Hardly. People, managers, politicians, analysts, scientists do need to abandon the idea that the world can be simplified enough to fit into their single human brain in a model that will give them the right answer to "what if" type questions.
(Try your intuition on the "amazing devices to impress your friends, for example.)
If that ever worked, it won't anymore, ever again. Now, we are our own problem.
The key that can work is to address the problems of working together, which, reflexively, recursively, we need to address together.
It appears that there is no way around one truly inconvenient truth: we need all those diverse people, cultures, and opinions and backgrounds to balance out our own blind spots and mistaken assumptions that no one we hang with questions any more.
Wealth, even immense wealth, is not sufficient to break our interdependence and set us "free" of needing to work together. This problem is squarely in our path, and it's time to stop trying to finesse it or get around it or pretend it isn't important.
We need "unity in diversity".
Collectively, (dirty word, i know), we can synthesize a thinking engine that can get past the limitations that any one person or viewpoint or culture must have. In complex systems, the enemy is "oversimplification", and the key to survival of a species is "diversity." If all we have is "elm trees" and there is an elm tree disease, we are screwed. We lose all out trees.
This arguing over WHICH viewpoint is right is pointless, because NONE of them can POSSIBLY be "right", because human beings are too tiny, too low dimensional, to short-lived, to ever even begin to understand, as individuals, the important relationships and how they unfold.
But, we CAN understand a process - that if we figure out how to work together as one, then THAT larger "ONE" can solve problems that we, as individuals, even brilliant ones, cannot.
As it says on every bill and coin in the USA, lest we forget, "E pluribus unum." (From many, one.) This is what to remember when times get rough, and, guys, times are getting rough.
Can even diverse races and ethnic groups and religions act like grownups and work together to solve common problems? That's a question many people, such as the Baha'i Faith have been looking at for a long time. (Baha'is say "yes!", by the way.)
It is crucial that we get "scientists" engaged in this discussion. It doesn't matter if we find new sources of energy or water or food or high-mileage engines if we destroy our planet while we're doing that.
The core problem can be stated very simply:
How do we have to act and thinkThat's it.
so that adding one more person
to our group improves the result
of our thinking?
Mathematically, this is what is known as a recursive solution. This, restated,
is the problem between us, today, and our grandchildren surviving or all dying.
Solve [N+1} > [N] for all N, including N=1 (two people),One thing leaps out from this starting point -- the whole "competitive" approach to solving problems, trying to make individuals the key, trying to make superhuman individuals, is doomed to failure and should be abandoned immediately as a solution route.
where [ ] brackets indicate "working together on a common problem."
Our entire educational system is based on a false premise, that our goal is to maximize individuals. We need to maximize [US] not [me].
We've started to stumble into this realization, finding that teams, not individuals, are the authors of most great new research papers, but we haven't adjusted our Nobel prizes or other pay incentives to reflect this, let alone the way we teach or "grade" students, or the way we evaluate and reward "employees."
In health care, the Institute of Medicine has recognized that "teams" or ("microsystems") are the key to reliable, safe , cost-effective care, not super-individuals -- even surgeons with 8 years advanced training. Errors spring from broken teamwork, and great results spring from functional teamwork, and there is no way around it.
Most commercial aircraft accidents occur on the first day that that set of people is together as a team. in the cockpit. (74% to be exact, according to Johns Hopkin's researcher Bryan Sextan).
The individuals are highly competent, but until the TEAM becomes competent, "they" cannot fly a plane safely.
Maybe it helps to think of it this way. Each feedback loop can hold information and sustain a concept. If we put "N" people together, we can make N-factorial combinations of connections, but then way more ways to send feedback percolating through that. This is the model our brain is built around - rather dumb neurons, individually, interacting to be, collectively, bright enough to handle the world.
This is the core problem. Not terrorism, not Iraq, not weapons of mass destruction, not urban decay or competitiveness. All we're doing with those problems is stirring the pot, generally making things worse by our efforts to make them better -- unless we can pool our energy and spirits and thinking and overcome our intellectual silos and work together.
The planet's climate is breaking. The ecosystem is starting to oversimplify and unravel. This is not good. This needs more attention, but it has to get it from [US] not from us.
We need to advance one more rung along the evolutionary direction of giving new life to our collective self, including our corporations in particular. They need to grasp that, if the people all die, they will die too. No one will be left to spend the vast wealth they are trying to accumulate.
This is not parallel play type "teamwork" or "groupwork." This is seriously different.
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