Swarm Theory and Politics

First published at Opinion Forum.

Can analogies be drawn between insect swarms and human political activity?

Stink bugs have been swarming in Washington, D.C. where, unlike CongressCritters, "they really cause no harm. . . . just a nuisance." Fortunately, the Congress has adjourned.

The swarming addressed here can be more than just a nuisance. Sometimes the results can be seen as good or bad depending on what one wants. Swarming (as distinguished from smarming, a human social and political tactic) is a natural phenomenon permitting essentially brainless creatures -- ants, bees, other insects and some fish -- to thrive through apparently instinctive collective reactions to external stimuli. Maybe swarming also illuminates some species of political behavior.

Ants and bees construct truly ingenious structures in which to live and breed and which they protect when endangered. If a bee hive is destroyed the surviving queen leaves, followed by a swarm, and they get busy building a new hive -- without the help of FEMA, federal grants or other financial stimuli. Ants do much the same with great industry. The nests of some ant colonies extend for many miles underground.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the "Californian large," extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

As with bees, ant colonies are marvels of architectural sophistication. Highly unintelligent creatures, apparently lacking even a sense of their own existence or that of their fellows, acting collectively and instinctively in swarms, they can do some things as least as well as can individual humans and can exhibit collectively something resembling individual human intelligence and activity. As a point of at least minor interest, humans are thought to have a biomass of approximately 335 million metric tons and ants of between 900 and 9,000 million metric tons. Bee biomass is thought to be declining, but I couldn't find any numbers.

When an ant leaves its nest to forage for food it takes an apparently random path. When it finds food, it carries it back to the nest leaving a trail of chemical signals called pheromones. Other ants also go out looking for food and when they find it they do the same things. There being no welfare system, when the first ant returns with food others follow its pheromone trail back to the food source and return by the same path, leaving additional pheromones. The pheromones are short lived, so once a food source is exhausted and unsuccessful ants have abandoned it and gone looking for other sources, the old trails evaporate. When new sources of food are found the ants returning to the nest with food leave new pheromone trails to be followed by others until they in turn evaporate. There is a lot more to it than that and there is a mountain of literature on the subject of swarming; a bit of it is available here.

Computer programs based on ant behavior abound and parcel delivery services use them daily to determine the most efficient routes for their trucks. Much of the traffic on the internet is routed using similar ant-based algorithms. Some suggest that the human brain itself involves swarm theory, "even complex cognitive functions, such as abstract reasoning and consciousness." Maybe our brains resemble bee hives, although in some cases that might be an insult to the bees.

In 2002, Michael Chichton (1942 - 2008) wrote Prey about a nanoparticle project gone very wrong. Nanoparticles are microscopically small, dust like things. The idea was to use swarms of nanoparticles, some with visual, some with aural and some with other capabilities, to conduct military surveillance and for other purposes. However, they inexplicably "evolved" very quickly -- a generation was of about three hours duration -- and began to reproduce as well as to swarm in unforeseen ways. The novel leaves unanswered the question of whether the human race survived. Scary and far fetched, but not as far fetched as one might think. The United States military have been looking seriously at swarm behavior since before 2000. Murphy's law, that whatever can go wrong will at the most inopportune time, is similar to the concept of the fog of war, where ambiguity, chance and chaos, with all of their non-linear recursive complexities, continue to play important roles despite (or perhaps because of) advances in command and control equipment and procedures leading to information overload. Small events can have large consequences. Multiple articles are collected here. The military apparently envision using large numbers of inexpensive, highly expendable and essentially autonomous robotic devices to accomplish various missions. These are not the remotely controlled unmanned drone aircraft currently in the news.

[C]urrent UAVs require at least one operator per UAV, despite technological advances that make it possible to deploy hundred (if not thousands) of inexpensive [UAVs]. This requirement not only increases expense, but makes coordination among UAVs more difficult.

Recently swarm technology has been suggested as a possible solution to automatically control and coordinate multiple UAVs. Swarms consist of a large number of distributed, parallel-acting individual entities coupled with primitive communication mechanisms such as chemical markers. The idea behind a swarm is that simple local rules that govern the behavior of individual entities can lead to complex emergent [self-taught] behavior of the system as a whole. For example, it might be possible to conduct a search and destroy operation. Rules include ideas such as “avoid areas already searched” or “avoid UAVs within a certain radius.”

Cheap and stupid robots are in some cases more effective than teams of intelligent soldiers with assigned specialties. Soldiers think and adapt quickly to changing conditions. The loss of even one with a critical task can cause a mission to fail. Although robots don't "think," they too can react very quickly to changing stimuli. They are homogeneous and can be numerous. The loss of some is matter of little consequence to the mission. Are nano devices being considered? So it appears.

People obviously (with few exceptions) are individually far more intelligent than are ants and human swarms are less common than with bees. Still, sometimes they occur. At a hotly contested rugby match, something similar to a swarm sometimes occurs. A sense that team A won unfairly (or simply because it was team A rather than team B) can cause a major riot of thousands of spectators. "Deprived youths" in some nascent Islamic countries swarm to offer burnt automotive sacrifices to their image-phobic god, while others, perhaps more devout, riot self-destructively to allay cartoonish offenses to theirs. A racial incident can cause similar rioting, particularly if stimulated by queen bees and lesser luminaries; great and self-destructive damage to the infrastructures of the communities from which the rioters hail is common. They "lose their minds" and become a swarm. "Damn those jerks! We'll show them. Let's burn our houses! Yeah! Let's!" The phrases "herd mentality" and "mob mentality" are commonly applied. This sort of thing occasionally happens in politics. The politically inspired race to judgment over the activities of the "elite" Duke University lacrosse team vis a vis a stripper may have been a minor example of something similar; the queen bees were very busy.

On the other hand and in a different context, some beneficial things can result from conduct resembling but not amounting to true swarm behavior.

[T]op-down management is viewed as a forced, and thus, ineffective approach. We say that the bottom-up thrust is based on the world's creatures' success with 'emergence', 'swarm theory' or 'chaos theory' a bottom-up approach used by ants, bees,birds and even trees[??]. Its basis is that small simple local decisions, if allowed to develop and follow their own path under an overall strategic guidance of process, will lead to an elegant solution - not just a better solution but a superior solution that no single individual could likely have conceived.

I don't know about the trees, but does this at least remotely suggest T.E.A. party organizations to anyone else? According to this Wall Street Journal article, individual groups called "tea parties" remain highly diverse but are coalescing in pragmatic fashion to the extent necessary to achieve their basic goals. It seems to be a bottom up, and far from top down, phenomenon.

Statism and the accompanying central (top down) planning, direction and control of human conduct are fatally flawed but might work well in an ant colony or bee hive, provided the insects were not thereby deprived of their autonomous nature. If Venezuelan el Presidente Chávez could wiggle his buttocks like a queen bee and invoke consistent and reliably productive responses by the masses, Venezuela might be a viable machine for creating stuff. He can't and it isn't because that's not the way in which humans have evolved. There are other problems:

we know that complex systems are exquisitely sensitive to initial operating conditions and that interventions can have disproportionately large or small implications depending upon timing, etc. . . .

Central planning does not, and cannot, take into account apparently insignificant changes which can have very important effects.

North Korea seems to offer the best current example of remarkably unsuccessful quasi-swarm-based human endeavor. Fortunately, elsewhere in politics there tends to be substantial diversity of opinion transcending the charisma of queen bees. Although the power of a queen bee once firmly entrenched is difficult to undermine it is possible. Senator Obama managed to displace Senator Clinton as queen bee in 2008. Now many of his swarms of worker bees are wondering what happened and may be looking for a replacement. Many who didn't like but voted for him in 2008 are also doing so. Does Governor Palin seek to be Queen Bee (at least for a day)? I don't think so and hope not.

Humans are neither ants nor bees and we don't have the same instinctive reactions. Leaders are necessary and as long as their pheromone trails lead to what we desire we follow them. Also like ants, when they don't we stop. Unlike ants and the folks in North Korea, we get to decide what we want and whether the paths directed by our leaders are likely to be fruitful. Sometimes we screw up in deciding what we want and how to achieve it, and we ultimately pay the price as we -- and the queen bees -- must. When members of the political class see the "unwashed masses" as bees ready to swarm, they sometimes are not too far off and sometimes they are. Even bees and ants respond to new external stimuli and their behavior can't always be predicted accurately; the results can be chaotic and chaos theory is very much implicated in swarm theory; maybe with an explanation by Uncle Jay it would all make more sense.

Does swarm theory have any significant relationship, at least by analogy, to political behavior or would a suggestion that it may be faddish? I don't know, but the concept is worth keeping in mind as we decided how to cast our votes next month and reflect upon the outcome.

A Modest Proposal to Pomote Domestic Tranquility

Published on Opinion Forum on May 20, 2010

Huff and Puff and down fall the houses of falsehood

Here is a truly fascinating article from Huffington Post by Jim Taylor, PhD in psychology and lecturer at the University of San Francisco, a well known bastion of unbiased intellectual thought. Mr.^* Taylor complains that the sources of information nowadays are too many, too prolific and too motivated by politics and/or ideology, and that we lack the resources, intellectual and otherwise, to distinguish "facts" from "falsehoods" and from opinion. President Obama recently said much the same. They are, of course, right correct.

Mr. Taylor directs his message not to those whose "facts" are incongruent with his.

The reality is that, for these extremists, when ideology comes face to face with the facts, facts are the victim. You need look no further than the birthers, truthers, death panelists, and Sarah Palin devotees to see the profound disconnect from fact for those who hold extreme ideologies.

Rather, his message is directed toward the reasonable folk who agree with him.

This post is directed toward to [sic] everyone else, those who, whether a Republican or Democrat, Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist, environmentalist or industrialist, socialist or capitalist, are reasonable people who believe that truth should trump ideology, who are interested in separating fact from fiction, and want to know both sides of an issue before forming thoughtful and well-supported opinions. Just look at the health-care legislation. Decent people can disagree about what is the best health care system for America, but that determination should be based on facts, such as how many people will be covered and what will the costs be, not ideology or prostituting to special interests.

Truth is good; untruths are bad; distortions, spins and misinformation are bad. Gosh Darn! We agree.

However, Mr. Taylor's prescription (in this context, perhaps I should accord him the honorific "Doctor") is as follows:

The federal government should create a Department of Information whose responsibility it is to determine the facts behind any decision that confronts our country. I know what you're thinking: This sounds like something that belongs in a totalitarian regime. But the reality is that someone has to decide on what is factual and what is not. So who can we trust to give us the most accurate information available? Big Business? Traditional media? The blogosphere? I certainly wouldn't trust any of them.

Though our government is far from perfect, it does exist, at least in theory, to serve the best interests of the American people. That's more than can be said for any other influences in our society; everyone else has a self-serving agenda. And our government already decides what is factual in many areas, whether the Office of Management and Budget deciding how much the health-care legislation will cost, the Federal Reserve describing the state of our economy, or even the decisions handed down by Supreme Court (though, interestingly, they are called opinions not facts). I know, budget estimates are often wrong, the Fed has made glaring economic-policy mistakes, and the Supreme Court has made some lousy decisions, but those mistakes may be more a reflection of the complexities of life and honest disagreement on ambiguous issues rather on than intentional misinformation.

Here's the next part of my proposal. Anytime there is a factual dispute, the Department of Information would render a decision on what the facts are. Those parties who come out on the short end of those decisions would not be allowed to use their "facts" any longer (just like having potentially dangerous drugs or products taken off the shelf). If they do, there would be fines levied to punish the transgressors. This system would not only make clear what the facts are and empower those who want the facts to be known, but it would also discredit the lunatic fringe and reduce the influence of their views on the majority of people.

Now that's a stupendous idea, despite that ratty old Constitution written by a bunch of long dead obscenely rich white male jerks (please excuse the redundancy) obviously cursed with an overabundance of Neanderthal genes! It should be tossed into an (ecologically sound) trash bin. Should it fly (and Mr. Taylor acknowledges that it might not -- but then, scientists were once said to know that a bumblebee couldn't fly), anyone who advocates that 2 + 2 = 6, that the Germans and Japanese were the bad guys and the United States and Great Britain were the good guys during the Second World War, that Arizona's Jim Crow immigration law is reasonable and constitutional or that under the Health Control Law costs are likely to rise, medical care to suffer and/or that the old farts might get the short end of the stick – being in all cases clearly misguided, politically and/or ideologically suspect wrong – would have to shut up or be punished by fines. Big fines, I hope. Perhaps Huff and Puff and Daily It's So Kos I Say So should get some of the fine proceeds. That will show those damn Fascist ideologues on the right. If only King George Bush II the Perverse or Prince Cheney the Unspeakable had thought of this and implemented it! But then President Bush's faith-based initiatives were bad and President Obama's faith-based initiatives are good. Maybe there is an ideological difference. Or maybe President Obama is the physical embodiment of faith.

What are facts, anyway? Obviously, it a true fact that man made global warming is happening and that the consequences will be draconian unless we cease spewing toxic CO₂ into the atmosphere – now, Damnit! Saint Al the Gored is correct, there is no legitimate scientific dispute and civilization as we know it will fall into oblivion if he can't buy another mansion or jet aircraft out of the (non) profits from cap and trade transactions. Once upon a time, more physicians preferred camels to any other, well, I suppose, cigarette.

Back when the Health Control Law was passed and signed, and only some of Santa Claus' elves (and maybe Rudolph) at the North Pole had read and understood it, there were no "facts;" only opinions based, quite likely, on the same reliable sources as those upon which Attorney General Holder relied in criticizing the new Arizona immigration statute – television and newspaper reports by folks who hadn't bothered to read it either and who, I might suggest, were among the ideologically blessed. Responsible officials can't be bothered with the trash spouted by those of impure ideology or worse. Get thee behind me, Satan, Fox, Beck, Palin, Rush et al! Make way for The New York Times and MSNBC! Quick! Before they die.

Still, if there were to be an official governmental arbitrator of what is fact and what is falsehood, it would greatly simplify life. The entire problem of separating the wheat from the chaff would be pushed off on someone else and hidden behind one of Douglas Adams' SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) fields where nobody could see it. The SEP field theory was noted in the second (or was it the third?) of Adams' five book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. I have read that "Adams had a keen interest in the effects of drinking on intelligent people, and discovered that you can get past writers block by drinking vast amounts of alcohol, blacking out, and waking up in a cow field." I don't believe it for a moment and hence it is not a real fact.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that alcohol is inexpensive and there are plenty of cow pastures here, I have implemented a remotely similar strategy at home. We have four dogs. Two of them are too puppy-like and carefree to worry, and I don't like doing it myself. So, I have delegated all responsibility for worry to the two pups who seem best fitted to the task. Getting a lobotomy might serve the same purpose, but might not be covered by my health insurance: it might be covered under the new Health Control Law, but I don't know and need a Department of Information to tell me. Regardless of that, the pup delegation costs absolutely nothing. I have denied them internet access, imbuing them with a degree of purity generally lacking in others. Now, I can be happy and carefree. Something similar would, in my carefree state of mind, be superior to Mr. (Dr.) Taylor's offering, and might also encourage the adoption of unwanted puppies otherwise doomed to execution. That, at least, seems worthwhile.

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^*When I was in undergraduate school eons ago, people with medical degrees were referred to as Doctor. It was considered snobbish for a PhD to refer to himself as "Doctor" because all of his peers also had that degree. Even lowly instructors and the post-doc teaching assistants who handled small seminars for the Big Man had them. Students absorbed this perception, and Professor Doctor Smith was referred to simply as Mr. Smith. Alas, that was then and this is now, but I still adhere to the notion.