Living the quiet life isn’t easy. Sure, at times we gently sway to elevator music, but we often dance to the tune of hormones and peer pressures. And in an urban setting like Manhattan, life is often like dancing in a mosh pit—even when we wear noise-cancelling headphones piping Enya into our heads. We know that if we remove the headphones, the noise that encompasses us will rush in; the headphones are dams that hold back a reservoir of sounds and activity.
 
In traffic, minds wander and sometimes even wonder. That’s probably not good for public safety, but it is also probably an inescapable product of our short attention spans. The brain has much to process in a busy urbanized life, a lifestyle that is not limited, it seems, to living in cities. Microwaves and portable devices have changed even some of the most remote places into a busy downtown street. From the boom boxes of the disco era to today’s powerful headphones, from portable Bluetooth speakers to the noise of any kind of machine, even the car air conditioner fan, and from conversations to ear worms, we have brains bombarded by distractions. And since we really can’t process all of them simultaneously, we keep attending to all like people watching a tennis match, this side and that side, this side and that side—but in the audience called the brain, many sides vie for attention. No wonder we wonder; no wonder we wander. There’s turmoil except for those occasional moments when we can gently sway to elevator music, or to an almost noise-free, activity-free background.
 
For the most part, most of us live lives in the mosh pit at the spa music concert. Think, for example, of what you are currently doing. You’ve just been through a number of images, all of them easy to perceive because or your experiences both real and virtual. Sitting and reading this you can jump easily to the top a snow-covered peak, breaking away from this sentence to envision the vision, to take in the view of a sunset from a mountaintop, to feel cool air only to have me plunge you into noisy traffic on a busy street at rush hour, cabs and Ubers everywhere, people unintentionally jostling people on sidewalks, and a cacophony of mechanical sounds echoing among the granite, glass, and steel walls.
 
If not truly such in some scientific sense, you are close to a being synesthetic as activity and sound compete for attention or space in the mosh pit of the unquiet mind. 

July 4, 2019, in the United States: Parades across the United States. People gathered on sidewalks. Marching bands performing in unison. No marcher or float driver bumping into something. People in the parade operating in an optimal way so that the long line of participants smoothly flows like a river between the banks of onlookers. Everyone in the parade trusts everyone else to keep the flow moving.
 
But outside of any parade day, flows of goods and people are often interrupted by individuals we cannot trust to cooperate in a common interest. How is it that we have become so untrustworthy and disruptive in the context of working together for a common good? Given our history of thievery and disruption, humans could easily be described as a race of pirates and disrupters. Turn on the news, pick up the paper, click through online reports: Daily stories of betrayal of the common good and theft are hard to avoid. Piracy in many iterations, glorified in numerous stories, is a constant whose reality is a blot on the soul of our collective. Trust, as the wise Ringo Starr once sang, “It don’t come easy.”  
 
Not that other species are without thieves and untrustworthy individuals, but humans go about thieving and deceiving both blatantly and surreptitiously. And, unlike other animals that steal and deceive for survival, humans steal for reasons too numerous to mention. Apparently, one cannot even travel on the scenic Lower Danube without a possible encounter with river pirates, and maritime pirates are common in some key navigation routes. The flow of river and maritime vessels isn’t always optimal; the parade of cargo gets interrupted.
 
And that brings me to thinking about “behavior optimization in complex self-interested networks.” Apparently, humans as a whole don’t make up a self-interested network that optimizes behavior on any permanent scale. What’s this mean? If you read the “call for papers” for a special issue of Behavior Optimization in Complex Self-Interested Networks, you will see one topic that might elicit from you a paper focused on untrustworthiness: “Models of selfish behavior dynamics.” * The topic fits perfectly with the model of traffic jams and piracy.
 
Take those pirates on the Lower Danube, for example. River boats deliver many goods like metals and fossil fuels to cities, factories, and power stations. For the good of a complex society, it behooves everyone along the stream to optimize the transfer of those goods. But individuals, though part of a complex society in which mutual optimization is beneficial, don’t see the big picture. Optimizing transportation isn’t the pirates’ goal. They are examples of individuals whose dynamics are motivated by selfish behavior.
 
One could say that in complex systems, all of us are at times very untrustworthy. Say you see an accident along the highway. You “rubberneck” because your curiosity gets the best of you. In the process, you slow down ever so slightly (or greatly), and your slowing slows the driver behind you and so on. There goes the optimization of the complex network of people trying to get somewhere. Gone in not going. All the other drivers trusted you to keep the system working, and you broke that trust.
 
Traffic flow is, in fact, the model that the editors use in describing the purpose of their journal on complex self-interested networks (CSIN). The supposed goal of anyone in traffic is to reach a destination. In that, all drivers are alike, and it makes sense for them to cooperate. But then, there’s that occasional jackass driver who acts as though he or she has no sense of the “common good.” Such a driver’s selfish act disrupts the CSIN. And thieves and untrustworthy people do the same to other networks. One might think that the free flow of goods and services benefits the species, but robbing the pizza delivery guy, stealing copper from a barge, and conning people out of their savings all disrupt the general network. Or—and this is just hearsay on this Fourth of July—what of the Russian sub that caught fire during its supposed mission to cut international Internet cables? In the network of nations, there are countries whose leadership either cannot comprehend the benefits of a general human network or desire for whatever reasons to disrupt the complex self-interested network of Earthlings.
 
So, networks of humans have to spend time and resources to prevent disruptions to their networks or to catch and punish those who disrupt. Think air traffic control and airport security. Optimizing for the group as a whole isn’t easily achievable when members of the group optimize for themselves, or in seeming motiveless malignity, aim to “break the chain,” to use the words of Fleetwood Mac.
 
We see the process of de-optimizing everywhere, even among government officials and contractors who misdirect funds from the common treasury. We see the process in families, neighborhoods, schools, towns, cities, and states. Globally, we see de-optimizing networks with very dire consequences.
 
You probably don’t have time to submit your paper on “selfish behavior dynamics.” The deadline is as of this writing tomorrow, July 5, 2019. But you might consider looking at your personal world as part of a network or as part of networks you enter during your daily activities.
 
If you happen to watch a parade on July 4, think of it as an optimized network.  
 
 
 
* file:///Users/Taylor/Downloads/846727.pdf
 
 
 
 
 
  

I’m not a golfer. Maybe you are. I can, however, understand the interest and obsession generated by the game. Other players, tiny easy-to-lose ball, great distances, obstacles on an undulating landscape, and a little cup challenge every golfer’s patience and skill. And then one has the pressure of yard work: replacing divots, that is. My understanding doesn’t entice me to play golf; it is expensive, runs slow, takes hours, and seems to require clothing brighter than hunter’s orange, colors that make the golfer easier to find than the golf ball. And the carts! Oh! The carts. Not much exercise there.
 
That’s why long ago, in the 1960s, in fact, I invented an alternative version of the game: Contact golf. * Two or four players, one ball, and rugby roughness with the exception of this: no blind-side tackle on a putt. Now, there’s a game with real challenges and some exercise. It’s a game that prepares one for the real world.
 
Sorry, duffers. I’m not making fun of your obsession. Whereas it is true that golf frustrates its players, it also offers them a day of relaxation and camaraderie, fresh air in a controlled wilderness, and a clubhouse bar—all pleasant diversions except for those landscaping divot jobs. Presidents have played the game to escape as much as they can the pressures of running the world. Of course, they probably have people who replace the divots for them.
 
For those who aren’t golfers but who want to spend an hour with date or family without the expense and duration of an eighteen-hole outing, there’s miniature golf. Played on short, artificial fairways and greens with obstacles no more challenging than model windmills, little bridges, and gentle slopes leading to the holes, miniature golf is an example of what an affluent, civilized society does to reality: Shortens both space and time, neatens the environment, and limits the skill and danger required to negotiate its bends and turns.
 
Miniature golf, regardless of claims that it gives one putting practice, isn’t “real golf.” Even on a manicured green, variables of slope and blades of grass make all putts a challenge that a carpet can’t match. The point is that miniature golfers can’t take on competitors who practice the full game that requires clubs of different lengths and pitches adapted to different “natural” conditions.
 
It seems to me—a non-golfer, remember—that miniature golf is an analog for a society bent on making safe spaces for its youth so that they don’t hear anything offensive. The ramifications of this are more serious than those associated with miniature golfers trying to play an eighteen-hole PGA course. Reality can be very rough. For those in war zones and crime-ridden neighborhoods, negotiating the turns and bends can be far worse than playing the entire course in the rough. Real offenses occur. People don’t replace the divots; rather, they make bomb craters in the fairways—which, by the way, are in no way “fair.”
 
The inevitability of hard times is a reality for every society and individual. Preparation for those hard times is prudent. Instead, some of our western societies in general and individuals in particular seem to suggest that playing miniature golf is the same as playing golf. In the “real” world the game is contact golf.

*I did not copyright the game's rules. I vaguely remember seeing later in a commercial the idea that I had spread as a joke among friends all those years ago. Then, there's the YouTube comic video of Tiger Woods tackling someone on a golf course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMjIvhQtFjI    

What if you awoke tomorrow with nothing in your head? What if you had to start over, to be what you were on the day of your birth?
 
Play along. I’ll give you the ability to reason, an ability that you did not have at birth. But nothing else: No developed emotional response, no memory of human ways save those that are inborn and instinctive, and no skills save eating, drinking, and walking. Blank.
 
How do you deal with the world? You would be in a constant state of discovery. What do you think would attract your attention?
 
I could easily go on, directing you with questions, but “blank” means “blank.” However, I will yield this: You have only the world as it is today, not the world through which you passed in your personal history. You are “blank” in the “here and now.” Now, go build your life.