So what? part A of why SLOOPS matter

I get tired of writing "Self-aware, self-repairing, goal-seeking, regulatory feedback-mediated control loops" so I'm going to use S-Loops or "SLOOPS" (all caps) to name those in this post.

Again, I need to meet the burden of showing why all this effort is worth it. Where's the payoff? Where's "the beef?" If this doesn't give at least a 10-times improvement over older techniques or frameworks, it's not worth considering, after looking at "transition costs".

OK. So, let me begin showing why this actually helps. Some theory to start, then some fully worked synthetic examples, then some real data. How's that?

First, recapping, I've said that we need to put on lenses that let us spot proto-life, or S-Loops in the sea of interactions going on around us, within us, and that we're within. Those are where I believe "the action" will be for reasons I went into already. Some are the obvious, named parts of "the Ecological Model" -- cells, tissues, organs like the pancreas, body systems like the endocrine system, families, work-groups, departments, corporations, cultures, religions, nation-states.

Then I suggested that maybe this set of what Marsden Bloise called "curiously laminated" levels of life on Earth isn't really many different living things, but only "one" living thing, in the same sense that our circulatory system or immune system is "one" thing, despite having many parts that are, in the short run, not even connected to each other. White and red blood cells appear at first glance to all be off doing their own things. The "ties that bind" are subtle, and not always some kind of physical binding like glue or cement. The "parts" are not always in a fixed or plastic relationship to each other, like our bodies, and can have "gaps" between them (as do blood cells, or the pancreas and various endocrine control centers in the brain.). They are still, in a critically real sense, "one." They act as "one".

But, this is a funny sort of "one". We're used to billiard-ball models, or rocks. We're taught that "one" plus "one" gives you "two". This kind of "one" has a different math, forget calculus, we've already left the building at "addition". We have "one plus one equals ONE" -- where ONE is larger than "one." But it doesn't stop there, because "ONE plus ONE equals ONE."
and "ONE plus ONE equals ONE." So many cells act as "one" body. And many bodies act as "one" corporation. And many "corporations" act as "one" nation-state. -- but each "one" also includes all the previous, "lower" level "ones" too. So corporations are made of people, but people are STILL made of cells. Corporations are big complex organizations of DNA, in fact.
So is the USA. It has the identity of DNA, and the identity of many immune systems and endocrine systems, and the identity of many "people" and the identity of many "subcultures" AND it has an independent identity too, on top of all of that. It seems infinitely branching, almost fractal. (actually, I think it is symmetric across levels, so it actually IS fractal.)

These identities are context-dependent, scale-dependent variables so we have to be careful what kind of math we do with them, and not just "addition."

In the SHORT RUN, with our SHORT RUN lens on, the levels appear to be "obviously" independent and unconnected, although, sure, they "impact" each other a little. Just like blood stream cells impact each other a little as each does its own thing. But that tells us NOTHING about what we see when we rotate the microscope stage to the LONG RUN, large field-of-view lens -- where suddenly all these "different" things are all connected after all and all coordinated and synchronized at a high level, which is almost (but not entirely) invisible at the lower level.

I gave the example of water molecules -- in the short run, molecular interactions are complex and require advanced quantum mechanics and only supercomputers can predict the behavior of a few hundred molecules at one time.

It's the height of arrogance and folly to try to hope to predict one thousand or ten thousand --- using those tools and that base-point and looking upwards.

But, if you keep on going, you get to the scale of household and city plumbing. Suddenly, people who never graduated from high-school are putting in pipes and faucets and getting "water" to do their bidding, and filling glasses with "water" whenever they need a drink. No big deal.

What was impossibly hard from below, becomes incredibly obvious and easy from above. Same molecules. Same you. Different lens.

So, whether things are "many" or "one" is a slippery concept that may be scale-dependent and time-horizon dependent. Whether interactions are "weak" and "loosely-coupled" or "deterministic" is also a scale-dependent and time-horizon dependent type of variable. We can't use our billiard-ball addition, subtraction, and reasoning on such objects -- they have a different system of math. It's very real and very solid, but it's different than we're used to, so our intuition is just terrible regarding it. Our hunches and impressions tend to be wrong most of the time.

So, bring this back down to Earth and focus, Wade.

OK, yeah, here's the thread. It is an important thing to decide how many semi-living things human beings are "one" with already, right now. If we put the boundary in the wrong place, we will get bad predictions on our "what if " thinking.

In my mind, the proper subject of "Public Health" is not the public misperception of "health care for poor people", or "hygene and sanitation", and is not to maximize the sum of the health status of every person, although both of those are virtuous goals. The proper subject is to take care of the health of the living and semi-living entities that are larger than people, including corporations and cultures and nations, going all the way up to Gaia or "all of us."

The "public" in "public health", in my mind, is ONE living thing, ONE highly complex, fractally organized set of DNA in a fantastically complex dance. Viewed through one lens, it is one planet. Viewed through another, it is separate "countries." Viewed through another, it is 6 billion "people". Viewed by a virus, it is some huge number of cells, waiting to be infected.

It's a system, and not a heap, although both have "oneness." The heap, however, just sits there, and a living system, or S-Loop, is self-aware, self-repairing, goal-seeking, and allostatic. In the heap case, our interventions are on a passive lump of clay. In the complex adapative system case, our interventions are on a living Body that has its own equivalent of an immune system and tissue rejection is a very real possibility. Or the patient could be upset by the injection and punch us in the stomach and stomp out and come back with its friends and burn down the clinic.
It is not a lump of clay. It has huge stored energy and active agents within it. And it has a self-identity, and a goal, and will attempt to keep itself aligned with its current concept of its healthy state.

So, much of this is not news. Public Health knows that you can't just walk into a culture and impose some solution and expect it to "take" and expect that you can walk out again and not have your solution thrown out the window after you. Almost every foundation that funds public health interventions in Africa or elsewhere has already learned that lesson the hard way.

One place where this is news is corporate management theory, and the large interest right now in trying to understand why Toyota, coming from behind with about zero to start with, could walk slowly up to and past General Motors and keep on going. Despite the unseemly screeching about "unfair trade practices" and "unfair cheap labor" and "unfair currency valuation", there is a realization that they're doing something right that corporate America better wake up and figure out and emulate while they still exist.

After reading 20 books on "lean manufacturing" and "The Toyota Production Process" and "Lean Six-Sigma", and attending a weeks training and exercises, I come away with this -- Toyota understands the multi-level living model, and aligns itself with that, and GM still thinks the parts of the Body operate best if they are at war with each other.

Economically, especially if you live in Southeastern Michigan near Detroit as I do, this is one very big deal. This is the dominant thing happening on the economic landscape right now, and it has, surprise!, a huge impact on employment, education, health care, and the health of the states, cities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, ancillary services, and physical health of the people who live there.

I have trouble imagining how that could NOT be a proper subject for "public health" to attend to, but some don't share that view.

People are not well because their companies are not well. Their companies are not well because they are pursuing a bankrupt, dysfunctional model of human behavior that ran out of steam in the late 1960's, after McGreggor's Theory Y was published -- but the news hasn't hit many corporate boardrooms yet. Why? Because the companies have banded together to maintain a set of stories and myths about why things are the way they are, in which CEO's are "good guys" with "white hats" and labor, environmentalists, unions, lawyers and terrorists are the "bad guys" with black hats. It's a very powerful story, capable of distorting perceptions and selective attention to discount and ignore incredibly strong evidence that the myth doesn't hold water any more.

Well, I have to go. Let me put in a bookmark here. The bad news, from the point of view of activist "people", is that the level of corporations and managmeent a few levels above them seems to be so short sighted that all hope is lost.

My message is don't despair. It's like the water molecules. I'm sure there are idiots and crooks wearing CEO hats, but there are many good people wearing them as well. And, if you get high enough, as with the water and plumbing example, the ultimate investors, the huge funds, the John Templeton's of the world, are not evil people and are not in a frenzy about making 37% return on their money this week before the dude comes with the tire iron to break their kneecap for the loan they took out and failed to repay. The huge investors would be ecstatic to find ANY place to put a trillion dollars that would even RETAIN its value from year to year, or, wow, maybe even grow 1% in absolute real value. China's bankers are sitting on that kind of money and have that very same problem.

So, while the CEO's seem "high up" and out of reach from below, from far above CEO's are hired guns and "a dime a dozen." They can all be replaced, if there is a better way to make money in a sustainable fashion, with less fuss and anxiety and fewer disrupted golf afternoons. Probably entire nation-states can be replaced if they're in the way by the Club of Rome type crowd, or "organized crime" bosses.

Everyone one of them has the same issues, the same problems, the same S-Loop issues to worry about. Every cell, every tissue, every organ, every body system, every person, every company CEO, every Governor or President has the same set of questions they face daily. These are the ones we need to get better at. FIRST, there are the 7 basic steps of the core S-Loop, that I've gone over before.

Yesterday's picture - above. My Capstone picture below.



Second, there is not ONE loop doing this activity, but millions of them, or at least very many, horizontally at each level of the hierarchy of life. Third, there is a whole fractal tree shape of higher and lower level "ones" doing exactly the same activity in their world, at their level, at the same time, interacting vertically. All that gemisch looks only loosely coupled, but I think a deeper investigation will show that, like the body's immune system or circulatory system, the distal parts are really tightly connected after all, in at least a few important ways.

So, we have one huge, fractal tree shaped collection of DNA, all trying to figure out which way is up and how to survive until tomorrow and make it through today. Everyone is working on the same set of 7 questions, over and over.

where to intervene? John Kenneth Galbraith would call them "mental models", but for public health or psychology these days they are "stories" or "narratives" (or myths) that we tell ourselves, tell each other, and make self-sustaining by passing them back and forth so they don't die out. The ones that link up to make an S-Loop will persist and end up dominating.

So, the intevention points are the boxes in yellow then. These are non-tangible "stories" and changing them will change all the very real, very physical parts of the S-Loop located at the right side of the diagram. The IOM had it perfectly -- use "feedback" to inform and reshape the group, and it will become self-working and self-managing and self-righting without any more "guidance" from management. My addition is, use S-Loop feedback, not just "feedback", and your efforts will be 1000 times more self-persisting and have way less "tissue rejection".

Besides, there's a resonant notch there, so it tends to "click into place" or "snap to grid" if you get close to it. It has a familiar heft and ring. We know this place, because it is us.


As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wade