You can say that again!

Here's an index to some of my favorite , easy to read, and more uplifting posts , repeated from Feb 28,2007 - originally posted as "Happy Ayyam-i-Ha!" Happy new term beginning, all you students! I'm only taking one continuing-ed course this coming term - Foundations of Systems Dynamics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Department of Social Science and Policy Studies. You'll hear all about it.


What is Ayyam-i-Ha?

"Baha'is celebrate the festival of Ayyam-i-Ha each year from sunset on Feb. 25 to sunset of March 1 as a preparation for the Fast, which begins March 2 and ends March 20. During Ayyam-i-Ha, members of the Faith perform acts of charity, give gifts to friends and family, and attend social gatherings."
(from http://www.bahai.us/node/74 )

My gifts to my readers:

Here's a shortcut to the most uplifting, positive posts from this weblog to start your new year right! Let me know if I missed one of your favorites!

The Importance of Social Relationships (short)

1) For a human to sustain peak performance, it is not enough to engage the brain; we have to engage the heart.

Positive Deviance - (the new business model)

What I find refreshing and inspirational is that actual companies and business schools are even starting to think about humans in positive way

Virtue drives the bottom line (many references)

Religion, business, and science are often depicted as in conflict, so it catches the attention when all three of them agree on something. That something needs to be investigated.

Pathways to Peace ( Link to a beautiful multimedia show on virtues)

a beautiful musical slide show of virtues, quotes and Nature to inspire hope and action. Produced for the Pathways to Peace Project

Houston, we have a problem! (On the need for teamwork and consultation)

An "Interdisciplinary" team is a very different animal. It assumes that the problem is irreducibly large, and cannot be broken down into a set of somethings that one person can manage.

Importance of Social Relationships (with references)

A story is told of two stone-masons working on a huge church in Europe, one with great work and one with sloppy work that needed to be torn down and redone. When asked what they were doing, the poor one said: "I'm building a wall." The other said: "I'm building a cathedral." The spiritual issue matters so much it hurts, in ways science doesn't begin to grasp at the moment.

You can say that again! (On the importance of saying positive things twice)

The end of our exploring (T. S. Eliot)

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.

Baha'i US Center

There can be no doubt whatever that the peoples of the world, of whatever race or religion, derive their inspiration from one heavenly Source, and are the subjects of one God.

~ Baha'u'llah ~

Baha'i World Center

Counting dead Iraqis - What makes facts credibile?

The University of Michigan's Science, Technology, and Public Policy program had a piece quoting Johns Hopkins' research and the White House's response.

"The Politics of Counting Dead Iraqis"
Excerpts:

The Politics of Counting Dead Iraqis

On October 10, 2006, at the height of the American midterm campaign season, the distinguished medical journal Lancet published an article on the internet that suggested a statistical estimate of the number of Iraqis who died as a result of the American invasion of their country in 2003. The estimate – 655,000 dead – was stunning because even the lower bound of its confidence interval was an order of magnitude greater than the highest estimates put forward to date. Perhaps not surprisingly given the prominence of the Iraq war as a campaign issue, the article proved an immediate sensation, maintaining a top spot in the headlines for several news cycles.

All of a sudden, everyone from local newspaper editors to the president was weighing in on the number of Iraqi dead. In a press conference held early on the morning of the 11th, a reporter asked U.S. president George W. Bush if he felt the study’s estimate of 650,000 casualties was credible. Bush’s response perfectly encapsulates the major substantive bones of contention that would emerge in subsequent media debates.

First, the estimate of 650,000 was simply too high to be believed, and the president reiterated his support for an estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that he had been citing in press conferences for over a year. Second, he stated that the study’s purportedly scientific methodology had been “pretty well discredited,” thus making it perfectly reasonable to disbelieve the estimate. And third, he hinted that the exact number of Iraqis killed is not particularly meaningful in evaluating whether the war was, on balance, a good thing.

The article goes on to analyze what's going on in these different accounts. One thing it fails to mention is that many, I think a majority, of the deaths reported were not only civilians, but women and children, who died as a result of the disappearance of Iraq's health care infrastructure. Prior to the war, Iraq had one of the best health care systems in the mid-east.

I suspect another thing that is going on here is simply short memory. The US has had such a strong public health infrastructure - clean water, sanitation, refrigeration, food that is generally safe to eat - for so long that we have, as a culture forgotten entirely what it was like before public health accomplished those things. Adding to the difficulty in remembering was the concept of the medical establishment that infers, or actually states, that the majority of improvement in expected years of life in the USA is due to either drugs or medical care. About the closest public health can come in the press is a second spot, as in this quote, emphasis added to the part generally forgotten:

The period between 1930 and 1940 saw a sharply rising curve in longevity rates thanks to the widespread usage of antibiotics and the much improved standards in cleanliness, hygiene, and sanitation.

The reality is that the majority of such improvement was due to public health and hygiene, and occurred before the development of wide-spread antibiotics and the Hill-Burton act.

However, since Americans take such infrastructure for granted, it creates a blind spot for them in realizing what the impact would be of destruction of that infrastructure, or even such military moves as blocking the importation or creation of chlorine or other water-supply disinfectants.

Even washing hands seems to be a lost art, perhaps under the illusion that we can all simply take a pill in the morning if we "get sick". It seems so ... mundane, so much like "your grandfather's medicine." This doesn't even seem to be taught in school any more. It's not that unusual to see a patient's infant drop their pacifier on the hospital floor and the parent pick it up and stick it back in their child's mouth without a second thought.

As other countries develop public health infrastructures, we see their life expectancies passing the US. Now more than 20% of the world's countries have longer life expectancies than the US (reference) and actually, in a much quoted and researched study, it was recently shown that the poorest quartile of white males in England have better health than the wealthiest quartile of white males in the US. This is another one of those facts that flies in the face of the social concept that the US has "the best health system in the world" and therefore this discrepant fact must be wrong.

Research in high-reliability organizations (nuclear power plants, the US Army, commercial aircraft cockpits) has shown that once a concept or "mental model" takes root in a person's mind, it can become self-fulfilling and even self-protective, repelling and squashing and quenching dissent and contrary data.

If a larger group of people is engaged, bad models can be revealed and rooted out, provided the group is fairly diverse and doesn't have a vested interest in the model. If a larger group is engaged that is homogeneous and does have a vested stake in a model, it becomes difficult or impossible to displace the model with contrary evidence, often even overwhelming contrary evidence. A million times, our perception says "No, that fact doesn't agree with my model, so it must be an error, I'll simply discard it before even showing it to the conscious person here."

In the extreme cases, the mental model becomes institutionalized. The weather satellites failed to detect the hole in the ozone layer for years because they had been programmed that very low readings must be errors, and should not even be recorded or reported.

The same error occurred in radio astronomy, where pulsars, the radio-frequency strobe lights in the sky, the brightest things in the sky after the sun and the galactic center in that frequency, were missed for years because "everyone knew" nothing was there, so filters were put into the equipment to discard all short-burst signals as "obvious noise."

According to one of my B-school professors who was involved in the creation decades ago of the Pentagon's original high-tech "War Rooms", the same filtering phenomenon occurs there, where the chain of command filters out "discrepant data" on the way up to the top, so that, by the time the Generals see the situation, all discrepant evidence has been "helpfully" removed.

I think the same thing may occur in many private corporations as well. The ability to "see" what is going on outside from inside the windowless Boardroom can be invisibly limited in these subtle ways. On a larger scale, one could imagine an entire country's news organizations deciding incorrectly what constituted "news" and helpfully eliminating "noise", so that the viewing public was making good decisions - given what they had to work with -- but what they had to work with had some serious gaps.

No "conspiracy" is required, only the work of "group-think" that hasn't been adequately detected and balanced out.

To quote the Banner of the New York Times, all too easily, the subtle, pre-perceptual "system effects" of our model-driven sensory networks trying to sustain a concept in a noisy environment result in making a surprisingly small fraction of the world available to us through the filter: "All the news that's fit to Print." What we end up with is "All the news that fits our mental model we print, the rest we discard before you see it. "

This seems to be a surprisingly common phenomenon, which means, to me, that we really underestimate the power of a concept to act like a living thing in defending its own turf and existence by twisting our ability to see what is actually going on.

As in MIT's "Beer Game", discussed in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, it is just hard for us humans to recognize situations where there is not a person to blame, or a conspiracy to blame, for a surprisingly consistent result that is brought about by "systems effects." We keep seeing it, and it doesn't fit, so we reject it.

Which, of course, is expected, since the inability to perceive system effects is itself a system effect. We not only have a blind spot, we have a blind spot in what it takes for us to admit that we may have a blind spot. And that is a recipe for making a perfect niche habitat for bad things to inhabit without risk of being disturbed.

A year later - high performing organizations

This is a copy of letter I wrote in the Systems Dynamics Society list-server yesterday.
========
I'll suggest that two requirements of a thriving organism or organization are that it be in touch with itself, and it be in touch with reality. These are systems effects and feedback loops.

In system terms, there should be a closed feedback loop connecting people who are aware of reality (usually on the bottom) to those making decisions (usually on the top), where those on the top take into consideration the news that the working model is wrong from those on the bottom.

And, there should be a feedback loop connecting actual outcomes of customers to product or service creation activities within the organization. In Toyota / Lean terms - there should be customer pull. Steering by process measures, or internal outcomes (also known as short-term "in-come") is not adequate to remain responsive and adaptive.

I suppose a third requirement is not falling into pitfalls, particularly ones with negative feedback, such as sacrificing tomorrow for today's "progress", making tomorrow harder, leading to even more sacrificing the next day to "progress', etc. in a death spiral.

We could go on about asking "why" five more times for each of those, but I think the list is long enough as it is, and sufficient to model the majority of corporate disasters and failures to thrive.

Secrets of High Reliability Organizations

[ originally published 8/29/06 in my "Systems Thinking in Public Health" weblog. ]

Wow.

I just found an astonishingly delightful, insightful, and immediately helpful paper on the roots of the conflicts between control-cultures and learning-cultures in the high-risk workplace: "Organizational Learning From Experience in High-Hazard Industries: Problem Investigation as Off-Line Reflective Practice", on the MIS Sloan School of Management Working paper site (Working paper #4359-02, March 2002). It is by John S. Carroll, Jenny W. Rudolph, and Sachi Hatakenaka.

It's on the Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=305718

Here's a few snippets:

This paper confronts two central issues for organizational learning: (1) how is local learning (by individuals or small groups) integrated into collective learning by organizations? and (2) what are the differences between learning practices that focus on control, elimination of surprises, and single-loop incremental "fixing" of problems with those that focus on deep or radical learning, double-loop challenging of assumptions, and discovery of new opportunities?

and

These four stages contrast whether learning is primarily single-loop or double-loop, i.e., whether the organization can surface and challenge the assumptions and mental models underlying behavior, and whether learning is relatively improvised or structured. We conclude with a discussion of the stages, levels of learning (team, organizational, and individual), and the role of action, thinking, and emotion in organizational learning.

and

We focus this paper on the differences between a controlling orientation and a rethinking orientation (cf. "control vs. learning," Sikin et al., 1994; "fixing vs. learning," Carroll, 1995, 1998).... We argue that it is very challenging for organizations to develop a full range of learning capabilities because assumptions underlying the two approaches can be in conflict and the controlling approach is strongly supported by cognitive biases, industry norms, professional subcultures, and regulatory authority.

and

The controlling orientation attempts of minimize variation and avoid surprises (March 1991; Sitkin et al., 1994). ... compliance ... deviations ... record keeping ... more controls ... a prevention focus that is associated with anxiety, loss aversion, avoidance of errors of commission and a strong moral obligation to comply with rules (Higgins, 1998). Within the controlling orientation, problems stimulate blame that undermines information flow and learning (Morris & Moore, 2000; O'Reilly, 1978). [ emphasis added] Causes are found that are proximal to the problem (White, 1988), with available solutions that can be easily enacted, and are acceptable to powerful stakeholders (Carroll, 1995; Tetlock 1983). Observers commonly make the fundamental attribution error of finding fault with salient individuals in a complex situation. (Nisbett & Ross, 1980) such as the operators or mechanics who had their hands on the equipment when the problem arose ...

Both the engineering profession and the US management profession are trained to plan, analyze complex situations into understandable pieces, avoid uncertainty, and view people as a disruptive influence on technology or strategy.

and

As Weick, et al. (1999) state, "to move toward high reliability is to enlarge what people monitor, expect, and fear." The rethinking orientation is based on attitudes and cultural values of involvement, sharing, and mutual respect. ... Assumptions about authority, expertise and control give way to recognition of uncertainty and the need for collaborative learning. There is a climate of psychological safety that encourages organization members to ask question, explore, listen, and learn. ... increase monitoring and mindfulness ... based not onlyl on a desire to improve and mutual respect among diverse groups ... gain insights, challenge assumptions, and create comprehensive models. [many cites omitted for clarity ]

and finally

Participants transcend component-level undertanding ... to develop more comprehensive and systemic mental models ....

and

Despite a desire to improve, investigators and managers seldom look for fundamental or deep, systemic causes in part because they lack ready-made actions to address such issues and ways of evaluating their success ...

=======

I was informed after I wrote this that John Carroll also addresses these same issues, but specifically in the health care area. See:

Redirecting Traditional Professional Values to Support Safety:
Changing Organizational Culture in Health Care

John S. Carroll & Maria Alejandra Quijada, MIT Sloan School of Management

Qual Saf Health Care 2004;13:ii16-ii21
accessed 8/29/06

At March 14, 2007 5:20 AM, Anonymous said...

I agree. A great paper. Did you check out the High Reliability Organizations conference 2007? It takes place in Deauville in France, and it has two interesting panels on healthcare. The link is http://www.hro2007.org/Agenda2.html

Model-induced blindness, FEMA, and Systemantics

[ Published in my other weblog 8/31/06. Still relevant today ]

It's a year since Katrina made it obvious that people watching CNN knew more about what was going on top government officials.

We have to ask how that is even possible. It defies our intuition, although not our experience, which is interesting.

While the "blame-game" remains in high-gear, Systems Thinking leads us to discount the obvious "bad people" and look for deeper root-causes in the social structure. FEMA Director Brown has been replaced, but the systems problems are harder to see and may still be there.

How would we know?

Some systems features come with the territory, such as problems getting coherent action across 6 or more layers of a hierarchical structure. Each layer has its own intrinsic variables and a world view that is quite distinct from that of the layers above or below. The result is that communication across levels that appears easy is actually quite hard, although the miscommunications may be hard to detect locally. The same words play into different mental models of the world, and convey different meanings.

This is not a problem that is fixed by simply getting everyone radios with compatible frequencies. A discussion in depth of this problem can be found on the weblog Fifteen Charlie.

Or, on the health care front, this type of problem is not resolved by everyone agreeing to use messages all formatted to the same governmental standard, such as HL7, so they are "interoperable." The telephone was already "compatible" in that manner, but it didn't help New Orleans. To change the outcomes, we need to realize that there are no "technical problems", only socio-technical problems, and the "socio-" part cannot be a last-minute add-on optional feature.

So, from President Bush's point of view, policies were followed, money was launched, their work is done. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job..." Six to ten levels away, where the money or benefits or even rescue from rooftops was not underway, these actions looked feeble and inept, disconnected from reality. And today, a year later, much of New Orleans still remains as it was a year ago, although many of the fund have now been fully expended.

John Gall, a University of Michigan emeritus physician, in his marvelous book Systemantics (1986) , captures the essence, as he calls it of "How systems really work and how they fail." An introduction to this book can be found here on wikipedia, and some of the key rules revealed, such as "A system is no better than its sensory organs" and "To those within a system, outside reality tends to pale and disappear." He goes on to describe the inversion of "input" and "output" and gives this example:

"A Giant program to Conquer Cancer is begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered, but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled "you and the War against Cancer" have been distributed. Those publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input. "

His book is a real gem, an easy read, and worth re-reading at least once a month.

Meanwhile, New Orleans remains a visible and tragic reminder of what an open-loop, top-down control model produces in practice. Without sensory feedback making the return journey from the eye to the brain, the hand is as likely to end up in the flame as on the handle of the frying pan. I'd says this "cybernetics 101" property of a control loop is what Steven Covey in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People calls a principle, a law of nature, that you can like or dislike, but you can't get around.

Unfortunately for all of us, it is precisely when high-stress disasters occur that these upwards communication channels close up entirely, as New Orleans discovered. Almost every factor there is conspires to close the lines:

* Top brass, fearing blame, close ranks

* Top brass, under stress, fall back on previously successful behaviors of ignoring small stuff and focusing on the top one or two priority issues. In a huge, multilevel organization, this means every problem from level 3 down is totally ignored.

* The most important information, that which challenges preconceived notions and the assumptions of the plan in hand, is what is ignored the most at the top. They are trying to focus on working the plan, not questioning the plan. Efforts to challenge facts are viewed as enemy action, not as helpful feedback from sensory organs. In worst cases, the messengers are killed to resolve the conflict between inputs and mental model.

I'm working on a white-paper on the issue of how upwards channels shut down during disasters and how that could influence disaster preparedness competencies. Contact me if you're interested in reviewing it.

And, voila. A president who is unaware of what every CNN viewer knows. Auto companies that can't understand how anyone could have foreseen rising gasoline prices, or competition from China.

These are very strong systems forces, that can totally overwhelm huge numbers of very bright and well intentioned people. These are the types of problems we need to be able to recognize and solve, or they will simply keep on occuring.

How frequent are such problems? Well, if problems occur randomly at all levels, and if humans typically only ever see and fix the non-systems problems, then there will be an ever growing sludge of unattended system problems. The percentage of all problems that are systems problems will keep on growing. A good guess, perhaps somewhat waggish, is that, if such problems have never been addressed, then they almost certainly dominate current behavior of the organization in question. The longer the organization has been functioning, and the larger it is, the larger the percentage of problems will be unrealized and unresolved systems problems. The US government is probably almost a limit point, and probably over 99% of it is dominated by such problems, as the others have all been fixed.

The fact that we don't recognize these as problems is what Systems Thinking attempts to address. Our "systems problem" detectors are broken is what it is.

Take the analogy to the detection of pulsars, intensely bright flashing objects in the radio frequency spectrum, virtual strobe lights in the night sky to a radio telescope, outshined only by the sun and the galactic center. These were missed entirely for years, because "everyone knew" that there were no important signals at high-frequencies, that this was just noise, and the noise was filtered out before doing any analysis of the sensory input.

It took a female graduate student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, one not caught up in the shared myth, to challenge that assumption, remove the filter, and just look at what was there with open eyes.

Systems problems are similar. They are everywhere around us, but we use statistics all based on Sir R. A. Fisher's work and the General Linear Model, or even multilevel models that are still linear, (as Dr. Ana Diez-Roux at the University of Michigan points out in the Annual Reviews of Public Health, 2000, Volume 21, pages 171-192.), and that assume, at their core, that there is no feedback. The key assumption, generally unspoken, and often unrealized, is that there is a causal end of "independent variables", some set of paths, and a terminal end of "dependent variables." Feedback or reciprocal causality is often noted in passing, but, lacking a recognized way to cope with it, most public health papers then try to proceed without it. Or, since the feedback is "small", it is considered insignificant - a mistake similar to looking at a beaker of air and denying the possibility of the existence of "hurricanes", which rely critically on such tiny effects, almost infinitely compounded, to exist and grow.

So, without meteorological feedback effects, Katrina would never have existed in the first place.
It invalidates the model if the output feeds back into the input, with feedback, which, of course, almost every social system we care about does: love, war, communication, relationships, terrorism ("He hit me back first!"), the economy, the stock market, the housing market, etc.

So, we don't see such "distal causality", not because it's not there, but because we've short-circuited it out of the equations before we even turn on the computer.

I'd suggest it's time for someone to remove that filter, analyze how to do statistics on feedback-dominated regulatory control loops, and let us see what's really out there. Odds are, as with the night sky, we will be very surprised by the answer.

========

In his new book "The Eighth Habit - From Effectiveness to Greatness", Steven Covey separates out and focuses on problems, including organizational blindness, that result from attempting to use the old paradigm, the industrial machine model, instead of the new paradigm - the Knowledge Worker model.

In the old model, workers are treated like machines - replaceable, better without an independent mind or spirit, needing firm management or a good whip hand to keep them from goofing off. In particular, only those in positions of authority should take initiative and decide what should be done. The model creates a self-fulfilling world.

The alternative he presents is the empowered knowledge worker, who has initiative, a "voice", heart, spirit, and an active role including taking personal responsibility for seeing that the job gets done, and done well. This expectation also creates a self-fulfilling world that latches, but in a far more productive state, and one that requires far less day to day management of "bad employees".

Review: Selling System Dynamics to (other) social Scientists

[I published this originally 8/13/06 on my prior weblog: "Systems Thinking in Public Health" Wade]

Review and summary of "Selling system dynamics to (other) social scientists", by Nelson P. Repenning, System Dynamics Review Vol 19 No. 4 (Winter 2003) 303-327,

Published on-line by Wiley InterScience. Accessed 8/13/05 (subscription may be required)

Author: "Nelson P Repenning is the J. Spencer Standish Associate Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His work focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to the successful implementation, execution, an design of business processes."

Quotes:

"Can one do research that both meets the standards of good system dynamics practice and is acceptable to other social scientists? ... practitioners resonated with this line of work almost immediately. Academics, however, were not similarly receptive."

I [initially] interpreted these reactions as evidence of irreconcilable differences - similar to those outlined by Meadows (1980) - between systems dynamics and other social science disciplines."

"Changing the labels to match the existing literature was a critical step in gaining acceptance for my model."

"The referees were, quite correctly, critical of a paper that proposed to link these concepts but failed to cite any of the previous attempts to define and understand them."

"I now believe my difficulties were rooted in my failure to build the reader's intuition. ... A claim that model is trivial is a s much a statement about the reader's understanding as it is about the underlying model.... People often do not recognize gaps in their intuition... Any discomfort that readers do experinece from not fully understanding a model is likely to manifest itself in indirect sways.
Suggesting that a model is "too complicated' that the "Insights are trivial", an that more analysis is needed are all likely responses.

"The answer is, I now believe, straightforward, if sobering: standard modes of presenting SD models, while potentially effective for SD audience, are ineffective when presenting to non-SD audiences, even those weth technical backgrounds. ...the popularity of modeling and estimation methods that build on the assumptions of equilibrium and mono-causality suggest that the social scenties will find it more, not less, difficult to develop intuition from a system model.

...I now believe that many of the difficulties I experienced in selling my work were, to a large degree, self inflicted....

I have found it easier to s ell my work to those scholars whose primary interest lies in understanding real world phenomenon.

...my sense is ... that many of the errors will onnot change without significant intervention.

"The consequence of using mainstream economics as a referent (in the 60's and 70's) is that movers of the field found little common ground with the rest of social science world (s they defined it). The early focus on economic appears to have fueled a vicious cycle of increasing isolation from the rest of social science that persists to this day."


"As a dedicated student of system dynamics, to me the conclusion that we are at least party responsible for the situation we now face seems inescapable.... The result is a community that, today, is largely isolated from mainstream social science. . The use of new modeling methods is on the rise in other parts of social science but this growth has not included system dynamics. For example in organization theory, the field with which I am most familiar, papers in so-called "complex adaptive systems " models and agent-based representations far out-nmber system dynamics models, although a strong case can be made that the latter is more appropriate to the task at hand.

The system dynamicist must sell her client on the fundamental premise of her enterprise; the forecaster faces no such barrier.


Gaining such sanction, however requires that scholars who use systems dynamics get and keep jobs at management and other professional schools. Developing research using SD that is of interest to the larger social science community is ... central to achieving the mission ...

States and Cities Lag in Bird Flu Readiness - New York Times

[ Originally published 2/6/06 -- How are we doing on this one?
To my knowledge, hospital surge capacity is less than it was 18 months ago. ]

States and Cities Lag in Bird Flu Readiness
February 6, 2006
New York Times

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

High-points:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 — The nation's 5,000 state and local health departments are rushing to plan for an epidemic of avian flu, but they say they are hobbled by a lack of money and guidance from the federal government.

"It's a depressing situation," said Jeffrey Levi, a flu expert at the Trust for America's Health, a nonpartisan health policy group. "We are way, way behind."

"..That $350 million sounds like a lot, but divided among 5,000 health departments, it's only $70,000 each," ...

"If we prepare now," Dr. Gerberding said, "we may be able to decrease the death rate and keep society functioning."

Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences, was more pessimistic. "We're completely unprepared," Dr. Fineberg said...

There are few local stockpiles of even the simplest precautionary items, like masks and hand sanitizers, and none of expensive equipment, like $30,000 ventilators.

And many states are chronically short of public health money.

But Dr. Isaac B. Weisfuse, the deputy city health commissioner in charge of flu planning, said he expected the first wave of any pandemic to swamp city hospitals; 67 percent of all intensive care beds, he said, would be filled with flu victims.

Officials interviewed from a dozen states named questions on which they want federal guidance so they do not set different policies, including these:

¶When should we urge citizens to wear masks?

¶When should we close schools?

¶If a vaccine arrives, who gets it first?

¶When should patients be taken off ventilators?

Dr. Levi, of Trust for America's Health, gave an example of a dilemma that could arise at George Washington University, where he teaches: If a dorm had one infected student, should everyone else be sent home for their own safety, or padlocked in to keep them from spreading the virus to their hometowns?

"Right now, that's up to individual schools to figure out," he said. "That's no policy."

Thomas W. Skinner, a spokesman for Dr. Gerberding, the C.D.C. director, said, "These are tough questions that will take time to answer, and we'll work with the states to help them come up with answers."

The agency also realizes that health districts need more money for preparedness, Mr. Skinner said.

But the biggest danger, public health officials said, is the one over which they have the least control: hospitals in their regions, most of which are privately owned, cannot handle big surges of patients.

Dr. Roger P. Baxter, head of flu preparedness for Kaiser Permanente, said his Northern California hospital network was "probably better off than 90 percent of the health systems out there, and we have no surge capacity."

"We're a business, and we operate on a thin margin," Dr. Baxter said. "We don't have extra ventilators."

"Even in normal flu seasons," he added, "we tend to divert patients to other hospitals. There's no way we can realistically plan for this."

Are your Jeans Sagging? Go Directly to Jail!

According to today's New York Times,
Are Your Jeans Sagging? Go Directly to Jail

Starting in Louisiana, an intensifying push by lawmakers has determined pants worn low enough to expose underwear poses a threat to the public, and they have enacted indecency ordinances to stop it.

Since June 11, sagging pants have been against the law in Delcambre, La., a town of 2,231 that is 80 miles southwest of Baton Rouge. The style carries a fine of as much as $500 or up to a six-month sentence....

“It’s a fad like hot pants; however, I think it crosses the line when a person shows their backside,” Ms. Lartigue said. “You can’t legislate how people dress, but you can legislate when people begin to become indecent by exposing their body parts.”

Here's a quiz on today's reading:

Question 1:
If a young, rich, white female (oh, say, Britney Spears) gets out of a car and shows the world her private parts, then
a) she'll get fame
b) she'll get wealth
c) all of the above

Question 2:
If a young, poor, black male (not necessarily from Africa) gets out of a car and his pants are sagging showing (gasp) underwear, then
a) he'll get a$500 fine
b) he'll be thrown in jail
c) All of the above.

Question 3:
Why?

Lower the nose, boys!

The US economy is showing signs of instability.

This is not surprising, given what a bad mental model we have of how things work, and given the wretched way the MBA genius crowd is trying to increase wealth production -- or at least their own wealth.

To figure out what to do about that, it would help to know what the "that" is we're looking at. Let me simply ignore economics ("the dismal science") and pick a new model.

Consider a small airplane. I happen to be a pilot, so I'm familiar with airplanes, and they are great visual examples of the conceptual problems student pilots face -- which I think may be the same conceptual problems "we" have with the economy.

First, as I believe Dave Barry pointed out, there are in fact no "red and blue arrows" holding the plane up. Why planes fly at all is indeed somewhat mysterious, even to a physics major like yours truly. The books all show diagrams where the air flows faster over the top of the wing than the bottom, which causes suction to pull the wing upwards --- it says. The only problem is illustrated by the Citabria acrobatic airplane - a nimble little plane that has a completely symmetric wing. The air flows above and below are identical. And, the plane flies as well upside-down as right-side-up. So much for theory.

What is very solid, however, is costs. You can't get around the cost of energy. If you want to go uphill, it's going to cost you energy, period. That's pretty solid. We can rely on that rule.

So, if you want a plane to climb, you have to supply energy. Period. There are no exceptions, at the scale of people.

More altitude will cost you more energy. Period. No exceptions.

So, if you are flying along happily at cruise speed, and you decide now you'd like to climb, you have two immediate choices that appear to work. Which one is best?

• a) Pull back on the control wheel, or
• b) Hit the gas and spend energy.

Clever test takers already will know that the correct answer is (b) -- hit the gas and spend more energy. And, in fact that's correct. The control to change in order to gain altitude in an airplane is the power setting. You hit the gas pedal, or in a plane, the throttle, in order to climb.

Whoa, this doesn't seem right to new pilots. Why not just pull back on the "stick" or the plane's steering wheel, pull the nose of the plane up, and climb that way?

The answer is that, in physics, there is no free lunch. Yes, if you pull the stick back, and pull the nose up, the plane will climb -- for a while. Where's the energy coming from to do that? It's coming out of your savings account - your speed. Yes, you can convert the kinetic energy of speed into the potential energy of height -- for a short time. The more you climb, the more it costs you, and the more your speed falls.

That, however, cannot go on forever, or even very long. As your speed falls, so does your "lift", that is, the mysterious thing that holds the plane in the sky in the first place.

If you persist in this foolish, newbie way of trying to climb for free, and think you have found a loophole in the laws of physics, you will be in for a rude awakening. At some point, as the speed falls, your plane will start to experience squishy controls, and seem to become unresponsive, then it will start shaking and a very loud buzzer alarm will go off telling you what is about to happen. And, if you persist past those warning signs, your "lift" will abruptly and catastrophically fail. The air flow over the wing will transition from smooth to turbulent and, you will transition from being a plane to being a rock with a pasenger. This is known in aviation as "stalling" the aircraft. (It has nothing to do with the gasoline-powered engine, but everything to do with the energy account "engine").

In other words, the plane will, basically, simply fall out of the sky. If you are very fast, you can shove the nose DOWN, point it at the ground, and reverse the process, pulling energy out of the altitude checking account and putting it back into your speed savings account -- and then, when the air flow is good again, you can pull the nose up back to level flight and recover and let your adrenaline settle down. Of course, you will have lost several thousand feet of altitude, or,
if you started too low, you are now dead. This is known as "stall recovery."

So, what are the lessons here? If you're going fast, you can cash in some of that speed and use it to pay for some altitude, but this is a very short-term solution. It's great for small corrections, or avoiding obstacles like trees. It's a loan, not a free ride.

The only way to climb and not fall out of the sky is to increase power, and pay the bills. Planes do not understand "deficit financing." You can't climb now and pay later, maybe.

Anyway, with that model in mind, look at the economy and the recent behavior of the stock market. One senses that the whiz-kid geniuses have discovered that, if you pull back the stick, you can get the market to climb! Wow! And they did that in a huge way, sucking the real energy out of the economy in an ecstatic ride upwards - possibly wondering on the way why no one else had ever thought of this clever solution before.

In point of fact, they had "discovered" that, with a credit card, they could buy all sorts of things, apparently unlimited, and not have to pay for them! Suddenly the country goes a few trillion dollars in debt, while the stock market soars, and they are just so happy that they have "created wealth."

Ahem.

Then comes the bill. Not only has all the loose capital been taken out of the market, but it's been sucked out of all the companies that need cash to operate, and sucked out of all the families that used to own houses that they now live in but, in fact, have already spent and are just waiting for the knock on the door telling them "You are now homeless. Get out."

Oopsie.

The question now, in that model, is whether the whiz kids will, as newbies always do, "pull the nose up even more", or push the nose down rapidly and pick up some speed again, at a major cost in altitude. The "climbing" it turns out wasn't really earned, it was just borrowed, from a lending agency that doesn't take "No" for an answer when the bill is due.

So, in looking at the stock market, the question is whether this model is applicable. Since 1995, have we created a huge amount of new wealth -- and PAID FOR IT by spending more energy, or have we created the appearance of wealth, the illusion of wealth, by cashing in the actual economy's health and momentum and converting it to "height" of the Dow Jones over the ground.

The one process - climbing by paying for it, can run until you "run out of gas".
The other process, climbing by cashing in health and momentum, runs out of steam and then is no more. All gone.

The recent efforts by airlines to push planes to 100% capacity, or 105% capacity, seems eerily like new student pilots desperately pulling back on the stick even more, as they notice that their speed is dropping, and even though the engine is running and the nose is pointed up, in fact the altitude is dropping.

I'm not sure about industrial health. My sense from the number of layoffs and watching the Big-3, now Big-2 auto companies fall to Toyota, is that things are not well there. I am sure about individual-level health of the US population, and that is plummeting, even before their mortgage payment jumped 40% in one month. Obesity, stress, diabetes, fatigue are all soaring.

It does have some signs that the economic whiz kids are trying to kick up the market and create wealth, and "climb", by sucking all the energy and momentum and health out of our normal operating "flying speed." It does appear that the process has reached an unstable point where there are lurches downward, like yesterday's 280 point drop in the Dow Jones average.

This is not good.

The hard part is recognizing the problem, and giving up a lot of that altitude to get back flying speed. The alternative, in that model, is crashing and giving up all the altitude and the flight.

The question is, how much of the stock market and economy's rise since 1995 is due to actual value added and new plant, equipment, training and other hard "capital", and how much is fluff due to exactly the opposite -- selling off everything of value, firing the older experienced workers, and pretending that cash flow was "income."

The GDP, Gross Domestic Product computation doesn't make the distinction between real income and pretend income. The fact that the GDP is growing tells us nothing about how sustainable that growth is, and whether a deal with the devil was made to obtain it.

Regardless, laws of physics win. If it's earned wealth, we can keep it. If it's borrowed wealth, like the nice 4000 square foot house in a nice suburb, we are going to have to let go of it, or it will let go of us.

If that model's right, that is. Like all models, the analogy gives us something to look for and think about, and doesn't "prove" anything. It's the looking and pondering that has the value.

Maybe we conclude "that model doesn't apply." Fine. Maybe we conclude "Hey, that model does apply." Either way we've learned something and have a better idea what we need to do next.

references:
Standard & Poor Price/Earning Ratio Historical Trend - 1943 to present.
http://www.lowrisk.com/sp500pe.htm


Shiller's data - just showing the P/E ratio history since 1880. (chart at the
start of this post).


Robert J. Schiller (author of "Irrational Exuberance")
http://www.econ.yale.edu/%7Eshiller/data/ie_data.htm

Bloomberg Data to 4/2006
(also at top of post)

2007 Data from bull and bear wise
S&Poor 500 chart (not P/E, just the index)
from Yahoo Finance.

It's all in the wrist

Most of us aren't Einstein. People aren't born fluent in reasoning.

There are holes, gaps, blind-spots in our reasoning and perception. Magicians, con-artists, and some advertisers make good use of those to fool us.

(picture credit: That picture is the work of researcher Gregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com, subscription required.)

This makes it hard for us to make good decisions, especially social decisions.

Here is a made up example that illustrates a common problem that doesn't even have a name-- at least I don't know what it's called.

Suppose I walk into 10 rooms and shoot a person in each room, killing them. That would clearly be homicide.
Suppose instead I lock each of them in their room, seal all the doors and windows and cracks, and they die of suffocation. It's still homicide, but getting fuzzier and harder to see.
Now suppose instead of those methods, I release 1000 mosquitoes into each room, and let's say that 900 is sufficient to kill someone by each drinking one drop of their blood. The numbers may be off but you get the idea. At the end of the day, the poeple are all dead, due to my actions, and it is still homicide, but with a bioweaopon, I guess you'd call it.

Now suppose instead that I and 9 buddies each release 100 mosquitoes into each of 10 rooms, so the total is still 1000 per room. The people in the rooms still end up dying, but now no one person has released enough harm to any one person that it was fatal.

In this case, is anyone "guilty" of anything? Under American law, I suspect they are guilty only if someone can prove conspiracy.

Now suppose 10 people who don't know each other and never talk each release 100 mosquitos into each room for different reasons. All ten people in the rooms die.

Suddenly, now, no "crime" remains on the table. The "criminal action" has "gone away", and yet, the victims are all still dead at the end of the day.

Finally, suppose that 1000 mosquitoes are only enough to kill one in 10 people, if that one is unusually sensitive. Most people, 9 out of 10, can easily handle 1000 mosquito bites, say.

So, the 10 perpetrators each release 1000 mosquitos , 100 per room, and only 1 person, predictably, always dies, but we don't know in advance which one of the ten it will be. And let's say that happens every day for a year, so at the end of the year 365 people are dead.

Is anyone guilty of anything?

Here's the problem. On a collective scale, if you stand way back, there is a clear causal relationship between the mosquito release and the deaths. If you get up close, the relationship seems to go away - at least its now become so fuzzy that no jury would convict any individual mosquito-breeder for releasing a sub-lethal dose of 100 mosquitoes that demonstrably, in zero cases, by itself, would ever be fatal.

This becomes like the picture of, uh, Einstein (if you stand close) and Marilyn Monroe (if you stand far away) that I posted at the top and repost here:


If you back up 20 feed (7 meters) and look at that picture, it's the actress Marilyn Monroe.
If you sit at your computer, it's a picture of Alfred Einstein, the scientist.

Anyway, the problem described is an analogy to many of the problems Public Health has to deal with, and problems that large cities or nations have to deal with on a regular basis.

There is a hole, a gap, a blind-spot in our reasoning and perception, for this kind of distributed action that "goes away" when seen close up, but is clearly there when seen from "far away."

Or, in the case of the poor people who are stuck in urban ghettos, this kind of problem is very real when they are the ones dying, and the frustration is very real when they can't figure out how to make their case that the killing should stop.

Worse, it's not just the jury that won't convict anyone - it's that the perpetrators may individually each feel sincerely that they are not doing any significant harm and they can't figure out what the fuss is about. Sadly, the dim perception of a possible problem to a possible hypothetical victim has far less weight than the very clear perception of very clear profit from some enterprise such as selling cigarettes, or liquor, or guns, or predatory check-cashing, or predatory home-mortgages, etc.

In the suburbs, these don't add up to a lethal concentration, and the reported problems from the slums are interpreted as "something wrong with the people who chose to live there."

From the slums, the question is "Why do they keep doing this to us?"

Outrage, violence, or riots are ineffective at making the case. They generate a lot of attention, but then no one (from outside) can see what everyone (inside) is so excitedly pointing at.

On an international scale, I have to wonder how much of the violent resistance to the US and perception of the US as "the great Satan" is similar -- a protest over policies and actions that arrive diffusely but are experienced in concentrated form by the victims.

We need, as a planet, as humanity, better tools and better words for this sort of thing, so we can discuss it intelligently. This is one kind of "system effect" with profound implications and "unintended consequences" of the worst kind.

It is not unknowable. The problem is very clear, mathematically. It is easy to simulate it and show the effect, and, like the Einstein/Monroe picture, show how different it looks from each viewing location (inside and outside, in that case.)

After studying this, I think this effect is remarkably widespread, because it evades our perception. It causes management and labor to battle. It causes commerce and the poor to be in conflict. It causes the US and poor nations to be in conflict.

It seems like we should make a priority funding project to get researchers in such things to figure out how to make this visible, tangible, perceivable to everyone so we can resolve the abuse/oppression/exploitation cases that are accidental and inadvertent and unintentional.

Intentional abuse is a different story, but Systems Thinking shows that many problems are actually unintentional and completely unrealized and effectively impossible to view in the direct sense we normally see things. So, let's lower the conflict temperature by resolving the unintentional ones first, that we may all agree on if we all could simply see.

Thoughts on the financial markets

Some reflections on the state of the world financial markets, which, despite the apparent stabilization of the stock markets, seem to be in a state of back-room panic.

But first, some thoughts from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible:

"Where there is no guidance, the people fall,
but in abundance of counselors there is victory."
(proverbs 11:14)

"He who trusts in his riches will fall,
but the righteous will flourish like the green leaf."
(Proverbs 11:28)

"Adversity pursues sinners,
But the righteous will be rewarded with prosperity"
(proverbs 13:21)

"Righteousness guards the one whose way is blameless,
But wickedness subverts the sinner."
(Proverbs 13:6)

"There is a way which seems right to a man,
But its end is the way of death"
(Proverbs 14:12)

"The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life,
That one may avoid the snares of death"
(Proverbs 14:27)

"All the ways of a man are lean in his own sight,
But the Lord weighs the motives"
(proverbs 16:2)

"The mind of a man plans his way,
But the Lord directs his steps"
(Proverbs 16:9)

"Pride goes before destruction,
And a haughty spirit before stumbling."
(Proverbs 16:18)

"The horse is prepared for the day of battle,
But victory belongs to the lord"
(proverbs 21:31)

"Do not rob the poor because he is poor,
Or crush the afflicted at the gate;
For the Lord will plead their case,
And take the life of those who rob them."
(Proverbs 22:22)

"Then you will know that I am the Lord when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, My People.
And I will put my Spirit within you, and you will come to life, and I will place you on your land. "
(Ezekiel 37:13-14)


"And one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question testing Him.
Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?
And He said to him, 'You shall love the lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.'
This is the great and foremost commandment
And a second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets"
(Matthew, 35-40)

=================
Rephrasing - remaining connected to God and mankind is required for preservation of wealth and "life". Without those, "death" sneaks in and takes over. The hazard of wealth is when it causes pride and arrogance and belief in the power of self and turning away from caring for the needs of others. The wrong pathway appears "right in your eyes" unless you are spiritually tied into God and humanity, and the end of that wrong pathway is the loss of all wealth and "death".

Put another way - the basic state for matter in the universe is "dead", in which state the laws of physics and thermodynamics rule and ensure that there is only one way things can go, and that is downhill, the only exception being if there is some outside input. Love of God and humanity, and being "moved" to action by that motivating spirit, is exactly such outside input. Without it, even what you seem to have securely in hand will simply decay and collapse, and, in fact, be trashed by your own hand in foolish schemes and plans driven by pride and arrogance and foolishness and unwillingness to consult with others or listen to their good advice.

Without the psychological and cognitive framework of loving God and others, and some slight nudges from the spirit of God, "bad" pathways will look to you much more attractive than "good" pathways, and they will be indistinguishable to sight, logic, or even computer analysis by Nobel Prize winners and their Hedge Funds, and your fate is sealed by the laws of physics.

Even in hindsight, you will say "How could we have known?" and be technically correct, in that there was no way to compute that outcome, although, if you had stayed with loving humanity, your perception and judgment of exactly the "same facts" would have been different, and you could have avoided that pathway and calamity at the end of it.

It is almost as if hairpin turns without guardrails are put into the roadway on purpose, so that those with eyes to see know when it is time to turn, and those operating on blind models drive off the cliff. Very much like a security system put in place to prevent take-over by robots or computers or "Sky-Net" of Schwarzenegger's "Terminator" movies.

Those without any sense keep on betting their entire winnings to date, plus whatever they can borrow, on the same number on the roulette table, because they are "on a roll" and "nothing can go wrong with their get rich quick" scheme. And, in an ironic twist, the more wealth is acquired and squirreled away so that "others cant get to it", and the more one turns away from humanity to an obsession with "wealth accumulation", the less and less "sense" one has of the ample clues God gives that it's time to change directions, making the outcome ever more and more likely, and the amount staked on each wager higher and higher.

Turning away from the "common sense" that only comes with loving God and humanity thus brings about a series of events in a feedback loop that increase blindness, paranoia, and the "need" to make "more money" and take ever higher and higher risks.

The result is a classic "Markov chain" model known as the "Gambler's Ruin" -- "each spin of the wheel, bet an amount twice the size of everything you've lost so far, and sooner or later you're bound to win!" is the thought and the strategy. What the strategy lacks is a "stopping place", so that, having won, the gambler now, sensing "momentum", bets again and again, larger and larger stakes, until eventually the inevitable out come occurs - everything is lost and they are thrown out of the game.

What seems to drive this is a sort of addiction, a "greed is not enough" sense that they only acceptable stopping place is when everything in the universe is "owned" and taken out of productive use and stored in one's vault "safely." A million dollars is not enough. A billion dollars is not enough. A trillion dollars is not enough. World hegemony is not enough. Whatever comes next is not enough. Bet again and raise the stakes, bet again and raise the stakes, until BLAM - bankruptcy ends the series.

Or, in the financial markets lately, a corporation that employs 500,000 people and makes 7% profit on top of that is considered a "loser" and should be dumped and the CEO fired because they should be making 17%, or 27%, or 72% or 720% or 7,200%, or 7 billion percent - it goes without end until the end is brought on externally. The whole financial market falls into a self-hypnotic dance pursuing wealth that isn't really needed for reasons that, after the fall, are entirely unclear, even though they made so much sense at the time.

The hypnotic spell can be broken by love of others, interruption of the "run" to spread out some of that wealth to assist other people who need it - but the hypnosis goes the other way, and makes it seem sensible that, instead, even everything everyone else has should be collected up and bet on the next spin of this wheel on a lucky run that cannot possibly ever fail.

Until it does.

At least, that's the risk that it seems to my reading that the Book of Proverbs has written down, for those who have ears to hear it.

Mathematically, any given data set has an infinite number of interpretations. "Sanity" is multivalued, and Godel's Theorem assures us that, from the inside, we cannot possibly ever hope to tell by looking whether the "sensible" course we're following is globally sensible, or just locally sensible. Only with consultation and with love for others is something additional added that gets us up out of Godel's maze.

As Dennis the Menace said "How come dumb stuff seems so smart when you're doing it?"

That's a very important and profound question.

As Snoopy said "Did you ever notice, that if you think about a problem at 2 AM , and then again at noon the next day, you get two different answers?"

Again, a very profound observation.

Brilliance, high IQ, Nobel Prizes, "momentum", whatever are not sufficient to break this binding constraint. They lead to arrogance and a closed feedback loop that spirals into total ruin.

It's easy to model, and easy to see from the outside, and impossible to detect from the inside.

That's what we're being warned about. Those with wide social interconnections who cannot be bum-rushed into ever increasing frenzy of action can avoid being sucked into that vortex of addiction and "death". Those who chop their connections to humanity that are "just slowing them down" do in fact keep on speeding up -- until their flywheel explodes.

It was true 3000 years ago. It's still true.

Does ill-gotten gain produce wealth?

We know our eyes don't show us everything. The world around us is filled with WiFi radio waves, cosmic rays, infrared rays, all sorts of things we cannot see. We only perceive a very narrow part of the spectrum.

So, for the rest, we need to figure out how to tell what's there, and how to tell whether we are right or not. It's easy to make mistakes when you can't see what you're doing.

If "things" are hard to see and get right, "events" are even harder, and "causation" is harder still.

For "causation" we have to not only see two different things correctly, but also see the relationship between them correctly.

Now, we run into a second limit of human sight -- we can see most clearly when things are near us, and less clearly when things are farther away.

In fact, as the same "thing" gets farther away from us, it appears to get "smaller" to our eyes, in many senses. And, worse, the number of things at that distance just keeps on going up.

So, maybe there are 3 things going on right here, close up, highly visible. There may be 10 things going on over the space of a week with our friends or the stock market, somewhat farther away, and less visible. There may be 6 billion people on this planet, 6 billion lives and God knows how many relationships, farther away yet and so invisible we tend to forget about them. All that distant stuff becomes a big blur.

This kind of perception is great when the problems we face tend to be local as well, such as a snake on the ground or some berries that may be good to eat. But some important things are not local, and, as a species, in general, humans are pretty bad at managing those. "Out of sight, out of mind" is a good summary. First, they are far away, and we're dying close up, so they can be put off -- we figure, if we don't survive the short run, the long-run doesn't matter -- which is true.

Second, perversely, we tend to ignore distant events because there are so many of them. Our little brains get quickly overwhelmed, which is locally fatal. We miss the snake, or drive off the road while worrying about next year.

Still, when planning, we need to consider both local and distant events, because, in the long run, many things that seem far off now have a habit of suddenly being upon us. Suddenly, the final exam is here, or the term paper is due, or our mortgage payment is out of our "grace period" and is going to go up by $500/month. Suddenly the kids are grown and gone.

So, we need some basic simple rules to use here and now that will protect us in the long run, because trying to think about the long-run hurts and isn't easy to do and is often wrong anyway.

Many rules like that were distilled into the Book of Proverbs in the Christian Bible Old Testament, any many of those came from Egypt before that. They are worth reading and considering. This is a case where "the olds" may be more interesting than "the news."

As with all wisdom, some days the same words make more sense than other days, so we need to revisit them frequently and ask - "Now, from here, today, can I see something here that can help me?"

Here's one, from the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 10, verse 2, from a website BibleBrowser.com that has 20 other translations, including the Hebrew. This is part of the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic writings as well.

Ill-gotten gains do not profit, But righteousness delivers from death. (Proverbs 10:2)

For now, let's just look at the first part of that: "Ill-gotten gains do not profit."

This verse says something that is pretty important, if it's true -- First it says that there are two kinds of "gain", those that are well-gotten and those that are ill-gotten. By gain I believe this would include financial return, as well as outcomes of political maneuvers, military maneuvers, office politics, treatment of your neighbors, treatment on a larger scale of other countries, etc.

The verse asserts that the benefit of such "gains" depends on how they are obtained. It asserts that, even if the events that got you this "gain" is far away from here and now, it is still connected and still affects the benefit of having such a "gain."

Is that true?

Well, it certainly flies in the face of what we usually assume today. Let's simply look at cash, money. We assume a dollar is a dollar, and there is no difference between a dollar that was obtained by fraud or a dollar that was earned honestly. We assume that the origin of us having this dollar "goes away", and , being far away, no longer matters.

The verse in Proverbs I quoted differs, and says that assumption is wrong. It says that "blood money", money we got through bad actions such as theft or fraud, will turn out not to profit us after all, even though it "looks the same" as good money and is counted the same by our bank or phone company, that accept it as payment.

Besides, the form of this "gain" has been laundered, changed, altered many times, and it has passed through many hands, so even if the original dollar, say, was contaminated and "had the cooties", the electronic figure in our on-line checking account has surely separated us from such contamination, right?

Well, the verse says no, wrong. The verse doesn't say that changing the format of the "gain" makes this effect go away. It says that bad gains will result in bad things happening to you, and isn't worth doing, or worse, is actually a net loss to you.

Hmm. Well, first, things can't stay "connected" over a long distance, can they? Actually, they can. Physics tells us that a pair of particles can be "quantum entangled" so that, even if they are taken to opposite ends of the universe, they are still "connected" and if you change one by measuring it, say, that it instantly changes the other. So, there's at least one instance where distance in space is not a barrier to connection.

Well, still - we don't have to believe something just because some old book says it, do we? No, we don -- but we might consider thinking about believing it if someone had more current, solid, reliable data and evidence that such a principle is true.

Generally, physics doesn't suggest "physical laws" that relate physical things to human actions or intentions. That doesn't mean there can't be such laws, only that this isn't the sort of thing a physicist would ever be able to get a grant to study. This isn't "physics" but is something else, akin to both physics and commerce.

So, reflecting on this question, is there any other evidence that piling up fraudulent profits ends up being a bad idea? Maybe, rephrased, "Does crime pay, or not?"

It is clear that "ill" actions, can yield "gain", often immense "gain": ranging from theft to fraud to pillaging whole countries to making billions as merchants of death ( tobacco, heroin, etc.)

The question on the table, suggested but not proven by this old text, is whether such "gain" behaves differently over time than "gain" resulting from some more honest, socially beneficial wealth-building activity.

Are fortunes made through criminal activity less "stable", or less "valuable" to their possessors than fortunes made through hard honest work? Or not only less valuable, but of zero value, or, worse, of negative value?

Should we envy those those who pull off amazing con-jobs and sell drugs and "get rich"? Obviously, some get very rich. The question is, do they simultaneously get poor in some other way, so that, overall, net, it was a lousy life-choice and a poor business decision?

Given that many people and corporations and even nations are attempting to amass fortunes in this way, by ripping off other people, this is a big question. If nothing else, maybe we want to avoid owning stock in such companies, or not stand too near such people, waiting for lightning to strike or something? Hmm.

Oh, notice by the way that this verse I'm thinking about doesn't say money is bad, or wealth is bad, or profit is bad, or commerce is bad. It implies that profit is good, actually, and is a warning that someone long ago put there, trying to share what they saw as hard-won wisdom, telling us who seek profit that we should stay away from "ill-gotten gain", which , by implication, may look very attractive but turn out not to be in the end.

Reasoning about "impact on your soul" or "Heaven or Hell" is not very popular today, so we'll skip that line of thought. So, it comes down to this question:

Aside from such things that cannot be measured by science or commerce, are there things that can be measured by science or commerce that tell us "ill gotten gains " behave differently than "well-gotten gains?'

What exactly would we look for?

Here I want to bring in a board game called "Go", although the same thing is true for other games such as chess. At one time I was the organizer of the Cornell Go Club, which had several hundred members, about 30 very active, who played this game, and I learned a lot about it. Go was required knowledge of all Samuai soldiers in ancient Japan, and I actually advocated that Cornell's Johnson School of Management, where I was teaching, should include it as part of their MBA training. (That's a Go board from Wikipedia pictured at the top of this post.)

The game is one important way to gain insight into thinking and strategy that we can expect Asians, particularly Japanese and Chinese to use to compete with the US. There aren't very many such ways, so this is important.

One thing I found is that it was essentially always possible to defeat MBA students with a very simple strategy -- keep on trading them visible material short-run gain for longer-term much more valuable "position on the board." So, the MBA's would happily capture army after army, winning battle after battle, until suddenly they realized that they had lost the war. This seemed to be bait that such fish would always take.

The game Go teaches one patience and a long-range strategy. The aim of a good player is to "win by one point". Trying to win by more is overly-adventuresome, and requires taking risks that are not warranted. A balance is required between short-range, short-term tactics and long-range, long-term strategy -- but in the end, assuming one survives the middle, it is only the long-term value of each move, seen in hindsight from there, that matters.

So that may be an example where "foolishly-gotten short-range gain that you had to trade position for doesn't profit you in the end."

This is still not yet "ill-gotten gain", the topic of this post, but is getting closer, and the reflection on the proverb is uncovering some useful wisdom, whether the proverb is "right" or not.

So, let's remove that component and try to be more explicit and narrow in the hypothesis we're trying to test. Rephrased, we have two quesitons:

• Is there something hidden set into motion by socially-destructive gain that comes back to haunt the person or company that carried out that destructive action?
• If so, is it something that would also haunt other people downstream who got paid this money for goods or services or as a stock dividend?

There's no point in looking at the second part of that if the first isn't true, so let's focus on the first part. It seems safe to assume that such an effect was considered "hidden" by the writer of the proverb, because if it was obvious, they wouldn't need to go out of their way to write it down for their children to learn, nor preserve the thought over 3000 years.

Well, we know human vision is flimsy and has trouble seeing hidden connections between things, so we can't rule this out just because it is hidden and not obvious. Doesn't prove it, just doesn't rule it out.

And questions of "mechanisms" in my book can come later. First, blind to mechanisms, we can look and see if there is some effect. Then we can spend the energy to worry about mechanisms or pathways, and before then it's not justified. This seems scientifically valid to me. Besides, "That can't be true because I can't think of how it could happen!" has been used against every breakthrough in science, and doesn't prove anything.

First, we need careful, empirical, observational field-work to simply go see what is out there that needs explaining. In Toyota's "Lean" lexicon, this is Genchi Genbutsu -- actually going down and seeing for oneself instead of assuming you can see well from the executive suite or analyst's windowless cubicle.

I guess this comes down to the core question of theology and of this post:

Do your socially-destructive actions have bad consequences for you, even if you pull off a "clean getaway" and no one sees what you did?

People today seem think that, since the "God did it" mechanism is "dead" that all the social phenomena that mechanism explained can also be thrown away. "Allie Allie in-free!" as the child's game goes.

Two notes - first, I'm looking, as always, at "scale-invariant" rules , so the "you" in that question could be a person, or any larger entity that has "intent" such as a corporation or nation. Maybe this is relevant for cells and atoms, but that's a little obscure from here. (And I'm assuming intent matters, not just inadvertent (oopsie!) accidental, incidental, or "collateral damage", although that's not proven either.)

Do destructive actions have hidden bad consequences that make the visible benefits of them irrelevant or misleading?

OK, how would we test that hypothesis? Well, even though we have to look for cases that disprove it, we can start by asking if there's any case that comes to mind that agrees with it -- or else we should abandon this effort right here. The writer had something in mind, probably a lot of somethings distilled into this advice, so we should be able to think of something.

(to be continued...)

Are you my mommy? What shape AM I anyway?

I'm working on turning my thinking to the practical problem of the economy of Southeast Michigan, the area of the USA near the city of Detroit - on the Canadian border.

Actually, from Detroit, you cross the bridge Southeast to get to Canada, which everyone knows is to the North of the US. It's a perfect illustration of how things that are "true" at one scale can also be "false" at another scale at the same time. In general, on the world-sized map, yes, Canada is to the North of the USA (above it on the map for those with no sense of direction.) At the same time, on a city sized map, Canada is Southeast of Detroit.

Please try it now. Take this Mapquest map and slowly change to larger views by clicking successively lower buttons on the left. Watch as the city of Windsor (and the country of Canada) "move" from the south to the north of Detroit. Don't just think about it -- actualyl do it. Interacting helps the idea come forward in your mind which you'll need in a minute.

Both are true and not in conflict, because the "fact" varies with the size of your map. This kind of "fact" is common, but not discussed in school, and many people didn't pay attention in school anyway.

It seems to turn out to be a huge conceptual error to assume that things that are "true" at one scale must be "true" at every scale. Cultural, governmental, corporate, and personal mistakes due to this single, simple error are responsible for much of the misery we face in life.

I gave another example before, of the visual equivalent - a photograph of, well, either the female movie star of old, Marilyn Monroe, or of the male scientist Albert Einstein. Which it is depends on how far back from your computer screen you are. -- Up close, it is CLEARLY and OBVIOUSLY a picture of Einstein. Walk across the room and look back, and it is CLEARLY a picture of Marilyn Monroe. In between it is just confusing.

The original post was here: "The Sixth Discipline for Learning Organizations." And here's the picture:


(That picture is the work of researche rGregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com -- subscription required to get to it online.)

Now, imagine trying to achieve any meeting of the minds, or trade agreement, or corporate policy, or an end to conflict between groups sitting close to the screen and another group sitting far from the screen, that depended on what it was showing on the screen. "See, how we help you?" one group might say. "Help us? You're killing us!" the other group might say, and new fighting might ensue, or both groups could walk out of the room because the other group is "being unreasonable."

We've adapted to the fact that which building is larger needs to be adjusted for "perspective", so that now we automatically "see" a tiny skyscraper on the horizon as "being" much larger than a one-story house nearby, despite the fact that on a photograph of the scene or on a TV view of the screen, the house takes up most of the screen and the skyscraper is tiny.

Now, this is a really strange thing, if you stop and think about it, which we normally don't. It's not that our eyes "are broken" or "don't work" at all - our eyes are fine. There's a physical thing going on that changes what we see depending on where we are. The "one world" contains within it millions of "perspectives", as we try to reduce a real 3-dimensional world into a single two-dimensional image. The image is not the world. Same world has many different images, which may "appear" to conflict.

The only conflict is in our confusing the image with the world. The error is in "reducing" the complex world to a simple picture, which has a result that differs depending on where you are.

Note that it's not WHO you are. If you and the other person swapped places, you'd now see what they see, and vice versa. It's the same "you" near the screen with the picture of Einstein and across the room with the picture of Marilyn Monroe. The only thing that changed is where you are looking from.

Our language has terms "different perspective" and "different viewpoint" but they have become twisted around to mean that something inside the person is different, and that those viewpoints would persist even if the person swapped places with us. That's an error in thinking, responsible for much bloodshed.

So, with that discussion of Detroit and Marilyn Monroe in mind, let's turn and look at a recent news article , one of many recently on researchers discovering that "we" aren't at all shaped like what "we" thought "we" were.

And, again, this conceptual error is responsible for many failed policies across the spectrum.

The article is from the August 11-17, 2007 issue of New Scientist, an article by Chris Frith on Determining Free Will. This is a great subject for killing time and getting nowhere - back in the 70's I used to attend a conference out on Star Island of the group IRAS - Institute for Religion in an Age of Science, and we'd spend a week happily arguing about the existence or non-existence of "free will", or temptation, "demon possession", fate, etc.

So, anyway, the article goes on to talk about some presentations at a conference by the John Templeton Foundation on that subject. Frith discovers that in many cases, "we", our conscious selves, seem to actually just be inheriting actions that "our brain" decided for us long before, and sort of tells us about after the fact, when "we" swiftly pivot and act as if, then actually belive, that "we" made that decision and "took" that action.

I have noted, of course, a similar phenomenon among CEO's of companies, and Kings and Presidents, and the "pointy-haired boss" in the Cartoon "Dilbert", who act as if, and come to believe that they are "running things". They get all puffed up with their "greatness" and carried away with taking credit. Recently Forbes had a "Titans of Industry" article where some CEO's were astoundingly arrogant talking about why they, singlehandedly, had "done" such and such and why they, single-bank-accountedly, should indeed receive that bonus of $250,000,000 for the company's success.

Uh, actually, the other 350,000 people had something to do with the success.

But, again, this is the work of "perspective" and "viewpoint" and "scale" -- from the Office of the CEO, it really honestly LOOKS LIKE they are the one doing all the work, against the arrayed forces of decay and opposition and enemies and inertia. Of course, to the people actually building the cars with their hands and labor, it appears that the actual work is being done by them, and the CEO is some pompous windbag totally out of touch with reality.

Thus, management and labor, subject to the subtle and insidious power of "perspective", end up deciding each other must be some combination of demented, evil, uncaring, and stupid -- and productive work drops off, and the company becomes "non-competitive." Management then, to "lighten the burden" of all those excess useless moocher employees, lays off 10% or 20% of "the workforce" (a term whose meaning they have lost, as with the term "labor".) Wall Street applauds the great move and stock prices go up.

Then, curiously, output at the factory goes down for some reason. Management keeps on laying off more and more "workers" but, dammit, there STILL seems to be too much dead weight holding the company back from the efforts to lift it up that management is exerting.

In the extreme case, management lays off 100% of the "workers" trying to make the unit more "productive." I actually saw this happen at Cornell University, when times were rough and the Buildings and Grounds unit laid off 100% of the employees that they sent out to do actual work, for which B&G charged $60/hour, their only source of income. No one in management could understand why this still didn't improve the profitability of the unit.

The illusion at the top that "they" are in charge is very, very strong. It's not an "illusion", but a "perspective" effect, like the size of the buildings. To their eyes, their little 1-story house looks huge in comparison to the labor "skyscraper" that is very far away from them.

Well, it appears, as is so often the case, that important processes are the same across all scales. Some design patterns that work at one scale work at every scale, and those are the ones to focus on first -- and possibly the only ones we ever need to look at to understand what's going on.

So, "you" and "your body" and "people around you" are just the same as the "boss" and the company. In fact, yes, it turns out that most of what "you" end up doing was actually done by some other part of your mind or body, or by the people around you, or even your spouse or employees, when "you" weren't looking. And, in fact, it turns out that most of what "you" think "you" decided to do, because it was "obvious", is also the doing of all these other invisible actors that "you" tend to forget exist.

This repeated finding has startled and baffled some academic scientists, most of whom are deeply committed to the dogma of isolated experts being the only "actors" of importance.

This is a critical realization that impacts our health, the public health, the cost of health care in the USA, the competitiveness of General Motors, the productivity of Southeast Michigan, etc.

In health, for example, Johns Hopkins researchers have found that about 70% of the USA's health care bill is due to "life-style choices" - that is, what we decide to eat, or smoke, or ingest, or whether we decide to exercise or not, or whether we are "compliant" at taking those pills the doctor said we needed, etc.

Actually, the number is a lot higher than 70% if we include the downstream damage from bad choices at work, or "not feeling like" studying, or shutting off our friends and taking that "incredibly low cost mortgage" that now has turned into a nightmare.

While the focus for the last several thousand years has been on what we do and how we behave, and why we do things (belief, attitudes), that is now just at a "tipping point" and starting to change to go back again and revisit that word "we".

After many tens of thousands of efforts to change "people" or intervene in foreign cultures, it's becoming clear that, as soon as the effort stops, "people revert" to their old behaviors. It's also clear that this is due to the larger set of people who "have influence" over the first person, who we had always assumed up to now was the "actor" and the one "making the decision".

Now, that's all turning upside-down.

Now, it appears that many choices are already made for people by the group they are in, so, in fact, it appears that "we" have far less "free will" than assumed. In fact, yes, it appears that sometimes people are "not responsible" for what "they" do because they were "caught up in" a wave of humanity doing something else.

This, of course, as discussed before, totally messes up our concept of morality, and justice, and "criminal justice" and "blame". When Systems Dynamics demonstrates that problems in production aren't due to any person making mistakes, but due to "the system" making a mistake, that doesn't help the argument. When hospitals and airline companies talk about not punishing a person who "makes a mistake" because the "team made a mistake" it further confuses the issue. "What up?" we may well ask.

But, here again our reductionist thinking leads us astray. Yes, it is true that, at a given moment, we may find ourselves, to our surprise, unable to overcome our habit, or tendency to do something, or the impulse to do something that the herd or crowd around us is doing.

That does NOT mean that we are helpless victims, however, because if you change lenses, shift to a larger time frame and scale, you see that we did get to pick our friends, and our job, and the crowd we hang with, and which activities we wanted to pursue, so, in that larger scale we made the bed we are now sleeping in. So, we're responsible again.

But, no wait. It turns out that choice of housing is not a "free choice" but is limited by our language, our culture, our income, social discrimination that forces us to live in an immigrant ghetto, etc. It turns out that our employment is not a "free choice" - or is, more to the point, like "free choice" on network TV or "free choice" of who to vote for for President -- there's not much choice left by the time it's our turn to pick one.

But, no wait, those levels of discrimination are caused by actions that ... etc.

This apparent mess of seemingly contradictory arrows of causality can be quickly and neatly resolved if we simply recognize two things:

1) the near and far worlds are in a feedback loop, each influencing the other. There is no point where you can cut that loop and say "A" causes "B", because you will aso find that you left out the fact that "B" also causes "A". This is confusing to academics not familiar with loops, so they either leave it out of the analysis, or put it in a footnote, or go work on something else.

Sidebar: It's quite remarkable to watch as they erase a data point they don't like with some hand-waving justification for their total violation of intellectual honesty to get the "data to fit." My wife and I attended a conference on "Self-regulation of health behaviors" at the University of Michigan with all the big world-famous researchers - Prochaska, etc. - on a panel. It was clear as they talked that the most effective strategies each of them had found involved group interventions, not individual interventions. They would pay a woman's children $5 for each point she lost instead of paying her and it worked way better. But, I asked in the Q&A, am I imaginging it, or did you each find it's the group that matters, not hte perosn? Yes, after discussion, the panel agreed. Why, I persisted, is none of that in your published papers?
Oh, they said, none of us could figure out how to compute a p-value and do the analysis.

Oh. So, the most successful interventions for the largest health care cost in the country were left out on purpose, because they didn't make sense and fit the model of "an individual actor".

2) To make sense of it, the easiest thing to do is to redefine the shape of a human.

Now, maybe, this is not a profound thing to do. Maybe this is just practical, like treating the sun as if it goes around the earth, not vice versa, because the math is easier and, well, that's what it looks like from here anyway.

But, for "people", it appears that the relevant shape for "a person", or the unit that we're trying to change or understand, is actually a larger shape than their biological body.

In fact, "a person" can be thought of, for planning purposes, more like the combined human in the middle of the mix and the feedback loops out to include the other relevant persons, cultures, and organizations that influence "that person's" behavior and that, effectively, make the choices that we have "ascribed to " or "attributed to" that person.

What I'm trying to do is expand the circle of DNA included in "a person" to cover all the DNA that is involved in the "simple" act of choice or "making a decision." Clearly this includes more than just the DNA inside the skin of the person we're looking at. It includes the DNA of all people, present or past, near or remote, who had or are still having a "controlling" effect on the behavior, attitudes, and choices "this perosn" is making - as well as a "defining" effect on the set of things "this person" gets to choose FROM.

THAT entity, that larger glob of DNA spread out across space, time, and multiple "bodies", is the entity that is actually "making the decision" among "the remaining choices" that "person" has left to them at that time.

We need to stand way, way back in this analysis. Joe may have "no choice" about what happens on this road in life, except that he did select this road back at the last corner and that was his choice. OR was it. Or, more to the point, WHICH JOE are we talking about?

The little Joe, with one skin and one set of genes and DNA? Or the bigger META-Joe, with many people pushing for something, many hands on the steering wheel, many TV ads resonating through his head and shaping his perceptions, etc?

The bigger Meta-Joe seems to be the smallest unit that gets back to being a "causal" actor, but it's not clear that there is an edge here. Because everyone of THOSE other people is tied in a feedback loop to a larger set of people, etc. ,etc.

IN some very real sense, WE ALL are Joe, and Joe is US. The choices he makes, given the choices he has made, given the people pushing on him, given the resources he had available, given the choices he had to work with where he was, all come home to roost in the current "action" and "choices".

Many prior actions are now encoded in habits and patterns of thinking. Many are encoded and stored and persisted as the house or apartment or neighborhood he lives in. Many are now encoded in the friends he hangs with, his job, his boss, his education, his language and culture and sub-culture.

So, 2000 BC to 1900 AD or so, we had a clear model that people were little separate beings, who occasionally interacted. Yes, there was some strange anecdotal talking about marriage as being a "becoming one flesh" but that was just flowery language. Yes, there was talk of "possession" and temptation and not being able to control oneself, but that was ascribed to demons, devils, and maybe bad blood or bad company.

After World WAr II, the psychological warfare crowd realized that it was possible to change people's behavior by simply changing the advertising messages they received, and the unemployed psyop crowd became Madison Avenue, and started trying to control the shopping, eating, driving, buying, and voting habits of Americans - sometimes with startling success.

Finally, this century, we have the computing power and the concepts to start actually getting our hands around swarms of actors interacting, and stop discarding these data points, and look at how things actually come down.

The bad news is that it will appear, as with the New Scientist article, that much of our lives is determined outside "us". The good news is that, with another click of the microscope stage to a larger view, we see that, in fact, "we" get to pick our friends, our city, our job, what we watch on TV, whether to have a TV at all, what country to live in, etc. So, it's not a simple "either or", but a "both".

Yes much of what "we" do is influenced by others, if not actually determined 100% by others, or our subconscious, at this given moment. Longer term, though, we get our turn to determine which others are significant to "us". There is a feedback loop, which causes identities to merge, and we become more "waves" than "particles" -- there is no "me" and "you" there is only "us".

This isn't a "bug" -- it's a "feature". This is what will allow us to interact and build a new society based on the model our body uses to hold ten trillion cells together and act as one person.

It's also a terrifying thought for those who have a mental model of being "above the rabble" and higher class, not subject to this sort of weak-willed nonsense that the poor seem so prone to. As the housing crisis shows, foolishness spanned the rich and the poor equally.

It does suggest, however, that our prisons are filled with people who had less choice in their actions than our penal system considers. It suggests our CEO's are way over-paid, and should be more thankful for their labor force.

It suggests we can get either "active strength" from hanging with the right crowd, or "active weakness" by hanging with the wrong crowd.

It suggest that we don't live in this moment alone, but our second grade teacher's training on us is still operating today, which means, in that sense, she is still alive even though her body isn't.

This is, indeed, a "paradigm shift." It is inexorable now. Having seen it, it won't go back in the box. We're going to have to learn a whole lot more about getting along with "other people" because, it turns out, "they" are actually "us".

If we want to "control" how "we" act in the future, we do have levers to do that -- it's just that the levers look like changing the people around us and how "we" interact with "them".

Just because our internal self has only 5% control of what "we" do at any given moment doesn't mean that's not enough to get us anywhere we want to go. It just takes time and persistence and recognition that much of the "self" we need to change is outside our skin, not inside it.

So, bottom line - what is it? Are we "free" or not?
Well, it's like the Einstein/Monroe picture - - it's BOTH, depending on what SCALE you look at the problem with.

In the short run, over a few minutes or a day or week, perhaps, no, we are not very free, and have almost our whole life determined by "outside influences", constraints, and habits. In the long run, over years, we are pretty much free to determine our life, if we manage to get linked up with enough stability, perhaps a religious institution or a scientific one, so that we can actually make long-term plans and stick with them, despite local setbacks.

As motivational speaker Tony Robbins puts it -- "We overestimate what we can do in a year, but we underestimate what we can do in a decade. "

Amen.

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