Swarm Creativity Blog

Cybernetic Alchemy - The Rosenkreuzer Vision and the Technology of Reading Nature

2026-02-22T10:36:00.000-08:00

1. The Rosenkreuzer Dream

The Three Manifestos and Their Promise

In 1614, an anonymous text appeared in Kassel, Germany, that would shake the intellectual foundations of Europe. The Fama Fraternitatis described a secret brotherhood founded by one Christian Rosenkreutz — a man who had traveled to the East, learned the hidden arts of nature, and returned to establish an invisible college of enlightened minds. A year later, the Confessio Fraternitatis followed, and in 1616, the allegorical Chymische Hochzeit (Chemical Wedding) completed the trilogy.

These were not merely occult curiosities. They landed in the middle of Europe’s most turbulent intellectual transition — the bridge between Renaissance magic and Enlightenment science. The manifestos spoke to Kepler’s generation, to physicians frustrated by Galenic dogma, to natural philosophers who sensed that the “Book of Nature” could be read if only one had the right eyes.

The core promises of the Rosenkreuzer brotherhood were breathtaking in their ambition:

The Universal Language: The brothers claimed they could speak and understand every tongue on earth — an echo of the Pentecost miracle, reversing the curse of Babel. This was not mere polyglotism but the recovery of an “Adamic language”: a mode of communication so aligned with the structure of reality that understanding would be immediate and complete.
The Book of Nature: The Rosenkreuzers believed that God had written two books: Scripture and Nature. The second book was encoded in “signatures” — visible patterns in plants, minerals, animals, and celestial bodies that revealed their hidden purpose and interconnection. Reading these signatures was the supreme act of knowledge.
Universal Healing: The brothers were sworn to heal the sick freely, without payment. But this was not ordinary medicine. It was a healing rooted in understanding the living forces (Lebenskräfte) that animate all organisms — a holistic vision where curing a disease meant restoring harmony between the patient and the cosmic order.
Moral Transparency: The Fama insisted that only the morally pure could join the brotherhood. They believed that true knowledge was inseparable from virtue — that the “Stone of the Wise” could only be found by one whose inner being had been refined. The adept’s character was itself the crucible.
General Reformation: The manifestos called for nothing less than a Generalreformation der gantzen Welt: a total renewal of science, religion, art, and social order. This was not revolution but transformation from within — beginning with the individual’s inner alchemy and radiating outward.

Signatura Rerum: The Doctrine of Signatures

At the heart of Rosenkreuzer thought lies the concept of Signatura Rerum — the “signatures of things” — most fully articulated by Jakob Böhme in 1621. This is perhaps the most consequential idea for understanding why their vision resonates so powerfully with modern sensing technology.

The doctrine held that every created thing bears an outward mark of its inward essence. A walnut, shaped like a brain, was understood to be “signed” by God as a remedy for the head. The yellow of celandine signaled its affinity for bile. But Böhme went further: he argued that all of nature is in constant silent expression, radiating its inner state through form, color, sound, and vibration. The task of the wise person was to develop the perceptual sensitivity to read these emanations.

This was not primitive superstition dressed in mystical language. It was an early, intuitive articulation of what we now call biosemiotics — the study of sign processes in living systems. Plants do emit electrical signals when stressed. Animals do communicate emotional states through patterns invisible to the casual observer. Human beings do leak their true intentions through micro-expressions and vocal patterns. The Rosenkreuzers were, in a sense, correct about the existence of these signals. They simply lacked the instruments to measure them.

The Chemical Wedding as Methodology

The Chymische Hochzeit of Christian Rosenkreutz is often read as allegory, but it also encodes a methodology. Over seven days, the protagonist undergoes a series of trials: weighing on the scales of virtue, witnessing the dissolution and reconstitution of matter, and ultimately participating in the creation of new life through the union of opposites.

This seven-day structure maps remarkably well to how genuine innovation unfolds: the call to adventure (recognizing a problem), the trial of integrity (questioning one’s motives), the dissolution of assumptions (letting go of what you think you know), the recombination of elements (interdisciplinary synthesis), and the emergence of something genuinely new. The “wedding” is not between two people but between understanding and action — between reading nature’s signals and responding with wisdom.

2. The 90 Percent Problem

Four centuries after the manifestos, we possess technologies that would have seemed like the fulfillment of every Rosenkreuzer dream. Large Language Models translate between hundreds of languages in real time. AlphaFold has decoded the three-dimensional structure of virtually every known protein. Satellite networks image every square meter of the planet. Wearable sensors track the physiological states of billions of human bodies.

And yet, 90 percent of this capability is directed at selling advertisements, optimizing engagement metrics, and automating tasks that were not worth doing in the first place.

The Rosenkreuzers anticipated this problem. The Fama explicitly warns that knowledge without moral refinement is dangerous. The brotherhood’s secrecy was not mere elitism — it was a safeguard. They understood that the power to read nature’s hidden language, without the wisdom to use that reading responsibly, would produce not enlightenment but exploitation.

This is precisely where we stand. We have built the instruments the Rosenkreuzers could only dream of. But we have largely failed to develop the ethical framework they considered prerequisite. The question is not whether AI can decode the Book of Nature — it manifestly can. The question is whether we will read it as adepts or as profiteers.

3. Modern Instruments for Ancient Readings

What follows is not a metaphor. It is a description of working technology that performs, in measurable terms, what the Rosenkreuzer tradition described in allegorical ones.

Reading the Silent Speech of Plants

The Rosenkreuzer doctrine of signatures held that plants express their inner states through outward signs. Jakob Böhme wrote that every herb “speaks” to the one who has learned to listen. This was dismissed for centuries as pre-scientific fancy.

It turns out the plants were speaking all along. We simply needed the right ears.

Using ESP32 microcontrollers equipped with AD8232 bioelectric sensors, we have developed stations that detect and classify plant electrical responses to four categories of stimuli: human touch, sound, light changes, and — most remarkably — human emotional states. The system achieves 95% classification accuracy for environmental stimuli (touch, sound, light) and 73% accuracy for distinguishing between different human emotions expressed in proximity to the plant.

The mechanism is not mystical. Plants generate measurable electrical signals through ion channel activity in their cell membranes. When a human approaches with elevated stress hormones, the electromagnetic and chemical microenvironment shifts. The plant’s electrical signature changes in response. Our ResNet18 convolutional neural networks and XGBoost classifiers learn to distinguish these patterns with remarkable precision.

But here is where the Rosenkreuzer parallel becomes uncanny: what we are measuring is precisely what the doctrine of signatures described — a living organism’s outward electrical “signature” revealing its response to the hidden qualities of its environment. We have built a technological Signatura Rerum.

At the “Living Synthesis – Silent Signals” exhibition at the Phänomena science exhibition in March 2026, visitors will experience this directly: four interactive stations where they can observe, in real time, how plants respond to their presence, their voice, and their emotional state. The invisible made visible. The silent made audible.

The Moral Compass: Reading Human Signals

The Rosenkreuzer emphasis on moral transparency — the idea that a person’s inner virtue or corruption should be discernible — finds its modern expression in two complementary systems.

The first is the SocialCompass, a framework for analyzing team communication patterns that identifies five behavioral archetypes: the bee (creative connector), the ant (reliable executor), the butterfly (social catalyst), the capybara (harmonious mediator), and the leech (extractive presence). These archetypes emerge not from self-reporting but from objective analysis of communication frequency, response patterns, and network position. The system reveals who is genuinely contributing to collective intelligence and who is merely performing collaboration.

The Rosenkreuzers would have recognized this immediately. Their brotherhood was structured around the principle that authentic contribution — not rank, not rhetoric — determined one’s place in the order. The SocialCompass operationalizes this principle: it reads the “signatures” of human collaboration to distinguish genuine connectors from parasitic actors.

The second system extends this into the territory of Moral Values from Word Usage and Body Signals. By analyzing linguistic patterns (word choice, hedging behavior, certainty markers, emotional loading) alongside physiological signals (vocal prosody, micro-expressions, galvanic skin response), we can construct a real-time portrait of a person’s alignment between stated values and embodied behavior.

This is, in essence, the Rosenkreuzer “weighing on the scales” from the Chemical Wedding — the trial where each candidate’s true nature is revealed. The difference is that our scales are algorithmic, and they measure in data rather than allegory.

Across the Species Boundary

The Confessio Fraternitatis described a world in which the enlightened adept could communicate not only across human languages but across the boundaries between species — understanding the “language of birds” and the “speech of beasts.” This was the dream of recovering the pre-lapsarian harmony between humans and the animal kingdom.

AI-based emotion analysis of animal behavior brings us closer to this than any technology before. By applying machine learning to vocalizations, movement patterns, and physiological indicators, we can now classify emotional states in animals with increasing reliability. A cow’s distress call has a measurably different spectral signature from its contentment vocalization. A dog’s body language encodes anxiety, joy, and social submission in patterns that algorithms can learn to read more consistently than most human observers.

This is not the mystical communion the Rosenkreuzers imagined. But it is something they would have valued: a genuine extension of empathy across the species boundary, mediated by technology that translates between fundamentally different modes of being.

4. Data as Prima Materia

In alchemical tradition, the Prima Materia was the formless base substance from which all things could be derived through the right transformations. The alchemist’s task was to dissolve, purify, and reconstitute this matter through stages of increasing refinement — nigredo (blackening), albedo (whitening), citrinitas (yellowing), and rubedo (reddening) — until the Philosopher’s Stone emerged.

Data is our Prima Materia. Raw, formless, and overwhelming in volume, it contains within it the patterns that govern health, communication, ecological balance, and social cohesion. The machine learning pipeline mirrors the alchemical stages with striking fidelity: data collection (gathering the raw matter), preprocessing and cleaning (dissolution and purification), feature extraction and model training (the transformative operations), and finally the emergence of actionable insight — the “gold” of genuine understanding.

The critical difference — and the one the Rosenkreuzers would insist upon — is the intent behind the transformation. When data is processed to maximize advertising revenue, it is the alchemical equivalent of seeking literal gold: a misunderstanding of the entire project. When data is processed to make plants’ silent distress audible, to reveal the emotional lives of animals, to expose the gap between a leader’s words and their true values — that is the transmutation the Rosenkreuzers actually sought: the conversion of ignorance into understanding, of blindness into sight.

5. Toward a General Reformation

The Generalreformation that the manifestos demanded was never merely technological. It was a call for the simultaneous advancement of knowledge and virtue. The Rosenkreuzers would have found it incomprehensible that one could possess the power to read nature’s hidden language and yet choose to use that power trivially.

The work described in this narrative — plant bioelectric sensing, collaborative intelligence analysis, cross-species emotion recognition, moral signal detection — represents one possible answer to their challenge. It is technology used not to extract value but to extend perception. Not to automate empathy away but to make it more precise. Not to replace the human capacity for moral judgment but to give it better data.

The Rosenkreuzers believed that the reformation of the world begins with the reformation of perception. First you learn to see what was always there. Then you learn to act on what you see. The instruments change — from alchemical retorts to neural networks — but the sequence remains: refine the observer, extend the observation, and let understanding lead to action.

Christian Rosenkreutz, according to the Fama, was found in his vault 120 years after his death, perfectly preserved, with a book in his hand and a lamp still burning. The vault was inscribed: “I shall open after 120 years.”

Perhaps it has taken roughly four centuries, rather than 120 years, but the vault is opening. The question the Rosenkreuzers left us is not whether we can read the Book of Nature — we are demonstrably learning to do so. The question is whether we will read it as they intended: with humility, with moral seriousness, and in service of a world that heals rather than extracts.

The technology exists. The signals are there. The plants are speaking, the animals are expressing, the patterns of human virtue and vice are legible in our data. The only remaining variable is us.

Crypto Leeches and Open-Source Bees

2025-05-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

Cryptocurrencies bring out the worst in digital greed:

John Woeltz, 37, and an accomplice were charged with holding a man captive for three weeks in a Manhattan townhouse—torturing him in an attempt to steal his Bitcoin password. The horror of it is hard to overstate. But even more unsettling is what it reveals about a growing subculture: a ruthless obsession with crypto wealth, removed from any sense of ethics, community, or shared future.

These are the crypto leeches—people who see money not as a lubricant for life, but as the point of life. Their behavior mirrors what I described in a recent post about how money, when disconnected from meaning, begins to take over the host like a parasite—hijacking the human mind, turning imagination into speculation, community into competition, and security into surveillance.

If parasitic control is one metaphor, then nature offers us a better one:

In that earlier post, I proposed a different vision: mycorrhizal finance, modeled after the underground fungal networks that connect forests—sharing nutrients, warning of danger, and fostering resilience through mutual aid. This is how we should be thinking about wealth, connection, and digital systems.

And that’s where the open-source bees come in.

Unlike crypto leeches who hoard tokens and pump schemes, open-source developers pollinate the digital ecosystem. Their code, shared freely on platforms like GitHub, creates the infrastructure we all rely on. These are the digital mycorrhizae, linking and enriching rather than isolating and extracting.

Think of Tim Berners-Lee, who could have privatized the web but chose to make it available for free.

Or Linus Torvalds, whose Linux kernel became the invisible foundation of the internet, built collaboratively by thousands.

Or Jimmy Wales, whose Wikipedia proved that collective knowledge—not curated elites—could map the world.

They, and the countless unnamed contributors behind open libraries and open models, are the open-source bees. They don’t demand keys to private blockchains. They don’t hold your data hostage. They build platforms so that others can stand on their shoulders, not kneel before them.

Meanwhile, at $500,000-a-plate fundraisers like the one recently attended by crypto billionaires and political power brokers hosted by President Trump, a different ethos is celebrated: speculation without substance, accumulation without contribution.

It is tempting to believe we live in a zero-sum world, where one person’s gain must come at another’s loss. But the natural world shows us that symbiotic systems scale better than parasitic ones. That’s true in forests. It’s true in economies. And it’s true in code.

So we must ask:

Do we want a digital future run by leeches?

Or one nourished by bees and fungi—by collaborators, not predators?

The future of tech isn't just about algorithms. It’s about ethics.

It’s about what we choose to build: a hive, a forest—or an ambush.

“Looking Good vs. Feeling Good” - Lasting Change Starts From Within

2025-04-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

In our quest for self-improvement—whether seeking better health, increased attractiveness, or greater wellbeing—we often reach for the quickest and easiest solutions. From miracle diets to surgical procedures, we tend to favor visible results and instant gratification. But what if the most effective approaches are the ones requiring the greatest effort—and the most self-awareness?

That’s the idea behind the Social Compass app, a tool designed to help individuals navigate the deeper levels of transformation by identifying their personality traits, values, and behavioral tendencies. Using proven psychological assessments—like the Five-Factor Personality Inventory (FFI), the DOSPERT Risk-Taking Scale, and the Schwartz Values Survey—it maps out your unique profile, offering a personalized foundation for meaningful, lasting change.

The Five Levels of Transformation

Most self-improvement methods fall into a pyramid with five distinct levels. Each level offers a different approach to transformation, with varying degrees of effort, sustainability, and impact.

Level 1: Dressing up - Surface Appearance

Examples: Makeup, haircuts, fashion choices, filters on photos

At the base of our pyramid sits the most accessible approach—changing how we look through external enhancements. This level requires minimal commitment and offers immediate, though temporary, results. There's nothing wrong with wanting to look your best, but these changes wash off, grow out, or go out of style.

Level 2: Wonder Food - Nutritional Quick Fixes

Examples: Fad diets, "miracle" supplements, detox teas, diet pills

Moving up a level, we find nutritional interventions promising dramatic results with minimal effort. The supplement industry thrives on our desire for transformation without perspiration. While nutrition certainly matters, the marketing often overshadows the science, and sustainability remains questionable.

Level 3: Medical Drugs & Therapies - Pharmaceutical Solutions

Examples: Weight loss medications, anti-aging treatments, hormone therapies

The middle level involves medical interventions that alter our internal chemistry or biology. These approaches can offer significant results for some people but may come with side effects, costs, and dependency. They also typically require ongoing use to maintain benefits.

Level 4: Surgical Interventions

Examples: Cosmetic procedures, bariatric surgery, facelifts

As we climb higher, the interventions become more dramatic and invasive. Surgical approaches can create substantial changes quickly but involve greater risk, recovery time, and expense. While sometimes medically necessary, they often address symptoms rather than underlying causes.

Level 5: Behavioral Transformation

Examples: Consistent exercise, mindfulness practices, improved sleep habits, emotional regulation, cultivating empathy

At the pyramid's apex sits the most challenging yet ultimately most rewarding approach: changing our behaviors, habits, and mindset. This level demands consistent effort, confronting discomfort, and developing self-awareness. It's no wonder many of us avoid this path—it's genuinely difficult!

Guidance Through a Social Compass

To support this journey, the Social Compass app offers personalized behavioral insights rooted in psychology. By analyzing your results from FFI, DOSPERT, and Schwartz assessments, the app helps you:

Understand your innate strengths and blind spots
Clarify your personal values and emotional drivers
Receive daily or weekly habit suggestions tailored to your profile
Find your “tribe” of users with similar goals and outlooks
Stay focused and accountable with a supportive structure

Behavioral change is never easy, but with the right tools, it becomes clearer, more compassionate, and more sustainable.

Why We Resist Level 5

Human nature pulls us toward the path of least resistance. We're drawn to quick results, and behavioral change rarely delivers immediate gratification. There are other easier solutions, changing habits requires confronting discomfort. It's easier to blame our struggles on external factors than internal ones. We also prefer the visible outcomes of levels 1 to 4. Many behavioral benefits happen internally before becoming externally visible.

The Paradoxical Power of Level 5

Here's what makes behavioral transformation worth the effort:

Sustainability: Unlike other approaches, behavioral changes become self-reinforcing over time
Compound effect: Small consistent actions create exponential results
Holistic impact: Behavior changes improve multiple aspects of life simultaneously
Independence: You're not reliant on products, procedures, or prescriptions
Transferable skills: The discipline developed transfers to other life challenges

Starting Your Level 5 Journey

If you're ready to pursue lasting transformation through behavioral change:

Start incredibly small: Choose one tiny habit that feels almost too easy
Connect to values: Clarify why this change matters to your core identity
Design your environment: Make good choices easier and poor choices harder
Expect resistance: Plan for the inevitable emotional and physical pushback
Find your tribe: Surround yourself with people pursuing similar changes
Track process, not outcomes: Focus on showing up, not just results
Practice self-compassion: Approach setbacks with curiosity rather than judgment

The Social Compass app can support each of these steps—offering both insight and direction, not as a shortcut, but as a thoughtful companion for the journey.

The Complete Picture

There's nothing inherently wrong with using approaches from all levels of the pyramid. A new haircut can boost confidence; nutritional changes support health; medical interventions can be appropriate and necessary.

The problem arises when we rely exclusively on the lower levels while avoiding the summit. True transformation—the kind that radiates from within and sustains through life's challenges—requires ascending to that challenging fifth level.

The path is steeper, but the view from the top makes the climb worthwhile.

Money - parasitic mind control or mycorrhizal network

2025-04-08T12:34:00.000-07:00

In human societies, money, the conversion of social capital into financial capital, be it mussel shells, gold coins, paper money, or crypto currencies, can have an infectious effect, taking over mind and actions of money-obsessed people. The effect of money on the mind and parasitic mind control have shocking similarities.

Parasitic mind control is one of the most fascinating and disturbing phenomena in nature. Some parasites have evolved remarkable strategies to manipulate their hosts' behavior for their own reproductive success. These parasites are spectacularly successful in taking over host animals for their own profit, manipulating their hosts’ minds to become a vehicle for the parasite to multiply and spread.

Nature's most successful parasitic mind controller is the zombie ant fungus (ophiocordyceps unilateralis). The zombie ant fungus infects carpenter ants and completely alters their behavior. It starts when a spore of the fungus lands on a carpenter ant, usually in a tropical forest. The spore penetrates the exoskeleton and begins to grow inside the ant’s body, slowly spreading through its tissues. After a few days, the fungus releases neuroactive chemicals that affect the ant’s central nervous system. These chemicals don't destroy the brain — rather, they manipulate specific behaviors. Once infected, the ant leaves its colony and climbs to an elevated position with specific temperature and humidity. The fungus forces the ant to climb to a raised place — typically vegetation about 25 cm above the forest floor - an ideal environment for fungal growth. There the fungus manipulates the brain of the ant to bite down on a leaf vein with a "death grip". This behavior is timed with solar cycles, often occurring around solar noon, likely to optimize humidity and temperature for fungal development. Once the ant is locked in place, the fungus kills it from the inside, consuming its internal organs but preserving the outer structure for support. A few days later, the fungus erupts from the back of the ant's head or neck, growing a long stalk-like fruiting body. This structure releases new spores into the air, which rain down onto the forest floor to infect more ants.

Money, just like the ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus, can have a similar effect on the human mind. Just like the fungus hijacks the nervous system of the ants, compelling them to climb to ideal spore-dispersing heights, and ultimately killing them —money can have a parallel grip on the human psyche, taking over the mind of money-obsessed people, ultimately converting them into zombies. Like the fungus, money is not inherently evil. It’s a tool — a means of exchange, a unit of value. But in a society built on scarcity, competition, and consumerism, money becomes more than a tool: it becomes a force that can shape identity, drive decisions, and override deeper human instincts like empathy, cooperation, and curiosity. People begin to optimize their lives not around meaning, connection, or joy, but around money accumulation. Work, relationships, even time itself are sacrificed at the altar of financial gain.

The Psychological Parasitism of Money

Money, in its essence, is just a tool — a neutral medium of exchange. But in today’s world, money has evolved into something much more potent: a symbol of worth, a metric of identity, and for many, the central organizing principle of life.

Like the fungal spores that infiltrate the ant’s body, the idea of money seeps into the human mind early. Through advertising, social norms, education systems, and status culture, we’re conditioned to believe that financial success is synonymous with personal success. The result is that millions of people orient their entire lives around chasing this abstract symbol, often at the expense of joy, authenticity, or connection. Those who are consumed by this pursuit often believe they are exercising free will — just as the infected ant appears to be making its own decisions. But in reality, they may be following a path subtly laid out by cultural messaging, economic pressures, and social incentives — a path that ultimately benefits larger systems of power and wealth, not the individual.

Trapped in the Death Grip

The fungus drives ants to their death by hijacking their instincts. Similarly, the pursuit of money can override human instincts for rest, compassion, community, and curiosity. People work jobs they hate, accumulate debt to buy things they don’t need, and burn themselves out chasing digits on a screen.

Just like the fungus that bursts forth from the ant’s head, money-driven ideology spreads — through media, education, and institutions — infecting new minds, guiding new behaviors, sustaining the cycle. The most effective control is the kind that feels like freedom. Money doesn't need to be forced upon us; we pursue it willingly — even passionately. But as historian Yuval Noah Harari put it: "Money is a belief system. It’s only real because we all agree to believe in it." That shared belief gives it tremendous power — power to shape cities, war strategies, human lives. But if the belief remains unexamined, it becomes dogma. And dogma becomes a cage you can’t see.

To break free is difficult. It requires recognizing the infection, questioning deeply held assumptions, and reorienting toward values that cannot be bought or sold. But unlike the zombie ant, we still have a chance to reclaim our autonomy — to act not as puppets, but as stewards of our own purpose. We can question the system. We can ask whether the endless accumulation of wealth truly brings us security or meaning — or if it’s simply the default programming handed down to us. We can imagine an alternative. One where value isn’t defined by digits, where work is aligned with purpose, and where time is measured in moments, not money.

The first step is waking up — recognizing that the parasite isn’t in your bank account, it’s in your mindset.

Fungal Finance: Reimagining Social Capital Through the Mycorrhizal Network

Fungi can not only be mind-controlling parasites, fungi can also be nurturing carriers of social capital. Another type of fungi connects the roots of trees and plants in vast underground networks called mycorrhizae. These networks don’t just passively exist; they actively distribute nutrients, water, and chemical messages across plant species. They’re nature’s original internet — and perhaps, a more hopeful model for what money could be.

Because fungi, like money, can serve two very different roles: they can be parasitic, extracting from their host for self-gain. Or they can be mutualistic, enhancing the health of the entire ecosystem. The distinction is not in the organism itself — but in the relationship it cultivates.

Two Faces of the Network

In a forest, parasitic fungi invade their host, hijack its behavior, drain it of nutrients, and sometimes even control its movements, like the notorious Ophiocordyceps that turns ants into zombies. It’s a chilling tale of control, subjugation, and system exploitation.

In contrast, mycorrhizal fungi work in harmony with plant roots. They gather nutrients from the soil and deliver them to the plant in exchange for sugars. They link individual trees into community. A strong tree can send carbon to a struggling sapling. An elder tree can nurture a forest it may never see mature. This is mutualism — not competition.

So it is with money. In one version of the story — the one we’re most familiar with — money hijacks human behavior. It incentivizes greed, extracts labor, fractures communities, and prioritizes profit over life. It becomes parasitic, and we become its hosts.

But in another version — a living emergent version — money becomes a nutrient, a facilitator of trust and care. Like the mycorrhizal network, it enables resilient, adaptive, and regenerative communities. It flows where it’s needed. It supports both the strong and the vulnerable. It listens, responds, and heals.

The Economy as Ecosystem

We can begin to see the economy not as a machine to be optimized, but as a living ecosystem that needs care, balance, and attention. In this view, money is not the end goal, but simply the medium through which energy flows — like water or sunlight in a forest. Value is no longer confined to what can be bought or sold; it is rooted in trust, in relationships, in the quiet strength of interdependence.

True growth is not about accumulating more, but about fostering wellbeing — about flourishing. A healthy economy, like a healthy ecosystem, depends on movement. Resources must circulate, not stagnate, if communities are to thrive.

This kind of economy isn’t a dream — it already exists, here and there, in scattered pockets: in mutual aid groups, cooperative businesses, time banks, and local currencies. What’s missing isn’t possibility, but perspective — the kind of mycelial thinking that recognizes connection as the foundation of resilience, and sharing as the source of true wealth.

Credits

Edited and illustrated by ChatGPT-4o.

Overcoming the pyramid of professional oppression

2025-01-08T06:31:00.000-08:00

“Why is it that Nobel prize winners are always nice, and the people right below them on the professional ladder are complete assholes?” This question was asked to me about ten years ago by one of my hosts, a senior professor in economics, when I was giving a talk at a university in Florida.

My host was perfectly right – fully confirmed by my own experience of the last 22 years at MIT. A fair share of Nobel prize winners reside at MIT and Harvard, and many others come to visit – usually they are a pleasure to talk to, and amazingly approachable. The same universities are full of people with huge egos, right below the Nobel prize winners, who are convinced that they deserve the Nobel prize and just didn’t get it because some assholes were against them. These people pull the levers at the most respected academic institutions, as editors in chief of prestigious scientific journals, making tenure decisions for junior faculty, and deciding on funding and promotions. Usually, they are a pain to deal with, full of themselves promoting their own greatness, always the first to speak and never to listen. In all significant academic organizations there is no way to circumvent them, one has to accept their toxic behavior in order to survive and to thrive.

I had been pondering this conundrum for a long time, but then it dawned on me. Nobel prize winners cannot nominate themselves, rather others need to recommend them for this honor. This means only people with social capital, who have a reputation not only for being smart and creative, but also for being kind, will be nominated. All the self-aggrandizing ego-boosting arrogant assholes right below them will never be nominated, rather their peers will take every opportunity to put their inflated egos down.

Unfortunately, this means that to succeed in a top academic environment, only the most opportunistic, resilient, schmoozing people will raise to the top. Of course one needs to be smart, but what matters much more is to be the perfect “cyclist”— kicking downwards and bowing upwards. Also, taking academic risks, doing high risk research that challenges accepted wisdom, can be ruinous to the academic career of a young idealistic researcher. The ones gaming their academic citation count the best, doing review papers of “hot” academic topics, and repeating earlier studies with more sophisticated ever more “scientific” methods will rise to the top the fastest. Most of the ones truly furthering the state of the art by bravely following their own curiosity will end in an academic dead end, very few will get the Nobel prize!

In my own research, leveraging AI and social network analysis to study collaboration among humans, animals, and plants, the ones challenging conventional wisdom about interaction with other species and the sentience of animals and plants are sent to the academic desert, while the ones constructing elaborate “proofs that the new theory is just hogwash” will get their publications into prestigious journals like Nature and Science. This goes on until suddenly the academic establishment concludes that “it has always been clear that <<new theory>> exists”, usually after the courageous researchers challenging accepted wisdoms have paid the price by losing their career, their funding and academic positions.

This leads to a toxic pyramid of professional oppression. Professionals at the beginning of their career are asked to play by the mindless rules of their bosses, obeying frustrating processes directed by superiors who boost their ego by demonstrating their power. Meaningless status-driven rules are invented by the people at the top and enforced by midlevel managers who hope to make it to the top by being obedient “cyclists”- kicking downwards and bowing upwards. It doesn’t matter whether it’s academics, lawyers, doctors, accountants, MBAs, or engineers, almost all large organizations operate like that. Whether it is working in a hospital, at a large law firm, at an accounting firm, or building car parts, it’s not really about doing the best possible job, but about doing whatever it takes to move up the career ladder. This means doing meaningless activities asked by your boss, and asking your subordinates to do meaningless activities to satisfy your boss. In 99 percent of large organizations, employees are doing their job not to do it intrinsically well, but for the sake of professional advancement. They are prohibited from doing what is good and goal oriented at the expense of doing what is good for being promoted. This pyramid of professional oppression is at the heart of job-related stress as the primary source of professional misery. The pyramid is robbing individuals of their own agency and removing their individual freedom to do a good job. This misery is independent of whether an individual is at the bottom doing mindless things to move up to mid-level management, or being a mid-level manager doing mindless things to reach the top, or being at the top and enforcing mindless things to avoid being pushed out by others shooting for their job.

The job is the primary source of stress and misery!

How can we change this feeling of not being in control of our own destiny, of spending eight hours a day in a meaningless task at the whim of a system creating stress and unhappiness?

Take your own destiny back and reclaim the freedom to make your own decisions!

Understand what you really want, what gives you meaning, and have the courage to change your life!

Our SocialCompass will tell you who you really are, what you really want, and who your true friends are!

How Blind Trust in Generative AI Undermines Creative Work

2024-11-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

This summer, we experienced firsthand the damage caused by blind faith in the "superhuman" capabilities of generative AI, even among otherwise intelligent individuals. Here's what happened.

We submitted a research paper to an academic conference, and after it was accepted, I paid the registration fee, booked flights, and arranged accommodations. A week later, we received an abrupt email from the organizers stating that our paper had been rejected. The reason? Their AI-based plagiarism and ChatGPT-detection tool flagged it as containing both plagiarized content and text generated by ChatGPT.

This accusation was entirely unfounded. Our paper presented highly original work by our team, proposing novel AI algorithms to predict animal emotions—a concept never explored before. We detailed the development of an AI model to validate this approach, something completely unique to our research. By its very nature, it was impossible for our work to be plagiarized or generated by ChatGPT.

I attempted to explain this to the program committee, emphasizing the groundbreaking and technical nature of our research. I also clarified that while we had used ChatGPT to enhance the language and clarity of our paper—a common and widely accepted practice—every idea, methodology, and analysis was entirely our own. Additionally, I pointed out that due to the technical nature of the subject, certain formulations might overlap with other works, as there's often limited flexibility in describing algorithms.

To further prove our case, I ran the paper through a different plagiarism detection tool, which showed it was well below the threshold for concern. Unfortunately, none of this swayed the committee, who remained rigidly committed to the judgment of their AI tool.

While they refunded the conference fees and I was able to cancel the hotel without penalty, the cost of the non-refundable flight ticket was a painful reminder of this ordeal.

This experience highlights a critical issue: uncritical reliance on generative AI tools can lead to unjust outcomes, especially when those tools are treated as infallible. In this case, it didn’t just undermine the integrity of the conference process—it dismissed original, innovative work without fair consideration. As we integrate AI into more facets of professional and academic life, it is imperative that human judgment remains a central part of the equation.

My life in Alternative Realities - fatherlanders and nerds don’t go well together

2024-10-02T01:03:00.000-07:00

We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress.

I experience this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well. My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the FBI taught me how alternative realities, having very different interpretations of the same factual events, can lead to huge misunderstandings and unpleasant encounters.

In 2022, the last COVID year, I was expecting a visiting student from a top ranked Chinese University as new member of our team. Hosting a visiting student from abroad entails a lot of paperwork at MIT, to obtain approval inside MIT, and initiate the process for a visiting student visa which the student can get from an US embassy in his home country through a visa interview. In the past I had had dozens of research visitors from Chinese universities, both graduate students and more senior researchers such as post-docs and visiting professors. It had always been clear that the Chinese visitors at US universities were junior partners in research, whose main goal for a visit at top US universities was to learn and acquire as much knowledge and skills as possible. While the process in the 2010s had been quite straightforward, under the presidency of Donald Trump the process had gotten increasingly hostile and onerous for both visitors and host universities, as the US government had started to treat the Chinese more as enemies and less as junior research and business partners. For Chinese applicants in fields such as computer science and AI which were considered relevant for the military, it had gotten quite hard to get a student visa. As a researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management, my work making use of AI to measure wellbeing and happiness straddled both computer science and management science. This visiting student therefore had asked me in his email to assign as his focus management science, and not AI, to increase his chances to pass the visa interview. As this was a decision not for me, but to be made by the MIT visiting student office, I just forwarded all his communication to the MIT administration without any comment – which it turns out in retrospective was the only “crime” I committed. MIT subsequently processed all his paperwork, and the student obtained his visa at a US embassy in China. However, on the evening of the day the student was supposed to arrive in Boston, I got a desperate phone call from his father, who told me that his son had gone missing on his trip from China, over Frankfurt, to Boston. It seemed that the student had made it to Boston but then had mysteriously disappeared. I alerted the MIT administration, and we sent out the MIT police to search for him in the apartment he had remotely rented, and in the MIT offices and streets of Cambridge, to no avail. Only next day I got a phone call from his father, who told me that his son had resurfaced at Frankfurt airport in Germany. We then found out that at immigration at the airport in Boston they had put him into detention, questioned him for hours, rejected his visa, searched his laptop and phone, and sent him back to Frankfurt. As this was still COVID time, and the Olympics in Beijing were ongoing, it took the poor student six weeks to get back to China, as during the Olympic winter games the Chinese let nobody enter China except active participants in the Olympic games. First, without a Schengen visa he was stuck for almost two weeks at Frankfurt airport in the international terminal with no chance to leave the terminal, and then for another three weeks in Thailand, until he finally was let back in into China.

However, the big surprise for me came afterwards, when I tried to fly back into Boston from Zurich to Boston the next time after the Chinese student’s adventures. I got a first warning when I got an email that my global entry card had been invalidated, which had allowed me to enter at US airports without having to talk to an immigration officer. I didn’t think too much about it, assuming that this was somehow related to Covid regulations. However, when I was to pass through the immigration booth at Boston’s Logan airport, I was pulled aside by the officer, and after some wait escorted by two plainclothes officers into an iron cell, where I was seated on one side of a desk, with the two officials sitting on the other side. They also took away my phone and laptop and forced me to give them the passwords. I was then told that I had committed visa fraud by helping my potential Chinese graduate student visitor to wrongly answer the visa question about his study subject. They told me that it would have been my patriotic duty to declare him as a student in the field of AI when passing on his application to the MIT visiting student office. Obviously, they had found this out by searching his laptop and reading the emails we had exchanged. They also told me that they had found out that I had had many Chinese collaborators in the past – my dozens of visitors from China of the previous decade which made me suspicious. These previous visitors showed up in my Google Scholar profile as co-authors of my research papers. I tried to explain that this was precisely the reason why I had invited these scholars, to collaborate with me on research and publish papers together. After having interrogated me for two hours, and searched all my belongings, I got my laptop and phone back, and was let go. As can be imagined I did not sleep well that night, and next morning I called MIT HR and the head of our research center at MIT. They were very supportive, as this was not the first time this had happened to MIT researchers collaborating with Chinese academics. In fact, a highly respected senior MIT professor of Chinese descent had just been put into investigative custody. MIT was thus not very surprised about my experience and provided me with a lawyer to assist me in my trials and tribulations with the US Department of Homeland Security. Sadly, I found out that these were far from over, as a few weeks later when I was trying to board the plane to fly from Boston to Europe, two plain-clothes agents were waiting for me. They asked me again for my laptop and my phone, informing me that they had good news and bad news for me. The good news was that I would still be allowed to board the plane. The bad news was that they would be taking away my laptop and phone and requested again my passwords for phone and laptop. Highly upset and disturbed I was finally allowed to board the plane without my phone and laptop. As I was supposed to teach a course online next day, as soon as I landed in Switzerland I went to a computer store to buy a new laptop and get myself a new phone SIM card. I then called MIT IT support, which reset my password, so at least I could log into my computer and access email again. The next day my confiscated laptop and phone already arrived in Switzerland by carrier, but by then I had already spent 2000 dollars for a new laptop. I subsequently called the Swiss consul general in Boston to complain. He was very understanding but told me that there was nothing he could do.

Unfortunately, my suffering did not end at this point, as the next time I flew into Boston, I was again pulled out at immigration and questioned for an hour and searched. I told this to my MIT lawyer, who then spoke with the state attorney for Boston, who promised that this would stop. What happened was the opposite, as the next day I got a visit from two FBI agents in my house in Cambridge. For the better part of the following year, whenever I flew into the US, I was pulled out at immigration and questioned and searched. It only stopped after about a year, when at JFK airport I told the immigration officer doing the questioning that I found this totally unfair, as it was obvious that they only wanted me to stop working with Chinese academics, which I had done by now. Worn out by the rough treatment, at this point, I had no Chinese visitors anymore, they had now all returned to China, and I had stopped accepting new Chinese visitors. It seems that this outburst stopped my being questioned and searched at US airports. For me the consequence of this harrowing experience was that after 22 years in the US, I sold my house in Cambridge and returned permanently back to Switzerland.

Taking control of your emotions leads to a more meaningful life - The ERM Way to Happiness!

2023-10-22T13:12:00.000-07:00

It’s all about relationships: interacting with other people can be the biggest source of happiness, but it can also be the biggest source of misery! The quality of your relationships is determined by your emotions: When you manage your emotions during a disagreement with your best friend, it helps keep your friendship intact. However, if you lose control and get really angry, it can lead to losing your job or even causing harm in situations like road rage.

Your relationships also determine the meaning in your life. If you have spent years searching for the meaning of life but nobody else cares about it, your hard work won't bring much satisfaction.You will only get meaning from what you do if you are surrounded by likeminded people. Even more, the people who make you happiest will also tell you WHAT makes you happiest!

To measure and improve happiness, I thus came up with the “Emotions, Relationships, and Meaning” (ERM) Way to Happiness.

We have previously used the PERMA model from positive psychology to measure happiness and satisfaction in our research. However, users have sometimes found it too complicated and not actionable enough (PERMA is an acronym for P – Positive Emotion; E – Engagement; R – Positive Relationships; M – Meaning; A – Accomplishments).

The ERM Way to Happiness starts with your emotions. All too often we are stressed or depressed without realizing it. And even when we do, we may not know why we're feeling that way. We also frequently misjudge what makes us happy. We expect a huge boost in happiness from vacations, a new car, or a sports match, only to be disappointed because the beach was not perfect, the suspension of the car was too hard, or our team lost.

In our approach we measure human emotions from “honest signals”, the body language that gives away true feelings from the expressions of the face and the body, the words in the WhatsApp and email messages, how I mirror the body language of my friends, and how quickly I answer them.

Measuring my emotions when interacting with others will tell me if my interaction partners make me happy, angry, or sad. This means that hanging out with others that make me happy is a simple way to increase my happiness, as is getting out of the way of others that make me unhappy.

We also judge others by their friends. Friends usually share similar value systems, they are either nature-lovers, sports fans, traditionalists, believers in science and technology or believers in MAGA. If I look at which of my friends make me the happiest, and with whom I hang out the most, this will also tell me what my values are.

For instance, as an academic at the MIT Sloan Business School, I attended a few Academy of Management (AOM) annual conferences. These are huge events, where tens of thousands of business school professors and management scientists in business suits convene in thousands of sessions trying to convince their audience how smart they and their management frameworks are. I quickly realized that this style of conference does not fit my personality. Rather we started the small, friendly “Collaborative Innovation Networks” (COINs) conference series where forty to hundred researchers and graduate students meet in an intimate setting to share results of how collaboration and wellbeing in teams and larger organizations can be improved. More recently, I also found that I very much enjoy researching the impact of nature on the human mind, working with half a dozen colleagues on an agricultural plot to measure EEGs of plants interacting with humans. Similarly, a few years ago I started measuring the emotions of animals (dogs, cats, horses, cows) leveraging AI, and found that interacting with the students who joined me in this endeavor gave me a lot of happiness. Therefore, this year we created a new startup, FaunaAI.

In other words, I find what gives me meaning from the happiness when interacting with others – which become also my friends – who pursue the same goals. In summary, by becoming aware of your emotions when you interact with others, you can discover which relationships bring the most meaning into your life, ultimately increasing your happiness and well-being.

In our research we have developed different tools to measure happiness when interacting with others, in particular the Social Compass and the Happimeter.

From Psychohistory to Babelfish – From predicting the future to mind-reading

2023-08-03T10:45:00.010-07:00

My research of the last twenty years was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory. In his Foundation Series science fiction stories, Asimov describes how mathematician Hari Seldon was able to predict the future a thousand years ahead through the discipline of psychohistory that Seldon invented. Its premise was that while it is impossible to predict the behavior of an individual, the aggregated behavior of millions and billions of people extending over the galaxy can be predicted accurately by studying their communication patterns. However already in his stories Asimov posited that it is impossible to predict “black swan events”, i.e. unexpected random events. In Asimov’s story, the appearance of the “Mule”, a mutant conqueror who could read and manipulate the mind of others, a few hundred years after Seldon made his predictions, threw Seldon’s predictions totally off.

This is where Babelfish comes in, a tool envisioned by Douglas Adams in his science fiction classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. If you slide a Babelfish into somebody’s ear, they will be able to understand any language of anybody from anywhere in the Universe. Babelfish does this by directly reading the brainwave matrix of the counterpart, and beaming it into the mind of its wearer.

In my psychohistory-inspired research over the last twenty years, I have used online social media and email to predict external events, for instance predicting stock markets from Twitter, or the outcome of Academy Awards from online forums, or performance of organizations from their email archives. However, just like in Asimov’s psychohistory, while we were able to perfectly predict the past, i.e. fitting our regression and AI machine learning models to past data with high accuracy, and then claiming that the same prediction model would also be true in the future, any unexpected black swan event threw off our prediction model. For instance, the election of Donald Trump, or Covid-19, nobody saw them coming, and it invalidated any stock trend prediction model running at that time. Another black swan event are the changes Elon Musk imposed on Twitter, now renamed X, after he acquired it. This means that any elections/stock trends/epidemiological/etc. model based on Twitter will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Motivated by the deficiencies in psychohistory, I started building in baby steps tools resembling “little Babelfishes” for the last six years, trying to read the minds of individuals from their words, body language, and other “honest signals”. Just like Asimov’s “Mule” through his mind reading skills was able to conquer the universe, throwing off safeguards put into place by Hari Seldon through the mathematics of psychohistory, our research tries to read what people are REALLY thinking – in spite of what they say. We use AI-driven natural language processing (NLP), face emotion recognition, and other body signal recognition to build a series of tools to read the minds of people, animals, and plants.

Reading the mind - Communicating with people, animals, and plants through AI

If you stick a Babelfish in your ear, you can immediately understand anything that has been said in any form of language by any alien anywhere in the galaxy. The Babelfish decodes the brainwave matrix of your counterpart and transmits their intent directly to your mind. Similar to Babelfish, our goal is to build tools leveraging the latest advances of today’s AI to better communicate with animals, plants, and other people.

How can we better communicate with other people?

Just like Babelfish, we try to read what the other person is REALLY trying to say. Spoken language is just a small part of it, albeit the one which is the easiest for others to (mis)interpret. But humans also speak for instance with facial expression, body posture, gaze direction, and pheromones.

Our approach consists of reading the emotions of other people. It analyses their personality characteristics from their word usage, social networking dynamics, facial expressions, and body language. Towards that goal we have developed our own personality model, made up of different personas (personality archetypes). We developed the groupflow personas (bee/ant/leech) and alternative reality personas (fatherlander/nerd/spiritualist/treehugger). We also compute the FFI characteristics (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeability, neuroticism), Schwartz values (tradition, achievement, power, benevolence), Haidt moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity), and DOSPERT risk attitudes (financial, health, recreational, ethical, social risk taking) from the words people use, but also from their facial expression in response to provocative movies, or simply by observing how they move their body, or the tone and pitch of their voice.

Our tools provide both a lens and a mirror. Similar to the magic mirror of the evil stepmother of Snow White, we provide a virtual mirror to a person, that tells them their beauty in comparison to others. It tells them what others think about them and how much they trust them, so they can improve themselves. It also provides a lens to look at others to gain insights about how they see me.

While we have focused for the last twenty years mostly on the dynamics of online interaction using text and online social media, our team recently has developed a series of new video and audio analysis tools to offer a magic mirror for face-to-face interaction:

1. Measuring body entanglement developed by Josephine Van Delden

2. Measuring turn-taking or diarization developed by Tobias Zeulner

3. Using gaze-detection to measure its direction developed by Moritz Mueller

4. Measuring emotions using multimodal approaches developed by Jakob Kruse

The objective is to build and test a real-time magic mirror that analyses teams collaborating face-to-face, and gives team members real-time feedback on the quality of their interaction, and how they can improve their teamwork to get into groupflow. It combines the tools and methods (1) to (4) described above. The goal is - as our and the research of many others has shown - to become a better team player by being more conscientious, caring, collaborative, and creative!

How can we better communicate with animals?

What if we could build a Babelfish to talk not just to humans, but also to animals? In fact, at least in humble beginnings, we can. We can apply similar AI algorithms we developed to read human emotions to reading emotions of animals. In past research we have measured the emotions of dogs, cats, horses, and cows based on their facial expression, body posture and voice.

In further work we want to extend this to reading the intents of animals (defining a list of actions the animal wants to do), analyzing for example interaction between a dog and a human, or two dogs solving a task. This will give a similar magic mirror to dog owners interacting with their dog, helping them to communicating their intent to the animal by getting immediate feedback.

How can we start to communicate with plants?

Until recently, the vegetative nature of the plant as laid out over 2000 years ago in Aristotle’s treatise “On the soul” was recognized as accepted wisdom. But recently, it has been shown that far from just reproducing and growing, plants show awareness of their environment, communicating with numerous senses. Tomato plants produce sounds when stressed, mustard plants respond to the munching sounds of caterpillars by producing defensive chemicals, mimosas learn not to respond to harmless shaking, to name just a few examples. In our own research we measure the potential differences of plants such as basil or mimosas between their leaves and their roots. This is similar to the action potentials occurring in the brains of animals, which are responsible for the signaling of information in the body.

In our work we are using the plant spiker box to measure “emotions of plants”, i.e., potential differences in response to interaction with humans. In our work we have trained machine learning models to predict emotions of humans interacting with basil, mimosas, and garden plants. In new work we are building machine learning models which will, based on the plant spikerbox, recognize human movement, emotion, and different individuals.

We still have a long way to go from psychohistory to Babelfish. But if everybody eventually will wear a Babelfish, psychohistory might even work!

If good people make AI, can AI make good people?

2023-06-06T04:16:00.002-07:00

The developers of ChatGPT built extremely useful software, putting a “Wikipedia on steroids” at our fingertips by leveraging collective intelligence in ways never seen before. In this sense, as defined by Plato and Aristotle over two thousand years ago, they are “good people”. This means they are morally good or virtuous by giving away a highly beneficial software product for free that makes many chores of the daily life of knowledge workers much easier. These AI developers are thus acting according to the golden rule (of reciprocity), treating others as they would like to be treated.

The problem is that not everybody who writes AI software is a “good” person. If only one percent of AI developers acts entirely egoistic, or even malicious, there is the risk that these “bad apples” will abuse the power of AI for their own sinister purposes, without any consideration for the wellbeing of the rest of us. But what if we could turn the power of AI on these “bad apples”, to identify them before they get a chance to put their hands on the levers of AI and pervert AI’s power in criminal ways. And even better, what if we could help these “bad apples” to become self-aware of their bad habits and convert them into “good apples”?

This is where our Social Compass comes in. It uses AI to show you if you are a good or a bad person, based on honest signals extracted from your words, social network structure, and network dynamics. (There is also a version that measure honest signals from your facial expressions, your speech energy, and your body posture with the same goal). Social Compass is the latest of our social network analysis, natural language processing, and forecasting and prediction tools that are based on over twenty years of research on COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Social Compass analyses your WhatsApp, Email and LinkedIn and computes your personality based on the FFI (Five Factor Inventory), your moral values based on the Haidt moral value theory and Schwartz value system, and risk taking behavior based on the DOSPERT survey.

These moral values are combined into virtual personas, the bees – creative team players, the ants – hard working but highly competitive, and leeches – selfish and extrinsically motivated mostly by money.

To give you actionable advice how to be(come) a happy bee, Social Compass measures your PERMA. PERMA has been defined by the founding father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and consists of five components: Positive attitude, Engagement (how much are you in flow), Relationships (how good are they), Meaning (how much meaning does your daily life give you), and Achievement (how much recognition are you getting). Each of us can show different faces and personalities to different groups of people. In WhatsApp we manage our friends and family, these are what sociologists call our “strong ties”. Email is still the workhorse in large companies; thus the Social Compass analysis of the mailbox will show my professional business personality within my company. LinkedIn shows my outside professional face, it is my showcase of the personality I want the outside world to see. The pictures below show my WhatsApp, Email and LinkedIn personalites. As you can see, they are quite different! The first picture shows the Social Compass analysis of my WhatsApp. This is the personality that my family and my friends get to see. I am mostly a spiritual bee, with a smaller share of spiritual ant behavior. My leech personality is minimal.

The picture below shows the Wellbeing and PERMA analysis of my WhatsApp personality, telling me what I can do to improve my mental wellbeing. While my mindstate is ok, Social Compass still recommends me some relaxing time. Regarding PERMA, it seems right now my relationships are in good shape, and I am getting a lot of recognition (high achievement). However, I am still searching for more and new meaning in life, and my entanglement with my closest friends could also use some strengthening.

The next picture shows the Social Compass analysis of my Email. While I am still a strong spiritual bee, my leech personality is larger in my business life. This is not surprising, because as an entrepreneur running a small company, I have to negotiate software licensing and consulting fees, and show my more selfish side to assure the continued success of my business. As the mindstate chart shows, this also leads to some stress.

The Email PERMA analysis tells me that positivity and relationships are in good order, but again, just like in my private personality, I still need to find more meaning in what I do and get more entangled with my colleagues.

The final picture shows my LinkedIn tribes, reflecting the personality I show to the outside business world. It confirms a consistent personality as a spiritual bee, with a very small share of competitive “antness”, and a smaller share of spiritual leechiness.

Knowing my own personalities, in all three spheres, private, company-internal, and outside business world, will help me to become a better person, to manage my leechiness consciously, and to use PERMA to improve personal happiness and wellbeing, by focusing on my identified weaknesses.

If you would like to try out Social Compass for yourself, you are welcome to sign up for a free trial account at sc.galaxyadvisors.com and discover your own bee, ant, and leechiness, and your PERMA.

Will AI (artificial intelligence) ever replace psychotherapists? - a dialog with ChatGPT

2023-02-21T08:07:00.002-08:00

Increasingly people confess their deepest psychological problems to artificial intelligence instead of a human psychotherapist. While I don’t think AI will fully replace human psychotherapists in in the near future, ever since Weizenbaum in 1964 created the psychotherapy program “Eliza”, people discuss issues about their inner self with seemingly ever more intelligent AI. My co-author Marc Schreiber and I just finished a short book for the Springer Essentials series discussing the role of AI for different aspects of psychology (in German).

As ChatGPT is capable of leading increasingly sophisticated dialogs about basically any topic, we decided to let it rewrite our book, using the same chapter structure as the Springer book, but all content written by ChatGPT. Here is the link to the formatted book rewritten by ChatGPT, as well as the transcript of our dialog with ChatGPT, both in German, as well as the translation to English by Deepl of the ChatGPT book.

On a side note, as Springer wanted the book in German, the German title “KI in der Psychologie - Ist der Mensch eine Maschine?” has been translated by Deepl to “AI in Psychology - Is Man a Machine?” using the gendered “man” instead of the neutral German noun “Mensch”.

My new Happimetrics book just came out!

2022-12-15T08:53:00.001-08:00

Happimetrics: Leveraging AI to Untangle the Surprising Link Between Ethics, Happiness and Business Success

By Peter Gloor

What is my book about?

Knowing what makes you happy will increase your happiness! Based on 20 years of rigorous MIT research, this book introduces “virtual mirroring”, analyzing individuals’ communication patterns with AI, and making them self-aware by mirroring their behavior back to them in a privacy-respecting way. It applies artificial intelligence to identify personality characteristics and ethical values based on body language and interaction with others. It builds on the concept of groupflow—when teams collaborate at their best through intrinsic motivation and positive stress. The book suggests tracking communication by combining machine learning and social network concepts, to measure emotions, social network change, morals, and tribes, leading to entangled teams of humans and other species such as dogs, horses, and mimosa and basil plants.

get it here or here

The best books about interspecies communication

2022-10-31T07:12:00.004-07:00

Today Shepherd published a list with my favourite five books about interspecies communication. There is also a bookshelf with more book recommendations about similar topics. Check it out!

Can leeches be turned into bees?

2022-10-30T14:46:00.002-07:00

In the German fairytale of the princess and the frog, a malicious witch had turned the prince into a frog. Only when a princess kisses the frog, will he become a human prince again.

Is there such a kiss by the princess, to turn a human leech – a selfish person sucking the energy of others – into a bee – a creative highly collaborative person?

The good news is that it seems there indeed is a way to turn a leech into a bee. Our approach is based on virtual mirroring. This means that in the privacy of their own phone or social network analysis, all members of an organization get an individual assessment of their “leechiness”. This is either shown in a social network based on communication structure, dynamics and content in email in the Griffin tool, or using our SocialCompass tool on the smartphone.

The left picture shows the Griffin student network of a team of students participating in a seminar, the green nodes are “bees”, the red nodes are “ants”, and the few blue nodes are “leeches”, showing that there are very few “leeches” in this course. The right picture shows the SocialCompass of my own “beeness”, “antness”, and “leechiness” based on my own mailbox.

For the few students in this course which the system found to be leechy, knowing that they are mostly leeches has been very effective in changing the behavior of these leechy students for the better. So it seems there is indeed a “princess” available to kiss the leechy frog, and turn it into a bee!

Ethical AI or Ethics by AI?

2022-10-28T15:38:00.003-07:00

Making AI ethical might be impossible, but AI can make us more ethical!

I don’t think it will ever be possible to guarantee that AI will behave fully ethical. Marvin Minsky once said: “Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.” What he means is that because we made them, the robots will follow our ethical understanding and thus be ethically well-behaved - unfortunately there will always be unethical hackers, leading to unethical robots.

Isaac Asimov defined the three law of robotics which say that (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. (2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Looking at the military uses of AI, where both Russia and the US announced that they are working on self-guided missiles that use AI to find their target autonomously, the first law has already been violated. Unfortunately, there will always be rogue programmers that either for amorally selfish purposes, or under the premise of jingoistic nationalism will program AI and robots to do their unethical calling.

However, what we can do, is use AI to measure our own ethical and moral values. In a series of research projects, we have developed AI models that measure one’s ethical values based on body signals tracked with a smartwatch, based on the words that one uses, and even based on the “honest signals” computed from the email interaction network and dynamics – without even looking at the words that are used.

This approach will enable you to know your personal moral and ethical values, as well as the ones of the people interacting with you. As has been shown in previous research projects, we are very bad judges of our own personal and moral values; our family and friends are much better in assessing them for us. Our tools will show you a virtual mirror of your own moral values and ethics, thus assuming the role of family and friends in showing you how caring, fair, honest and collaborative you truly are - not how you see yourself, but through the eyes of the people you are interacting with, aggregated and computed through AI.

Getting such a virtual mirror will help us to live up to the ethical values that we are aspiring to, and become the good person that we would like to be!

If you would like to know more, my new Happimetrics book, which just came out this week, will lay out all aspects in great detail.

Are you a Bee, an Ant, or a Leech? – find out for yourself with the Social Compass!

2022-07-16T09:18:00.003-07:00

Social Compass will tell you if you behave like a creative and collaborative bee, like a hard-working and competitive ant, or like a selfish egoistic leech.

Enter “vm-sc.galaxyadvisors.com” on a browser like Chrome on your smartphone.

The Social Compass will also tell you your state of mind, are you currently happy or stressed. In addition it will tell you your tribes, are you a nerd, a fatherlander, a treehugger, or a spiritualist. This is all done based on the words you are using, which are compared anonymously and encrypted using the latest advances in AI trained with the words that tribal leaders are using (e.g. Elon Musk is a prototypical nerd). In the current version, Social Compass takes as input your emails (gmail, outlook) or teams messages, plus the messages you are receiving. We are currently working on a version that will also include your WhatsApp messages.

Social Compass will also give you an overview of your current discussions, showing the happy or angry tone of the messages you are exchanging with your colleagues and friends.

You also have the option to look at your social network, which shows you at a glance the people which are most important for you in your daily interaction. Even more, you can also look at the tribes of your colleagues, (if they have sent you enough messages), to see if they are bees, ants, or leeches, and behave like nerds, spiritualists, treehuggers, or fatherlanders.

Even more, you can construct your own dream teams, by either choosing the tribes you want your team members from, or by selecting some role models, and then adding others who are very similar in their tribes and behavior to the role models.

To get started, you have to choose an email or teams account on your phone, and log in with it on vm-sc.galaxyadvisors.com:

The concept of “bee-ant-leech” groupflow and all the other tribes is explained in my new book “Happimetrics”, a full online version is available at www.happimetrics.com.

Please tell me what you think, I love to hear back from you!

From boiling lobsters alive to measuring happiness of cows

2021-12-03T09:00:00.007-08:00

Happiness = Respect + Compassion = Kindness

Respect and compassion are the two key properties of a benevolent society. To have happy citizens, it is essential to have both. China is respectful but not compassionate, the US is compassionate but not respectful. And citizens of both countries are not particularly happy, at least compared to small Northern European countries like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, or Switzerland. Finland makes sure that workers in less qualified professions still get a decent wage sufficient to lead a dignified life. Switzerland is compassionate even with lobsters, it is the only country on the world with a law that forbids to boil them to death alive. Unfortunately, in this regard the two most powerful countries on Earth, both vying for global leadership, still have a long way to go.

Americans are empathetic to their weak, but show no respect to their unqualified workers. Living in the US nearly half the time over the last twenty years, I observed that people with low professional qualifications, like janitors, waiters, and cleaners, get little respect. People on the higher rungs of society try to pay them as little as possible, so much so that it is impossible for members of these poorly paid professions – essential for the functioning of cities like Boston, New York, or San Francisco full of millionaires and billionaires– to actually live there. Rather, they have to either sleep in shifts in one-room apartments in windowless basements, or spend many hours per day in gruelling commutes from poorer towns far away to get to their jobs. Children from such backgrounds, mistreated by their peers from kindergarten, then take their frustrations out in school shootings, or by robbing high-end stores as flash mobs.

On the positive side, in the US, there are numerous charities and individuals that engage in acts of kindness and benevolence, assisting the homeless, mistreated animals, and others hit by misfortune through no fault of their own.

China is the opposite. The Chinese treat each other with respect independent of where in the social ladder somebody resides, but they have little compassion with animals and people who are seen as outsiders. In my frequent stays in China over the last eight years, I observed that my hosts, usually well-paid academics, company executives, and bureaucrats, treat others of lower social status with much more respect than their US peers do. Unfortunately, I did see little of this compassion against animals and outsiders. In a monastery I saw vendors offering caged birds whose freedom could be bought by tourists as a good deed, for the vendors only to go catch the birds again for the next tourist. Similarly, I was shocked that in a restaurant I could choose from pigeons sitting in a cage, which would then immediately be grabbed by the cook to be slaughtered and brought back to my table plucked and grilled twenty minutes later. Even worse, workers disinfecting an apartment vacated by a Covid-quarantined dog owner, bludgeoned her dog to death with iron bars, with the horrified quarantined owner forced to watch the scene over a remote camera. Unfortunately, that was not an isolated incident. Chinese are also really stingy when it comes to giving money to a beggar. This has been confirmed by the World Giving Index, which ranks the US as the most generous country, while China has been among the ten least generous countries on the world ten years in a row.

Therefore respectful China shows little compassion, while compassionate America shows little respect. In the end, it is in society’s best interest to show respect and compassion to all. Treating others with respect is the best antidote against a violent society where the one who has lives in constant fear of being robbed by the have-nots. At the same time, treating others with compassion ensures that if misfortune hits, others will return the care that one has previously shown, leading to safer and happier lives for all. The world would be a better place if more people would show compassion with lobsters. In a similar vein, we are about to start a project where we read the emotions of cows through AI and image recognition, aiming to recognize and reduce their stress as much as possible.

The Blessings of COVID-19

2021-11-28T13:13:00.001-08:00

While we are still stuck in the fangs of Covid-19, we all hope that soon the virus will fade away, and we will be able to go back to our old lives. However our old existence will not come back! For better or for worse, live will never be as it was before. Actually, I think it is for the better! Covid-19 has profoundly and positively changed the way how we are conducting our private and professional lives.

For a start, being stuck at home for months has got many of us to questioning the meaning of our old jobs. Many decided that they did not want to return to their nine to five office job anymore, and switched careers for something more meaningful.

But also the ones sticking to their old jobs are experiencing profound change. One of the main changes is in the way how business meetings are conducted. Before Covid, salespeople, managers, and many others would hop into a plane taking multi-hour flights for a short meeting with a customer or manager, assuming that there is no substitute for a face-to-face meeting. Well, now we know there is a substitute: a zoom call. Real estate brokers can sell houses over zoom, while buying a car does not even need the zoom call and can be done with a few mouse clicks.

Teaching and learning has also become much more virtual, particularly on the secondary and tertiary level, where students occasionally come to the classroom to meet the professor and each other, but for the most time just attend college and university classes using videoconferencing.

But also regular meetings changed in character and became more useful, as people can passively participate in boring video meetings where attendance is required - with the camera turned off, while using their time more productively to assist their children doing their homework.

And finally, Covid-19 has really taught us to appreciate our strong ties, our family members and closest friends. If anything, these ties only got stronger during the pandemic, becoming our lifesaver in keeping us sane and spiritually healthy while being stuck at home. Thank you family and close friends!

So, in summary - "no pain, no gain"! While being stuck at home with all the uncertainties and life-threatening risks of Covid was definitively painful, many positive things have come out of it. I am sure there are more blessings of Covid, I would love to hear if you have other examples of how Covid has changed your live for the better!

Converting “Human Resources” to Creative Swarms

2021-06-25T10:45:00.002-07:00

We are not resources.

We are not capital.

We are not talent.

We are not labor.

We are not manpower.

We are bees.

We are all members of the same swarm.

In preindustrial times, people were like bees, creating what they needed, growing their grain, baking their bread, sewing and stitching their clothes, and building their furniture and houses. With the onset of industrialization, division of labor arose, and managers started to manage their resources - one of which happened to be their human resources. But humans don’t particularly like to be resources – being a resource implies being a passive asset, which is being moved around like a pawn in a game of chess, without agency and own will. Synonyms like “human capital”, “talent”, “labor”, or “manpower” are not much better. “Human capital” is even worse, as it conveys the connotation of foreign ownership: according to definition, capital is an asset owned by an individual or organization available for a purpose such as running a company or investing. I don’t think people want to be owned by their manager or company. “Talent” is somewhat better, as a synonym for natural aptitude or skill, however the word’s origin is similar to “capital”, it also has monetary roots as the “talent” was a currency unit of the Greeks and Romans. Again, I don’t want to be a piece of money owned by my manager or company for my skill. “Labor” implies hard work and great effort with little interest in creativity and imagination. “Manpower” is not much better, it stands for the (amorphous and anonymous) number of people available for work and service, without valuing individual ingenuity and originality.

Happiness research has clearly shown that we humans highly value what psychologists call “agency” and “experience”: Agency means the capacity to make independent decisions and being in control of one’s own destiny. For instance, happiness researcher Bruno S. Frey has found that in already quite happy Switzerland, those Swiss cantons whose citizens have the most to say, that is they get to vote the most, are the happiest. He also found that being stuck in traffic, when we totally lose control over where to go, is assured to reduce happiness and make us miserable. The second psychological property is experience, the capability to enjoy and to suffer, to experience compassion and empathy for others.

As “human resources” we are denied both agency and experience.

Applied to the corporate environment, agency and experience are well described by the four management principles of W.L. Gore & Associates, a highly successful inventor and manufacturer of the water-resistant fabric Gore-Tex. Established by its founder Bill Gore, W.L. Gore & Associates operates by the four principles freedom, fairness, commitment, and waterline. Since its inception, Gore has consistently been ranked as one of the best companies to work for. Gore’s associates, as their employees are called, have the freedom to make their own decisions, are expected to treat each other fairly, are empowered to make their own commitments and to stick to them, and for wide-ranging decisions affecting the “waterline” of the company, they are counted on consulting with other associates. In other words, they become members of a self-organizing swarm, operating in agency and experience. They are happy bees, and highly successful in that!

The time has come to take back agency and experience from human resources, and create an environment for self-organizing swarms of happy bees. Take a look at our social compass, who uses AI to map the social landscape of each individual for more agency and experience!

Are you a Bee, an Ant, or ............. a Leech?

2021-05-08T08:38:00.002-07:00

In my previous post I introduced human bees, ants and leeches. Swarms of bees are motivated by creating something radically new, to draw satisfaction from inventing something that has not been there before, pollinating others and creating honey in the process. Ants are social insects too, who show loyalty to their swarm, but are obsessively competitive, motivated primarily by trying to win at all costs, be it in sports or in professional life. Leeches are more solitary insects, living off the blood they suck from others, motivated by money, and by trying to get rich as quickly as possible through whatever means available.

I created the three tribes in tribecreator, training the machine learning system with the Twitter feeds of Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, JK Rowlings, and the profiles of 150+ other creatives such as designers, musicians and artists. The ant tribe was trained with the Twitter feeds of 150+ athletes such as Rafael Nadal, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, plus Nascar racers, boxers and wrestlers, football coaches, and professional computer gamers. The leech tribe was trained with the tweets of activist investors such as Bill Ackmann and Steven A. Cohen, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and peddlers of “get rich quick” schemes.

The picture above shows the alternative reality tribal affiliations for the bee, ant, and leech tribes. We find that none of the three tribes are big fatherlanders, they all have other priorities. Leech tribe members are the biggest nerds, most likely because venture capitalists and hedge fund managers talk about the startups they are investing in. Surprisingly, ants are the bigger spiritualists than the bees, while leeches don’t care much about spiritualism.

The picture above illustrates the personalities of the three tribes, ants are the biggest risk-takers, followed by the bees which also take risks, leeches, as expected, are huge stock-traders, i.e., predominantly interested in money. On the other hand, bees talk mostly like journalists, i.e., using honest, matter-of-fact language.

The picture above shows the ideological tribal affiliations, leeches are the biggest capitalists, while the bees are more inclined towards liberalism. Ants are complainers.

The picture above shows the lifestyle tribes of bees, ants, and leeches. Not surprisingly, the ants are huge fitness buffs, while the leeches are the most sedentary, followed by the bees. The bee tribe has the largest proportion of vegan tribe members.

The picture above shows the recreation tribes, not surprisingly ants dominate in sport, while bees and leeches are prevalent in art, with the bees producing it, and the leeches trading it as an investment or as part of their philanthropic activities.

The picture above shows the emotions of bees, ants, and leeches. Bees are the happiest tribe, followed by the ants, leeches are the least happy! Leeches are angry, while ants are fearful! It seems there is an intrinsic reward in being a bee!

The picture above illustrates the clustering by tribe of the hundreds of tribe leaders who have been used to train the machine learning system to create the word embeddings for the three tribes. Each dot is representing a person. Dots representing people who use similar language are shown together using a layout algorithm called tSNE, that reduces the multidimensional word vector to two dimensions which can thus be plotted in a two-dimensional space. As the picture illustrates, members of the same tribe are close together, illustrating that each tribe forms a cohesive community based on common word usage.

This word embedding can now be used to identify the tribal affiliation of any person based on their word usage. The picture below shows six months of my mailbox computed and drawn with our new Griffin/Phoenix tool, with the people colored by flow-tribe.

As the picture illustrates there are many bees in my community, with smaller groups of ants and leeches. The red dots show the people who did not have enough words in their e-mail for the machine learning to make a tribal assignment with sufficiently high confidence. I am happy (!) to be a bee!

The figure above shows what percentage of the messages in my mailbox included content related to beeflow, antflow, and leechflow over time. Most of the time, beeflow is dominant, as we are mostly discussing new features for our software and other creative endeavors. Occasionally, for instance on February 11 and March 4, leechflow takes over, meaning that we talk about money, most likely negotiating about the price of our software and services with customers. This chart illustrates that reality is not white or black, but always grey, including all facets of daily life. What we can do, however, is decide where we want to put the emphasis in our daily lives.

Beeflow, Antflow and Leechflow ...... is all TribeFlow

2021-05-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I have spoken about human bees, sheep and leeches. This post extends this concept to the flow experience of groups of humans collaborating in groupflow.

The flow experience per se can be reached in many areas, from sports, art, and music, to professional teamwork. Csikszentmihalyi even describes criminals enjoying their burglaries, and the extreme example of the Marquis de Sade enjoying his sadistic behavior. On the flip side, perfectly legal flow activities might cause pain to some of the involved parties, for instance the dog and cock fights in some parts of the World, the bull fighting in Spain, or the boxing matches in the US and elsewhere. It is therefore worthwhile dividing flow experiences in three different categories sorted by positivity for the involved parties: first, the enjoyable experience of creating something radically new that has never been there before, second the gratification derived from competing against others or oneself in sports ranging from mountain climbing to computer games, and third the pleasure one gets from ripping off others, leading to pain for the losers and delight for the winners.

	goal	benefits	example
Beeflow	create	to self + to others	Create painting, play Jazz in a band, designing new product
Antflow	win	to self	Play online game, play soccer match
Leechflow	exploit	to self (from others)	Devise pyramid scheme, engage in mobbing

Bee hives are entangled organizations with the bees being masters of entanglement. Bees communicate through the waggle dance, by touching each other’s bodies rhythmically, similarly to jazz musicians swinging their bodies to the tune of their music. Bees are also good for everyone. Not only are they producing honey which is widely loved and was the main sweetener for millennia, honey also has valuable medical properties. But most importantly, bees are absolutely essential as pollinators, pollinating up to 80% of all cultivated crop plants. Without bees there would be no apples, no cherries, no peaches, no nuts, and no herbs. Without bees, life as we know it would be impossible.

Ant hives are similarly entangled organizations capable of amazing feats, self-organizing to solve complex tasks, for instance creating pheromone trails to food sources and herding larvae of other insects to drink the fluid that these larvae secrete. However, if two ants from two different ant hives meet, a fight to death will arise. This means that ants are immensely competitive. While they collaborate inside their hive, they conduct epic battles between different hives. For instance, the invasive Argentine ant forms super colonies with up to one trillion individuals in Southern Europe and the US. At the border between the super colonies there is constant warfare, for example at the border between two super colonies in Southern California researchers estimate that up to thirty million ants per year die in monumental battles.

Leeches are unentangled, each fighting for their blood meal on their own. Leeches are parasites, that attach their suckers to their prey animal, and feed on the blood of their host. In the front of their mouth, they have three teeth, which they slice through the skin of the host. Once attached, they use a combination of mucus and suction to stay attached to the skin of their host, while consuming their blood meal. While leeches have been used for medical bloodletting at least for 2500 years, they carry parasites in their digestive system, and bacteria, viruses and other parasites from previous blood meals can survive within a leech for months and infect the next host. Although leeches have limited medical use, life without leeches, without having to worry about a leech bite in leech infested water would be a better life. If bloodletting really is necessary – most of the time it is not, more people have been killed through excessive bloodletting than have been saved – this can also easily be done by the doctor in other ways.

There are also human bees, ants, and leeches that offer valuable lessons about flow and entanglement. Human bees are people who derive their joy and meaning in life from creating new things. It seems there is a subgroup of the overall population that draws particular pleasure from creating new things and gaining new insights. Researchers have found that for some people, creative insights, the “eureka moment” triggers the same neural reward as when we eat food we like, have an orgasm, or consume addictive substances . In other words, some people experience creative insights as intrinsically rewarding. This explains the puzzle solvers, starving artists, underpaid researchers, and innovators tinkering with new ideas in their garages. Human bees are creators. Creating new things creates joy for the creator. While the creation process might include painful moments along the way, the joy at the end of the process, when the final product is there, more than pays for it. One of the main reasons for experiencing the joy of creation is the flow experience. For instance flow is prominent when making music. This starts with little children who experience flow in music learning and making . Flow is experienced when composing music, and the flow experience is the main motivation for musicians playing together in bands and orchestras. Other typical human bees might be inventors, authors, painters, sculptors, researchers, and engineers. They pollinate society with new ideas, ensuring innovation and progress. Bees create positive entanglement among themselves by creating human creative swarms.

However not everybody draws intrinsic satisfaction from gaining creative insights. There is a large(r) part of the population that does not like change, but likes to follow the example of others, and would like to keep everything as safe and solid as it “has always been in the good old times”. Those are the ants. Ants are (most of the time) not hurting anybody, but they are not creating anything new. Ants are followers. Their happiness comes from being in company with others like them. Human ants like to aggregate in large crowds and occasionally demonstrate the madness of crowds. A prominent example of human ants following each other were the nearly 500,000 participants of the Sturgis Harvey Davidson motorcycle festival in August 2020, flouting Covid19 distancing rules, and leading according to one study to an additional 260,000 Covid19 infections, 19 percent of the US total of that month, and resulting in 12,2 billion dollars of additional public health costs. People investing in bitcoin and other pyramid schemes for speculative purposes are today’s successors of the Dutch investors creating the black tulip craze in the 17th century in Holland, where prizes of black tulip bulbs spiked to astronomical heights before crashing and losing any value. When buying a highly prized unique black tulip bulb, the Dutch investor probably reached the flow state. Ants can also reach the flow state just being on their own. For instance, playing computer games provide a pleasurable flow experience. Researchers investigating flow of computer gamers found that indeed the feeling of flow was a key reason for online gaming addiction.

Human leeches are different from bees and ants by being obsessed about getting as much money and power as possible, and do whatever it takes to grab it. Leeches are bloodsuckers. Their happiness comes from winning the competition, and getting everything for themselves. Human leeches are the people that are trying to profit from others, by bending the rules to their own advantage. Their goal in life is to amass as much wealth and money as they possibly can. They consume the honey of the bees and profit from their pollination and also milk the ants. Hedge fund managers, M&A bankers, and “activist investors” would be archetypical professions preferred by human leeches, for instance the investors of drug price gouging companies Valeant and Turing Pharmaceuticals. While a leech might get into flow, leeches destroy the entanglement of others. Leeches might reach groupflow for example by becoming the head of a mafia family.

Obviously, the world is neither black nor white, and we all possess attributes of all categories, and are sometimes bees, frequently ants, and if we get the opportunity, we might even behave like leeches. In every society there are taking leeches and giving bees. An entangled organization would like its members to be givers, not takers. A single selfish leech has the potential to destroy the entanglement of the swarm of bees. The goal is to make sure that in the end there are only bees in the group, and prospective leeches are turned into bees by making their parasitic behavior obvious to them. While it is up to each individual to decide their behavior, choosing to be a bee, an ant or a leech, their honest signals and virtual tribe memberships will give them away.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi does not distinguish if flow is reached as an individual, for instance as a lonely rock climber, or as a group, for instance being a member in a Jazz band. In my work I focus on reaching the flow state as a group. For instance, a great exemplar of group beeflow has been described by Dietmar Sachser in his book on theater flow. A theater ensemble reaches groupflow through many rehearsals, developing collective awareness and feeling as one unified whole. As German actor Fritzi Haberlandt says “It’s a form of intoxication that makes you happy.”

Too many Covid Experts - Whom should we trust?

2020-10-22T01:19:00.001-07:00

The answer seems to be: nobody!

With Covid raging on, we are all living under fear and stress. Countries such as China, New Zealand, or Japan that succeeded in keeping it contained, are hunkering down behind Chinese Walls, while the rest of the World is desperately searching for miracle cures. Our daily life is heavily influenced by coping and surviving under Covid19. Self-proclaimed Covid19 experts are inundating us with a never-ending stream of news and insights. These experts come from two opposing sides: mainstream science and government experts on the one side, and conspiracy theorists on the other side. Figuring out whom to believe, with so many “experts” contradicting each other can become a real headache. Politicians, regulators, and scientists in different countries, and even within the same country, are fundamentally disagreeing and fighting with each other about the best strategies for coping with the disease.

To shed some light, we did a coolhunting using Galaxyscope, creating two digital tribes, “Covid-Experts”, and “Alt-health” (spiritual healing believers, Covid deniers, and fringe conspiracy theorists). The picture below shows the two networks.

While the Covid-Experts form a solid cluster, Alt-health has some separate clusters, connected by a few gatekeepers. However, the most shocking insight is that DrTedros the director of the WHO, the World Health Organization, who should take the lead in the fight against Covid19, appears in both networks – at the periphery. This means that mainstream science and spiritual healers are both desperately looking for leadership – and not finding it.

In the Covid Experts community, people like Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps translational institute, Helen Branswell, a Canadian global health reporter, and Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist, occupy the central positions. In the Alt-Health cluster, activists like FLAutismMom, Brett Weinstein and Spiro Skouras are in the center.

The picture below shows the two Twitter word clouds of the two tribes, with the central term “Covid19” removed, because it would overly dominate the word cloud. While the experts talk about approaches for fighting Covid such as contact tracing and NIH, the alt health members talked about the Fox TV show “the masked singer” which became highly popular as a way of coping with Covid-related stress, but almost went under in the summer when its host Nick Cannon made anti-Semitic remarks.

The picture below shows the main words used by experts and alt-health members as word networks, where a connecting line between two words means that the two words appear in the same tweet. Experts recommend wearing a mask as the key Covid-prevention measure. Alt-health members lead a far more wide-ranging discussion with different word clusters, the Bill Gates conspiracy is in the center, and attacking Dr Fauci, the main US government Covid expert. Trump, Maga, and the “proud boys”, appear in the periphery.

Looking at the tweeting activity on the charts below, the experts are far more active tweeting about Covid than are the alt-health members. Alt-health members tweet more about non-Covid topics related to conservative politics, such as bikingthebattleground of conservative commentator Cheryl Chumley.

Looking at the emotions associated with Covid, there is no noticeable difference between Covid experts and alt health. Fear and sadness dominate for both experts and alt health members in the emotion charts below. Happiness is low for experts and even lower for alt health members, and fear is high for experts and alt health members alike.

In the comparison charts of the two tribes below, we see that while experts tweet much more, the two tribes have little overlap in membership, although some Covid experts are positioned right among the alt health tribe members by our positioning algorithm. The dark blue dots at the bottom of the scatter plot below at right stand for Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley and Seema Yasmin, an epidemiologist, who use language in their tweets more typical of alt health.

Looking at the membership in predefined virtual tribes below, we find that the experts are more treehuggers, while the alt health members are also fatherlanders (ultrapatriots), while there are none among the experts. Some alt health members not surprisingly have been categorized as spiritualists.

Personality-wise, the experts use a lot of political and journalist language, while the alt health members are more categorized as risk-takers and stock traders.

Covid experts are more capitalist than alt health members, which is not surprising as they work for the US government, pharmaceuticals, and academia, while some alt health members are seen as socialist in the way they speak.

In conclusion, we see that fear and sadness dominate the Covid19 discourse, with experts recommending handwashing and mask wearing, while the alt health members see conspiracies everywhere, and recommend miracle cures against Covid such as Melatonin and Vitamin C instead of having to wear masks. Both groups place strong emphasis on maintaining mental health among all the chaos. The main insight is that there are no accepted leaders, and very little trust in science. Everybody seems to hunker down and hope for better times – which undoubtedly will come, as they always have, we just don’t know when!

Many thanks again to Karin Frick from GDI for doing the coolhunting.

Using People Analytics for Analyzing “People Analytics” Thought Leaders

2020-10-15T03:20:00.004-07:00

Increasing workplace satisfaction and recognizing employee burnout before it happens are core issues in today’s Covid-19 home office workplace. People analytics has become a key technology to support these goals, thanks to recent progress in AI, machine learning, and other computer technologies. Using our own people analytics tools we analyzed the virtual tribe of key people working in the area of people analytics. If anything, this analysis shows that people analytics has become even more central in the Covid-world.

Using our Galaxyscope Tribefinder tool we created a virtual tribe of 57 Thought Leaders in the space of HR analytics, people analytics, and corporate culture. The picture below shows the social network of the people analytics thought leaders based on their Twitter network. Thought leaders are connected through who is retweeting and mentioning whom. It also categorizes each thought leader into an “alternative reality” tribe, identifying if somebody is a fatherlander, nerd, treehugger, or spiritualist (. As we can see in the picture below, the large majority, 38 out of the 57, are nerds, based on the language they use in their tweets. This is not surprising as they tweet about technology.

Among the 57 people who are popular tweeting about people and workplace analytics, we find that the most central people analytics thought leaders are David Green, Wharton professor Adam Grant, ABN Amro HR analytics manager Patrick Coolen, Andy Spence, and Josh Bersin, to name just a few. A connecting line in the network means that two people are retweeting or forwarding or mentioning each other.

The word cloud below shows the most frequent terms in their tweets of the last two months. “HR”, “HCM” (Human Capital Management), “people analytics”, and “future of work” are most popular.

The next picture drills down into the word cloud by showing the links between two terms, if they are mentioned in the same tweet. The word network nicely illustrates how Covid19 has created a second separate word cluster about the leadership of remote teams, which is a key issue in the home office workplace mandated by the Covid19 lockdown.

When looking at the popularity of hashtags over time, shown below, we find that the importance of “culture” is growing, together with “HR”, “future of work”, and “HCM”.

The last chart shows the characteristics of the tribe. It very well reflects the personalities of the people analytics thought leaders as a group of nerds. They are mostly fitness nuts, like to travel, are ingrained in capitalism (not surprising as people analytics is popular with large multinational corporations), but they are also risk takers, writing about early trends ahead of the mainstream.

For more information about how tribefinder and galaxyscope works, see my earlier blogpost and the papers on www.ickn.org, for instance this one. Many thanks to Karin Frick from GDI for doing the coolhunting.

How to Find Interesting Research Problems?

2020-09-02T03:31:00.003-07:00

This morning I was asked this great question, which I am struggling to answer, as this is a problem with many dimensions. Anyway, here is my try to give a partial answer.

The first answer is “never ending curiosity”. I wake up in the morning just wondering why things are how they are. Why are trees growing towards light, and not towards darkness? Why do we need light to live? Photosynthesis describes a pattern, but does not give the fundamental answer. There is always so many more questions than answers, and every answer brings more questions.

The second answer is “I want to find answers to questions I am passionate about”. So, you need to find your passion. How to find your passion? One answer is looking at other people. Whom do you admire most? What are people whom you find cool doing? For instance, Elon Musk said that he was most inspired by Nikola Tesla, as a consequence he started exploring electricity, ultimately building electric cars and naming his company “Tesla”. The area of research you choose also has to do with your personality. I noticed that an economist, a marketing researcher, a computer scientist, a psychologist, and a zoologist have very different personalities. The personality differences are even larger between soldiers, physicians, professors, entrepreneurs, and managers.

If the most exciting thing for you is being a professor at a top university, then choose your research questions opportunistically. Try to find answers to “hot” research problems in your area. For instance, a hot area right now is fake news detection and prevention, using AI.

Personally, I am much more interested in “cool” things than in “hot” things. The difference between “hot” and “cool” is that “hot problems” are in everybody’s awareness, which means it will be much easier to get your paper accepted, if you offer an incrementally new solution extending an existing solution. “Cool” problems are ahead of their time. There is a small group of other “crazy researchers” working on them, but it will be much harder to get papers accepted about “cool” topics. Papers addressing “hot problems” will offer incremental innovation, papers addressing “cool problems” will offer radical breakthrough innovation. The problem is that at first people will say it’s crazy, does not work, or is not a problem worth investigating, until it is suddenly “obvious”. I have seen that many times. For instance, in 2003 or 2004 I was in a meeting with VCs who were discussing investing in face recognition startups. They had invited a famous professor from a top university, an expert in image recognition, who told them that computers would never be able to recognize faces as accurately as people could. Well, fast forward a few years, and computers have become much better than humans in this task – isn’t that obvious!

The pebble rolls down the hill, inspiring the concept of the wheel. Innovation consist of applying existing solutions from other fields to the problem at hand. How to find new ideas? Talk to as many smart people from as many different backgrounds as possible. This is why I like to teach at universities around the world, students in Finland, Chile, the US, China, Italy, Germany, etc. have very different perspectives of the same problem. In my research I am straddling mathematics, computer science, management science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and biology which I find immensely enriching. As is bringing computers to children in the developing world, working on reducing infant mortality in the US, and trying to understand how plants, horses and dogs communicate. In the end this will even inspire a better understanding of how fake news spread.

AI-Enhanced Interspecies Communication

2020-08-30T03:58:00.001-07:00

While we humans have a hard time communicating among ourselves, we find it even more difficult to communicate with individuals of other species. The main interaction between species consists of eating members of other species, or being eaten. We humans consume huge amounts of pig, cow, and chicken meat, drink milk, eat eggs, bread, rice, corn and other veggies. However, when we are not eating plants and animals, we also like to talk to them. Some people even talk to their houseplants. And owners of dogs, cats, and horses of course talk to their pets all the time, maybe even considering them their soulmates. But do the plants and animals really understand what we are trying to say to them? And even more important, can we understand what the dog, horse, cat, or a mimosa or basil plant is trying to say to us?

Before we can start talking to others, we need to listen to what they have to say, and try to make sense of their output. Computers and artificial intelligence have made huge progress over the last twenty years helping us both to listen and to talk to each other. Today’s New York Times gives a great overview of using computers to read the brain which explains how computers are capable of knowing what we are thinking by tracking the activation of combinations of brain cells indicative of certain words. In the currently best implementations computers can read up to 250 different words at 90 percent accuracy by looking at our neurons. In genetically engineered mice, computers have also spoken to the mice, telling them when to drink water by turning on their neurons, “playing them like a piano”. Google Translate and Deepl have become language geniuses, dynamically translating from English to Chinese, with me talking to my phone in English in the hotel in Beijing, and the phone repeating my sentence to the hotel receptionist in Chinese.

What if we could do the same when talking to a horse, a dog, or a mimosa, with the computer telling the animal or plant what I would like to say, and then the animal or plant talking back to me.

Our research group has been studying how humans communicate online and face to face for the last two decades. In our work we have been building many tools for happier, more creative, and more productive collaboration among humans, leveraging the computer and AI to read the "honest signals" and emotions of what a human really wants to say beyond the literal meaning of words.

In the last few years we have been applying these algorithms and technologies to interspecies communication. We have used body sensing technology to better understand communication with horses, and facial emotion recognition to understand emotions of dogs and of horses .

In our most recent projects we are trying to listen to plants. We have put “brain sensors” on mimosas, as they talk back to the outside world quite visibly: when their leaves are touched, they fold them. We found that they seem to sense the electrostatic discharge of human bodies and the rhythm of body movement near them. When putting our sensors on other plants such as basil they show the same response. We also recorded the leaf movement of the “dancing plant” (Codarialcalyx Motorius) in response to human voice and music. Using automatic image recognition we found that its leaf movement was different in reaction to male and female voices talking nearby.

As this is a brand-new emerging area of research, we are at the very beginning. Imagine how wonderful it will be not just talking to your dog, cat, horse, or houseplant, but being talked back in understandable words, and engaging into a real dialog.

Much more research is needed, if you are interested in collaborating in our research, we love to hear from you.