Three of the candidates above extend results whose authors Jonathan Hare knew directly, and the connection is worth stating because it bears on how the extensions came to be attempted at all.
Michael Spence
Spence's signaling framework is extended twice in this document — once by dissolving the deadweight loss it identified, and once by inverting the direction in which credibility flows. Hare served as Vice Chairman of Consilient during the period, and the relationship was direct rather than incidental. An extension of this kind is more likely to be attempted by someone who has argued with the original framework in person than by someone who encountered it in a textbook, and the record should say so.
Myron Scholes
The Premium Multiple framework extends option-pricing theory into forms of capital the original could not reach — through a Universal Exchange spanning every aspect of the economy, government services, nature-based resources and human interaction. Scholes was likewise a direct mentor, and the closest of Hare's Nobel-laureate relationships. The extension is not a metaphorical application of optionality language. It is the observation that once contribution is attributable, contingent claims on it become priceable by the same logic that made financial contingent claims priceable in 1973.
Martin Hellman
EasyAccess Authorization completes a program Hellman began. He was among Hare's mentors and remains a friend, and the relationship shaped both the cryptographic direction of the work and the conviction that a problem widely assumed insoluble may simply be unsolved. Public-key cryptography is the canonical instance of that pattern in modern computing, and the architecture attempts the same move on the adjacent problem.
The Santa Fe Institute
Quantum Adaptive Systems Theory extends Complex Adaptive Systems Theory as developed at the Santa Fe Institute, and the connection is documented rather than claimed. A dated July 1998 itinerary records BIOS Group and the Institute, and the collaboration with Stuart Kauffman and the founders of the complexity program produced the treatise from which the present theory descends. Kauffman's autocatalytic-closure result is one of the six importations, and it is imported as a mathematical result about networks rather than as a biological analogy, which is why it transfers.
The Institute's contribution is not only the result but the habit of mind. Complexity science as practiced there treats the search for common structure across unrelated domains as ordinary work rather than as overreach, which is the disposition every importation in this document depends on. A researcher trained to stay within a discipline does not attempt six.
The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation
Hare served as Chairman of the Technical Advisory Board of the E.O. Wilson Foundation from 2006 to 2009. The Consilience Initiative he proposed in 2006 was offered as the only way to satisfy Wilson's TED Prize wish for a decentralized Encyclopedia of Life — an open and rich record of every species on the planet, their habitats, their environmental requirements, and the benefits and uses of both. That proposal specified seven services which the six domains of the Consilient Quantum Paradigm now deliver.
Wilson handed on the mission in person in 2013, and Hare gratefully accepted the charge. The Consilient Nature and Humanity Trust described in candidate seven carries the name of one of Wilson's greatest written contributions to the scientific enterprise, for that reason and in his honor.
The Foundation's board is worth quantifying, because it establishes the level at which the proposal was reviewed. The board alongside which Hare's Technical Advisory Board operated seated five Nobel recipients — four individual laureates in physiology or medicine, and one recognized through an organization awarded the Peace Prize — together with a National Medal of Science holder, the two-time Pulitzer winner who chaired it, the president of Rockefeller University, the president of Memorial Sloan Kettering, the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, and the chief executives of several public companies. The Foundation's current Board of Advisors retains three Nobel laureates and much of the same composition.
These were working relationships, not proximity. Wilson personally introduced Hare to the Foundation's founding chief executive and asked that he be appointed Chairman of the Technical Advisory Board so that the two could work together on the Consilience Initiative and attend the December 2006 Google summit in that capacity. Hare worked directly with board members across the period. The relationship continues: the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation is today an affiliate of the EP3 Sustainable Markets Accelerator, and its President and Chief Executive is a member of it.
Individual names are not listed here because no written endorsement of this document has yet been sought from any of them. Seeking it is among the purposes for which the document was written.
The 2006 specification survives, and it is checkable. The Consilience Initiative documents dated February 2007 state the goal as a self-funding information ecosystem, and specify seven shared ecosystem services required to build it: data interchange across disparate systems and organizations; search, query, visualization and analytics spanning heterogeneous data with filtering by reputation and source; integrated identity and reputation management allowing parties to verify each other across organisational boundaries; distributed, decentralized, fine-grained control of encryption, authentication and access; an anonymity service to de-identify and transform data to protect privacy; internet-based rights management making data ownership explicit; and information markets providing incentives to create, analyze, contribute and annotate.
Every one of the seven is delivered by a named domain of the Consilient Quantum Paradigm, and the phrase self-funding appears in the 2007 goal statement nineteen years before the architecture that makes it achievable. Those documents were written to solve a problem in biodiversity. What they specify is the general case, which is what Hare argued at the time it would have to be.
The universities
Three faculties shaped the method rather than the content, and each is visible in the results above.
- The University of California, Berkeley — Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. The training was in simulation and the modeling of dynamic systems, which is the formal foundation on which Adaptive Systems Analysis was later built. The disposition to treat an economy or an institution as a dynamic system to be modeled rather than a subject to be described begins there.
- Stanford Graduate School of Business. The analytical method originates in Andrew Grove's first course there and in the competitive analysis of the computing industry it taught — the observation that value migrates to whichever layer is missing. Applied at Microsoft in 1991, that method produced the identification of the missing layer as one for business process itself, which is the coordination layer the architecture now supplies.
- Harvard University and Harvard Business School. The first meeting with Wilson took place at Harvard in 1999, after Hare renamed his company Consilient in order to reach him, and the two agreed there to launch a foundation. The relationship that produced the 2013 commission begins in that room.
None of this is evidence that the results hold. Proximity to a laureate establishes nothing about the soundness of an extension of their work, and the extensions stand or fall on the same formal grounds as everything else in this document. What the mentorships, the collaborations and in some cases the brief interactions explain is how one person came to understand each of these domains well enough to unify them into an unbroken consilient ladder. That is a different question from whether the unification is correct, and it is one a reviewer is entitled to have answered.