Pondering fusion...
The world needs fusion.
Fusion needs you!
Fusion needs you!
or send checks payable to:
Focus Fusion Society
PO Box 232
South Bound Brook, NJ 08880
Quotes
See also Books | FilmsAlternatives to Reality
Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to be become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality
Man’s Reach
Ah, but man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
1984 Predictability
George Orwell's science-fiction classic Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.
Survival vs. Fun
Except for a random catastrophe completely out of our control, we pretty much know for certain that we are both going to be just fine. So why do we motivate ourselves and everyone else in our lives by acting as if our very survival were in question? The language and logic of business are organized around the survival instinct, even when survival is not in question. This is inefficient, unprofitable, and, perhaps worst of all, depressing.
Instead of relentlessly pursuing survival even after our survival needs are met, we must learn how to do things because they fulfill us - because they are, in a word, fun. Fun is not a distraction from work or a drain on our revenue; it is the very source of both our inspiration and our value. A genuine sense of play ignites our creativity, eases communication, promotes goodwill and engenders loyalty, yet we tend to shun it as detrimental to the seriousness with which we think we need to approach our businesses and careers.
Driver of innovation
...I'm hoping you'll suspend...the conviction that competition is the primary driver of innovation. It may have once been able to serve this purpose, but it is also a necessarily divisive force - turning potential collaborations into adversaries, and what could be meaningful play into grueling work. We find ourselves comparing and contrasting our progress with others, focusing on what we lack rather than what we have, and alienating ourselves from our potential allies in the process.
Funding fusion alternatives
Unfortunately, the whole fusion field is still centered on tokamak research, and most researchers simply are not willing to look at other devices, especially those as radically different as the plasma focus. As a result of this bias in the field, funding for the plasma focus has been extremely small. “I think the problem arises when funding is restricted and then scientists start to view each other as competing for funds. I don’t think that any of us should view each other as competitors for resources. I strongly feel that all alternative routes to fusion should be adequately funded. The fusion field as a whole needs more money.
Killing a fairy tale
Senator Wyden dismissed PAM ["Policy Analysis Market"] as a "fairy tale" and suggested that DARPA would be better off putting its money into "real world" intelligence. But the dichotomy was a false one. No one suggested replacing traditional intelligence gathering with a market. PAM was intended to be simply another way of collecting information. And in any case, if PAM had, in fact, been a "fairy tale," we would have known it soon enough. Killing the project ensured only that we would have no idea whether decision markets might have something to add to our current intelligence efforts. The hostility toward PAM, in any case, had little to do with how effective it would or would not be.
Disrupting the signal
Distinguishing between the two kinds of imitation [intelligent imitation vs. slavish imitation] is, of course, not easy, since few people will admit that they're mindlessly conforming or herding. But it does seem clear that intelligent imitation depends on a couple of things: first, an initially wide array of options and information; and second, the willingness of at least some people to put their own judgment ahead of the group's, even when it's not sensible to do so.
Do such people exist? Actually they're a lot more common than you'd expect. One reason is that people are, in general, overconfident. They overestimate their ability, their level of knowledge, and their decision-making prowess. And people are more overconfident when facing difficult problems than when facing easy ones. This is not good for the overconfident decision makers themselves, since it means that they're more likely to choose badly. But it is good for society as a whole, because overconfident people are less likely to get sucked into a negative information cascade, and, in the right circumstances, are even able to break cascades. Remember that a cascade is kept going by people valuing public information more highly than their private information. Overconfident people don't do that. They tend to ignore public information and go on their gut. When they do so, they disrupt the signal that everyone else is getting. They make the public information seem less certain. And that encourages others to rely on themselves rather than just follow everyone else.
Value of cognitive diversity
The legendary organizational theorist James G. March, in fact, put it like this: "The development of knowledge may depend on maintaining an influx of the naive and the ignorant, and...competitive victory does not reliably go to the properly educated."
The reason, March suggested, is that groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less new information to the table. Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives.
Or, as March has famously argued, they spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring.
Bringing new members into the organization, even if they're less experienced and less capable, actually makes the group smarter simply because what little the new members do know is not redundant with what everyone else knows.
ill-shapen innovation
As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.
The illusion of understanding
Human beings, including scientists, do not function under continual awareness of humanity’s fundamental ignorance; rather, they live under perpetual illusion of fundamental understanding.
Ingenious plasma
In this particular field, plasma physics, the phenomena themselves are so complex, the plasma so ingenious at defeating the predictions of nearly all physicists, that ideas cannot be “proven” without experiment.
