My Secret to Waking Up at 4:30 AM

About a year ago I had to do what my dad had to when I was about my daughter’s age: tell my family I was laid off from my job.

Before that, my department had promised me that their verbal offer to renew my appointment as lecturer would hold, despite bureaucratic restrictions against any formal offers until Stanford leadership had spoken. So I forged ahead assuming I would return, continuing to develop the new courses in computational social science commissioned by my department of Environmental Social Sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University.

Unluckily for all, my department’s “worst case scenario” for making promises was not “worst” enough. My department was forced to abandon hiring any lecturers until at least 2029.

Luckily, I love adversity.

I began this Substack newsletter about one year ago, shortly after getting the news about my job. Topics were scattered at first.

Luckily I know that one of the most important things to do if you want to be a writer is…Write!

Oh, so you hate what came out and don’t want to publish it, but you promised yourself you’d publish it? Too bad! Press “Publish” anyway, then curl up in the fetal position and cry yourself to sleep if you have to! Let the sting of that shame motivate your growth! Eventually you learn that all that judgement, shame, and so on, are unnecessary, and the best work gets done under an obscure mixture of relaxation and anxiety that neither rushes nor dallies.

Now one year after starting the SSIR, the purpose of this newsletter has become clear: here I will deliver incisive analyses of current events and the quantitative social science and sustainability research behind them.

My analyses provide a unique strategic intelligence advantage, given my training, career, and current entrepreneurial ventures that span physical sciences, engineering, computation, social and cognitive science, and international relations. I will also share guides in future posts on how you, dear reader, can start and hone your own organizations.

This Newsletter is a product of a larger ecosystem that includes two sister organizations I started. One is a humanitarian non-governmental organization called the Generation of Participation in Democracy, tax-exempt in the United States under IRS code 501(c)(3), EIN: 41-4992913. The other is a for profit LLC registered in California, SubtleTea Solutions.

THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY. That’s my mantra. On repeat, ad nauseam, every day.

The training program in quantitative social science that I developed to promote sustainability synthesizes my PhD training in quantitative social and cognitive science with my training in physics and mathematics, incorporating my professional programming experience as well.

Through all this, I have arrived at the following heuristic to ensure our actions promote the spread of adaptive, sustainable practices: act always to augment local autonomy.

My non-profit, the Generation of Participation in Democracy, is an institutional accelerator providing organizational and computational tools and a Flagship Institute accelerator program for the expedited creation of mission-driven charitable and humanitarian organizations. We leverage science, strategic cooperation, and computation to augment local autonomy in real-world marginalized communities.

My non-profit’s first Flagship Institute is the Instituto Dourados, which is partnering with the Universidade Federal de Grande Dourados and community of the Indigenous Reservation of Dourados to help them develop translation technologies and other public health support systems. We aim to build systems that will provide value whether we remain partners long-term or not, though of course we hope our partnership endures many decades.

Many sustainability initiatives fail because local communities are not involved, so humanitarian organizations prescribe practices that are locally maladaptive either culturally or environmentally. Our expertise in social science and strategic cooperation help us avoid such poor outcomes.

Even at our company SubtleTea Solutions, we only build products that can authentically serve the needs of historically marginalized folks first and foremost. We also believe that businesses and consumers generally will find our products valuable. Whatever income streams we establish will be directed according to how to best serve the most marginalized first. Our products are designed to go first to those who were once last to receive or influence new technologies.

INCISIVE SOCIAL INSIGHTS FOR A SERIOUS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.

I designed the Social Science Intelligence Report to be a rewarding experience in multiple senses. First, I provide strategic, actionable insights into which companies may be facing leadership crises or legal trouble, or which politicians are lying about what, why, who else is involved, and how that could guide risk management, investment, or other financial strategy.

The Social Science Intelligence Report will publish material and provide a platform to interact with me to different degrees for free and paid subscription tiers.

Free subscribers can access weekly reports and podcasts with video. The weekly office hours will be posted at the beginning of the following week.

Paid subscribers can access weekly reports and podcasts. Every month I will also write a long-form essay reviewing and synthesizing key topics in a popular, non-technical, no-jargon style. For example, the social network structure of groups can change which social movement strategy is likely the most effective one. A group's social network structure is a shorthand, meaning the set of all relationships of who influences whom, how many people the average person is connected to, and similar properties of social relationships.

Paid subscribers can also access weekly ask-me-(almost) anything (AMA) style “office hours” with me, where I will respond to questions about SSIR content, other content from other platforms of mine and my partners, or whatever else might be on the community’s mind.

Paid subscribers also get access to the community chat, where I will regularly poll the community to help guide the platform via feedback on past and future content, and other prompts.

The Social Science Intelligence Report will connect the unconnected and explain the path my organizations are charting to rapidly build sustainable economic capacity. We focus on capacity building among the most historically marginalized communities, but design our products to be the inevitable choice for all businesses. Our system and products will spread because of the efficiency and improvement in lived experience that free, self-interested cooperation and reliable technological tools can provide.

Quantitative social science has all the elements required for a synthesis that makes it look more like physics in the way that physics as a field has consolidated around a common set of core lessons, represented and taught using a relatively consistent set of symbols to represent physical, measurable quantities. The SSIR will train readers to leverage the core lessons from quantitative social science.

I invite you to please come along with me. Please do subscribe and share the Social Science Intelligence Report as a first step towards supporting our work. If you find the material worthy and you have the means, a paid subscription signals to me that the material is valuable for others and worth doing, and provides the means for me to create more of it.

The artificial intelligence (AI) hype of today confused me for a while because nothing about it is completely brand new, yet researchers seem to be caught off-guard by what AI bots (now rebranded as agents) are capable of.

It’s confusing because, going on ten years ago, I taught the programming section of a course called Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for three semesters, between 2018 and 2020 while writing my dissertation at the University of California, Merced. The course content included research and invention stretching across several decades past. So why all the hype and panic if AI has been decades in the making? I will try to explain this, or at least give some hypotheses and justifications, in future SSIR content.

Suffice it to say, my AI use policy is based on a practical stance: that AI is a uniquely powerful technology capable of something new. AI provides culture in a frictionless way, using natural, informal language as a programming interface, with a computational engine that can nearly instantaneously consolidate superficially distinct cultural threads from across social science, mathematics, sustainability, philosophy, engineering, programming, and so many more fields, if it is used properly. AI as currently instanteated is a power glutton. At my company SubtleTea Solutions, we develop alternative, more sustainable, local, and private approaches to computation than exist today, including AI. Our technology

SOCIAL SCIENCE INTELLIGENCE REPORT POSITIONS ON AI:

• Human-led, human-driven AI use for justifiably humane purposes is acceptable and even encouraged.

• AI usage must never be kept secret from colleagues or the community.

• AI usage is unacceptable if it affects the quality of the work in any way. AI is basically a fancy regression to the mean. So, if you rely on it for truly creative ideas, your work will be more mediocre by definition. A more fruitful

• AI use must remain conscious of the environmental, psychological, and social costs of AI in its current format. One must invest in or create alternative implementations of AI with all possible urgency to offset the devastation that AI expansion at current rates would engender.