Sharpening the axe

US President Abe Lincoln once said that if he had ten minutes to cut down a tree, he'd spend the first five "sharpening the axe."

Once upon a time, to cut down the "trees" of problems our society was running into, we had the "axe" of "smart people." This mostly seemed to work, and we developed huge systems of education to find "the right people" and make them smart.

As our society got more complex, and the problems grew larger and interconnected, those smart people were not smart enough to solve them, and we tried harder and harder.

What has happened, however, as this picture shows,

is that now the problems are so large and complex that even the smartest smart person cannot solve them, and it only gets worse from here on out into the future. We can't "wait this one out."

And, we have pretty well run out of ways to make smart people smarter. Already we ask them to go to school for 20 years or more, and even that doesn't seem to be working very well these days.

So, it's time to find a new "axe", something much more powerful than "smart people", and we have that -- it's called "smart teams".

Interestingly, the problems we face in making a smart team is just like the problem computer scientists had in making a "supercomputer" -- they finally figured out that it simply did not work to make a single, really, really, really smart computer --- what DID work was to figure out how to network together a cluster a half-million smaller computers so they acted in concert. That, actually, is what an "operating system" does. This took off the barriers, and suddenly it seems if we want more problem-solving power, we can add on more computers to the network.

So far, so good, but we haven't done the same thing with people. What concerns me is that we haven't even articulated this as a problem we should all be working on.

Teams of people can be smarter than the smartest individual person. We can, as the folk wisdom says, "get by with a little help from our friends."



The operative word is is "can". Sometimes, teams of people arrange themselves into "committees", a shape in which very little useful work actually ever gets done.

Sometimes people arrange themselves into hierarchical shapes, called "corporations" that sometimes get smart work done, but often only make larger versions of single-person mistakes.

Curiously, we know very little about what makes teams of people work well. And we know almost nothing about why the largest size team of people that seems able to function as a team is under 100 people.

We do know that if we want very high performance teams, producing very high quality work, the people cannot work "at arms length." They must take down the normal walls between each other, become vulnerable, become emotional, become intimate ( not in the sexual sense of the word, but in the "close" sense of the word.) and care about each other in a positive way. That seems to be required, and to help. Literature on some successful case studies is building up at last.

Our social problems are more likely "ten-thousand person size trees", while we are still working with 10-person "axes".

We don't know off-hand how to make a ten-thousand-person-size axe.

We do know, that for somethings like radio astronomy, we can "synthesize" a large telescope by getting a large number of small ones to "work together", as this photo shows.

Side note - for radio telescopes to work together as one, they can't just work separately and dump their results into a common basket -- they have to become aware of each other and synchronize their "phase" information as well, not just their "amplitude" information. Like lasers, there is a "synchronization" issue that has to be addressed for this idea to work.

This process is called "aperture synthesis" and it works in practice, as the photo above shows.

So, the problem is hard. So what? We didn't know how to get to the moon either, but when we needed to go there, or wanted to go there, we put in a lot of work and figured out how to do it.

We need to figure out how to make a ten-thousand-person size problem solving "axe". It's a problem worth solving, because we can then use the answer to that to solve most of our other social problems that no smart people know how to fix any more.


As the "Houston, we have a problem" graph above illustrates, this problem is not going to "go away" on its own, and it is not going to "solve itself." We will not solve this problem by making even smarter people and waiting for them to "solve it."

No, this problem needs to be solved by "regular" people, pooling notes on what has worked so far, historically, in making teams that work, and what hasn't worked, and then having a large scale discussion and head-scratching session about what might work, and just trying it until we find out how to get past this roadblock.

At least, that gives us a fixed target to work on, instead of an ever changing crisis of the day, and we can recruit the newspapers and top government officials to point at this and say "This is what we need to solve, everyone! If you have spare time, discuss this among yourselves and see what you can come up with!"

You know, we have millions of people on this planet that are (a) unemployed and (b) connected to the internet. Previous actions like the SETI project have tapped into their COMPUTERS unused power to solve large problems, like looking for intelligent life. What if we could tap into the human being's ability to work together, recognize patterns, and take some kinds of actions.

Even if this was only 1 percent efficient, we could make up for that easily by adding 100 times as many people into the web. One thing we do have is lots of underutilized people, many of whom would welcome something to do that felt useful. Another thing we have, or could have is high-speed internet access for those people.

And people don't all need to be in one place. People who need to "meet", or have complex "face-to-face" interactions, could potentially have those interactions in virtual reality worlds, such as Second Life or Forterra. The question is, what would nudge all that interaction from undirected Facebook-type chatter into powerful, laser-beam coherent focus that could pick up large problems , grapple with them, and solve them.

There is a crucial distinction I need to make here.

I'm not talking about the classic "divide and conquer"model

(which is what SETI uses, actually) where each of a million people is given one millionth of the work to do. That would constitute bringing the problem down to the level of the individual person.

What I'm talking about is the opposite -- bringing the collective grasp-size of the collection-of-people UP to the scale and scope of the problem. It has to be done that way, because "decomposing" the problem into parts loses crucial interaction terms and make any "solution" incorrect.

Otherwise, "Man must wait on street corner for long time before roast duck fly into mouth."

Wade

Notes:

In health care, the National Institutes of Medicine has realized that there is a problem that can be solved, which they term "microsystems" -- getting small teams of front-line care providers to work together extremely well.

In military circles, "Force transformation" is the buzz-word. Previous posts here on the US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100 have discussed realizations in the military about how effective teams have to be structured to operate in uncertain, rapidly changing worlds.

The ability of a group of people to have, effectively, computational power far beyond that expected is one of the findings in recent work in "social intelligence" and "the power of groups",
and "swarm intelligence."

Those findings give us hope that the "emotional components" of people are not flaws or bugs in rational machines, but are, in fact, the necessary connective tissue for reassembly of those fragments of living thinking protoplasm into a larger, self-aware, problem solving collection of protoplasm.

We don't want to remove human emotions from the workplace -- we want to turn them up full volume, and align them with the task at hand, because that's how people can synchronize with each other and act "in one spirit" or "as if one."

It is as if, by removing the walls and barriers between people, and getting rid of the Western concept of working "at arms length" in a "professional manner", we are moving from the energy released by fission to the much larger energy released by fusion -- in this case, the fusion of human beings, by the activity of working on a problem, into a persistent much stronger unified state, ready to be used again for just that purpose, and getting stronger with each use.

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Mathematical sidebar (advanced) -- in tensor calculus, any tensor of rank N can be decomposed (or constructed) into a larger number of tensors of rank N-1 working together. (As with relational database, there are simpler objects like tables and complex relationships that must be maintained as contstraints.) Carrying out that process iteratively guarantees us that any tensor of any rank can be completely represented by a sufficient number of tensors of rank one and a sufficient number of relationships and constraints. What that suggests to my eyes is that a wide range of complex mental activities can be "synthesized" out of a sufficiently large number of individuals of lower "rank" thinking, if (and only if) certain relationships are defined and maintained during the interaction.

In other words, there is very strong physical and mathematical basis for believing this "intelligence synthesis" process is theoretically feasible, for the class of problems that can be represented by tensor equations -- which Einstein believed spanned all physical problems. It is certainly a much larger class of problems than we can solve today.

Specifically, "Decomposition of a Tensor into a Sum of Vector Products): Theorem. In an n-dimensional space, any tensor of rank q > 1 can be written as the sum of n -to-the power (q-1) tensor products of vectors with q factors each." (From Introduction to General Relativity, by Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer, McGraw-Hill, 1965, p25).


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further reading (not mathematical!)

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help(my thoughts)
Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper, MIT)
High-Reliability.org web site
Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety - Texas

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Nineteen case studies of health care organizations that dramatically improved their operations through the use of feedback-regulated small-team ("microsystems") operations are well documented in another post
here:


A great deal of accessible literature and some excellent videos are here:
Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship, at the U of Michigan Ross School of Business

http://www.bus.umich.edu/positive/pos-research/pastpositivesessions.htm

http://www.bus.umich.edu/Positive/POS-Research/Readings-to-Get-Started.htm


Positive Deviance - (the new business model)

Consider this excerpt from the US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM 22-100)

1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your
character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in
order.
1-7: The example you set is just as important as the words you
speak.
1-8: Purpose ... does not mean that as a leader you must explain every
decision to the satisfaction of your subordinates. It does mean that you must
earn their trust: they must know from experience that you care about them and
would not ask them to do something - particularly something dangerous - unless
there was a good reason...
1-10: Trust is a basic bond of leadership, and it
must be developed over time.
1-15: People who are trained this way will
accomplish the mission, even when no one is watching.
1-23: you demonstrate
your character through your behavior.
1-56: Effective leaders strive to
create an environment of trust and understanding that encourages their
subordinates to seize the initiative and act.
1-74: The ultimate end of war,
at least as America fights it, is to restore peace.
4-9: Be aware of barriers
to listening. Don't form your response while the other person is still
talking.
4-20: Critical Reasoning ... means looking at a problem from several
points of view instead of just being satisfied with the first answer that comes
to mind.
4-24: Ethical leaders do the right things for the right reasons all
the time, even when no one is watching.

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)
Houston - we have another problem (My thoughts on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Mindfulness and fighting wild fires, and the value of simulations for training

Professor Karl Weick at the University of Michigan has written extensively on the need for "mindfulness" in emergency situations, such as, literally, fighting forest fires.

A mindful crew or crew-chief will be aware that they are operating on a mental model, and that model may be incorrect, so they must be alert to even very small signs that they have completely misconstrued the situation.

There are lessons here, on a longer time scale, for every leader, civilian or military.

Here are some public documents on the subject.

http://www.wy.blm.gov/fireuse/2009mtg/presentations/HROs-mindfulness.ppt

Teaching Mindfulness to Wildland Firefighters (Fire Management Today, Spring 2008, Dave Thomas)

For the last 3 years I have taught half-day workshops, conducted 1-hour lectures, and provided general awareness speeches about the Weick/ Sutcliffe model of High Reliability Organizing as described in their book Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity.

This article is a series of musings, conjectures, and recommendations pulled from this teaching experience. My intent is to pass on some of the lessons that I have learned teaching High Reliability Organizing, and to pose recommendations for further study...

Today, however, mainly due to the heating of the Earth through global warming and a build up of fuels -firefighters are working within an environmental framework of weather and fuel never experienced before. Errors that we might have "got away with" in the past could more easily become catastrophic today....

Next, I explain the irrationality (mindlessness) of always learning our primary safety lessons through trial and error. It is our job to be better at anticipating errors before they occur, before a brutal audit forces us to notice the discrepant events in the fire environment. The following quotation, which reinforces this view, is taken from French disaster expert Pat Lagadec:

"The ability to deal with a crisis situation is largely dependent on structures that have been developed before chaos arrives. The event can ... be considered an abrupt brutal audit: at a moment's notice, everything that was left unprepared becomes a complex problem, and every weakness comes rushing to the forefront."...

High Reliability Organizing

NEW! France-USA High Reliability Organizing in Incident Management Teams Project
Just like NYPD detective "Popeye" Doyle, who traveled to Marseilles in the 1970s hit movie “the French Connection” so too, did a Forest Service NIMO team this past December. Only it wasn’t for crime busting this time. It was a landmark match-up between two French and American Incident Management Teams to capture what makes these teams so successful in complex, rapidly changing, stressful situations. It is hypothesized that they exhibit many of the behaviors that directly align with high reliability organizing (HRO) concepts and principles.

( More to come)


More information:

The France-USA HRO Project (French Web Site, from Bouches du Rhone with video)
http://hro-fires.com/exercices_live.html

High-Reliability Organizing - Roberts, with Weick and Sutcliff:
http://www.wildfirelessons.net/HRO.aspx

Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, Berkely CA
http://ccrm.berkeley.edu

Communication and Information technologies:
New tools for DISASTER management
Jean-Michel DUMAZ (1)
Bouches-du-Rhône Fire Department – MARSEILLE - FRANCE
2nd International Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction
November 27~29, 2007

The Bouches du Rhône
Fire Department


Wade

Hypnotized in high places - Northwest Flight 188

( picture of vulcan cockpit from u07ch on flickr -- Click for larger view.)

So, yesteday, it seems that a Northwest flight #188 overflew its destination city as the FAA attempted desperately to reach it. According to the NY Daily News,

Crew members aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 188 told the Federal Aviation Administration they were distracted during an intense discussion over airline policy and lost track of their location in the bizarre Wednesday night error.

I wrote a comment to ABC News, after reading the other 200 or so comments, as follows (spacing put back in for clarity and ease of reading).

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There are always multiple levels of contributing factors, from personal to procedural to crew interaction to cockpit design to job design to corporate policy to FAA policy.

For safety, versus lawsuits, it's worth looking at each level of that nested hierarchy of contexts to seek ways to reduce the odds of this type of thing recurring. If we do that, we don't need to know for sure what happened -- only what might have happened that we are now aware of is a gap in our current system that is relatively easy to fix without side effects.

I think the context of the discussion could be expanded in two ways, both of which involve asking "What other events is this event like?" in a much larger framework.For example, I note an uncanny resemblance between this situation and the behavior of CEO's and government regulators as the nation financial situation flew up to the red line, and past it, while thousands of people screamed and called for attention below, and those above seemed to be ... asleep? ... arguing?... out to lunch?

This is not just situational unawareness, it is unawareness or a shared-delusional-mesmerized state that cannot be broken into by repeated efforts from outside and below, in the corporate and governmental boardrooms.

I'm not saying that just to b####, although b####ing can be fun -- I'm saying that human beings, even those with superb qualifications in isolation, can manage, collectively, to get themselves set up so that those "above" are completely and thoroughly "cut off" from input and flying blind or simply not flying at all anymore.

Again, not as legal blame for this accident, but as a route to understanding "what goes wrong with human interactions", this event could spur us to look at that much larger question, asking seriously, "No, seriously, how could THIS KIND OF THING ever actually happen?"

The truth is, socially, it happens A LOT.

There is something structurally seriously wrong with our mental model of how a hierarchical command structure ACTUALLY functions versus how we IMAGINE it to function.The lives destroyed and lost on a corporate and national level from THIS KIND of error are far more than the lives lost in this latest incident (zero).

Wade_AA

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(picture by aeneastudio on Flickr)

Other observations I've made about structural blindness and delusional-mesmerism in high places:

Why we have so much trouble seeing

Why are so many flights delayed? The circle of blame


Model induced blindness and FEMA

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....

The power of delusion

It is an astonishing fact of life, which the Times article reveals, that the desire for life to be simpler is so powerful that it can cause 10,000 "trained" scientists, with PhD's, to take 30 years to finally collectively observe what others outside their mutual-blindness-field already knew.

As I've said, textbooks such as "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" are in their 5th editions in Control System Engineering, but biologists, and much of public health's biomedical research community, discount that literature to the point of invisibility and effectively treat it with contempt. To them, this literature does not exist. When seen, it "comes as news to them", and is promptly forgotten, because it conflicts with the shared myth of their culture, and cultural myths always win out over boring contrary evidence.

The Way Things Are (The "Yarn Harlot" tells it like it is, beverage alert!)

There are some truths. Things that just are the way they are, and no amount of desperate human optimism will change them. Allow me to demonstrate.
The guys showed up with the new stove. I went out front to meet them....

OK, Seriously... WHY didn't we see it coming?

High-reliability human systems have been studied extensively, from Chernobyl to The Bay of Pigs to Challenger to aircraft cockpit teams to hospital surgical teams to the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The answer always comes down to the same thing -- dissenting views need to be heard, and dissenters need what Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson calls "Psychological Safety" or they will wilt and become ineffective. This is how humans always behave and unless steps are taken it always breaks along this fault line.

The right question then should be, who is going to take charge of seeing that those steps are taken and that level of social literacy achieved?

I can't emphasize enough how much more important this is than more math and science, in the absence of this. As T.S. Eliot said, we repeatedly get burned "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, but the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be."

Much of my weblog is about what we really need to do to avoid such errors in judgment.

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Various related posts:

My 40 page multilevel structural analysis of
the Crash of Comair 5191 crash in Lexington KY. August 2006
with extensive links to source materials

related webpost with links to Comair 5191 cockpit voice recorder transcripts.


Information on the investigation of the crash of Continental flight 3407 in Buffalo, NY Feb 13, 2009, from the Buffalo News.

On Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009 at 10:20 p.m., Continental flight 3407, en route from Newark, N.J., spun from the sky and crashed into a home as it made its approach to Buffalo Niagara International Airport. All 49 people on board the plane were killed, as was one man in the house in Clarence Center. It was the worst aviation accident in Western New York history.

...A moment later, the co-pilot, Rebecca Lynn Shaw, complained of her own inexperience.

"I've never seen icing conditions," she said. "I've never de-iced. I've never seen any. I've never experienced any of that. I don't want to have to experience that and make those kinds of calls. You know I'd 've freaked out. I'd have like seen this much ice and thought oh my gosh we were going to crash."

Moments later, the crew lowered the plane's flaps and landing gear, and the plane quickly encountered trouble.

Things we have to believe to see

Why men don't ask for directions

Pisa/OECD - Why our education stresses the wrong way of seeing

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Active strength through emergent synthesis

US - Economy of arrogance (and blindness)

Virtue drives the bottom line - secrets of high-reliability systems

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help

Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper)

High-Reliability.org web site

Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

The importance of social relationships.

Houston - we have another problem (on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Here's a few quotations from MIT Professor John Sterman's textbook "Business Dynamics".

Many advocate the development of systems thinking - the ability to see the world as a complex system, in which we understand that "you can't just do one thing" and that "everything is connected to everything else." (p4)

Such learning is difficult and rare because a variety of structural impediments thwart the feedback processes required for learning to be successful. (p5)

Quoting Lewis Thomas (1974):

When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing things with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century.... You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obligated to understand ... the whole system ... Intervening is a way of causing trouble.

IN reality there are no side effects, there are just effects.

Unanticipated side effects arise because we too often act as if cause and effect were always closely linked in time and space. (p 11)

And, this crucial comment by Sterman, reflecting the same observation by persons such as John Maynard Keynes.

Most of us do not appreciate the ubiquity and invisibility of mental models, instead believing naively that our senses reveal the world as it is (p16).

My additional note on this crucial insight. The reality is that the world, as it shows up on the mental TV screen we watch, is NOT the world that is actually out there. It has been more than rose-tinted by our brains. It has had entire chunks of the scene edited out entirely, and other chunks that "should go there " put in their place. A whole set of things that have given us pain or conflict in the past have been summarily removed, without so much as a place-holder left where they were. A set of things we hope might be true have been "helpfully" added to the scene. People's behavior, where it deviated from what we expected, has been "corrected" to show us them acting "the way we KNOW the are", not the way they actually are.

We are, in other words, flying almost entirely blind. We have papered over the front and side windows of our cars with pictures of the way we WANT the road to be, and are driving and turning the steering wheel based on those internal delusions.

Throughout evolution, this has been useful to reduce the immense fire-hose of data to a smaller set we can live with -- and, if we do a bad job of managing it, heck, we just die off and don't reproduce and others who do better jobs have children and go on. No big deal.

The problem comes when those living in such delusional and self-confirming, often self-congratulory worlds are given the power to rule our communities, our corporations, or our governments and they continue onwards believing that what shows up on their mental TV screens IS in fact what is going on out there, and believing, therefore, that those voices of dissenting views are, in fact, some kind of misguided or enemy action that should best be suppressed, shut out by locked cockpit doors or isolated fortress war-rooms, etc.

I'm not saying that solving this problem of filtering the fire-hose of complexity down to a size we can comprehend and use as a guide for steering is an easy one -- but I am saying that it is the kind of hard, complex problem that can yield its secrets to methodical research and study, and it is THAT research we desperately need at this time in our lives on Earth.

This is where it is breaking.

This is where we need to fix it.

Well, at least, that's what MY internal mental TV is showing me right now as the "obvious truth".

Wade

Untouchables revisited

Columnist Tom Friedman, in today's New York Times, in a context when another 100 people are being laid off at the Times newsroom, assesses the qualities of "the untouchables" -- those who will keep their jobs when the others are long gone.

I think he misses the point that the sea of others is going to drown the few in that mental model of how a solution might work. I suggest a better way, one that will sound familiar to my regular readers.

Maybe, we can help each other out, and get by with a lot of help from our friends.
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Ann Arbor, MI

October 21st, 2009

4:14 am

Indeed, "Man must wait on corner long time for roast duck to fly into mouth."

We are, sadly, more crippled by our educational system than we are helped by it, as gurus such as W. Edwards Deming have noted. The reason is not that we don't teach enough stuff, but that we teach "the wrong stuff."

We teach math and science and sometimes English and social studies, but all in a context of intense individual competition, as if we are waiting for very bright individual humans to save us. That "roast duck" isn't coming back. No individual is bright enough to grasp our social problems any more, and even if they could grasp their own and succeed, it has lately been at the expense of all of the rest of us, not as our leader and savior. Wealth isn't what's trickling down.

There is a solution, and it is realizing that people, like computers, are a thousand times more powerful in cooperative networks than as isolated "mainframes" or even "super-computers." All the new research on social intelligence and high-performance teams shows that we are at our best, and a best a thousand times better than our worst, when we are in a high-functioning team.

But that is exactly what "do your own work" trains us out of. We need courses in how to make friends, how to ask for help and get it, how to be a team member, how to be a good or great leader and / or follower, how to build relationships, and WHY we need cohesion and synergy far more than bright Rambo-style individuals.

Done correctly this does not dampen or quench the brightest of us -- it lifts and empowers and supercharges the brightest of us. Teams of people working this way are shown repeatedly to have extraordinarily high performance, quality, and productivity.

That's the corner we need to turn, the new model we need to understand, and respond to. Otherwise, we will turn on each other and collapse, like a shattering glass.

---------

(PS - yes it IS possible to have a work place where, when you get a good idea, other people enthusiastically support you instead of thinking, "Damn, there goes my own raise and job." In fact, that type of socially uplifting context is the only place where really good ideas can be nurtured and evolve and where truly creative problem comprehension and solving occurs.)

Related Posts

Houston, we have another problem.

The importance of social relationships.

DOWNSIDE OF MISMANAGED PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS: "Negative Deviance"

• Dr. Amy Edmondson (Harvard) on the corrosive power of fear in the workplace
• Lack of social relations causing depression, illness, and poor-productivity
• Why academia can destroy good thinking.

UPSIDE OF CORRECT PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS: - "Positive Deviance"

• Education and the real world.
• Virtue drives the bottom line
• Michigan's Ross School of Business and "Positive Organizational Scholarship"
• Leadership curriculum at the Ross School of Business - how to succeed in hard times
  
• Feedback empowered small-teams in health care - that work!
• US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM22-100) and high-performance secrets

• Spiritual solutions to economic problems

• Learning from termintes how to succeed beyond our brain power!

OECD and International Student Assessment

HIgh cost of baseball - Pricing the kids out

Columnist Bob Herbert in the New York Times today, "Pricing the kids out", bemoans the high cost of attending sports games in the fancy new stadiums

My reply as a comment was this
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Yep. I spent the last 20 years living within 2 miles of the University of Michigan stadium, and have never been there to see a game, and refuse to pay these kinds of prices, let alone be subject to harassment or arrest for bringing water, even, to a game.

In line with the rest of your articles on the collapse of American education, this one should go on the list. We could be teaching social skills and values, such as fluency in the ability to ask for help, fluency in the ability to make new friends, fluency in the ability to repair and improve relationships, and, of course, fluency in the ability to organize social activities that don't cost money, maybe even activities everyone participates in instead of passively watching, or instead of hooting and yelling and jumping while watching.

The poet T.S. Eliot asked \"Where is the Life we've lost in living?\"

Ten years studying algebra and zero weeks studying friendship?

We need new values, new virtues or refreshed virtues, and new heroes and heroines -- and they should not be people paid millions of dollars, period.

They don't need to lower the costs at the stadium, we just need to all stop going, and create our own new icons who have the virtues and values that we wish we had, and wish our children had.

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Oh, and, yes, I am fully aware that the plural in Latin of "stadium" is "stadia", but good grief.

Learning how to ask for help

Yesterday, I argued that "more math and science" is not what is missing in our school systems.

Today, let me start to get clearer on what should be in the curriculum instead.

One thing I'm sure would be a great help is a competency in "Asking for help." This seems to be something that should be taught, learned, and mastered by the end of first grade, and then strengthened each year after that.

It's puzzling whether we simply assume that it is obvious HOW to ask for help, and it is also obvious to everyone what kind of things need to be in place in advance to make it POSSIBLE, or better still LIKELY, or even better still, CERTAIN, that, when assistance would be of value, you actually DO ask for it AND GET IT, at a reasonable price.

Let's assume, for example, that you are playing ball and the ball goes over the fence and lands next to someone standing outside the fence. Most people are pretty good and comfortable at yelling "Little help?" or some such phrase, expecting the person outside the fence to stop what they are doing, even if they don't know you from Adam, and bending over to fetch the ball and throw it back to you. It's something we would easily do for others if asked. This much is clearly WITHIN our sort of radius of action.

What defines the limits of that radius of action, however? What's included in it? How much are we capable of asking of and getting from, say, a total stranger? And why do we settle for this limit, as opposed to working routinely to expand it?

Suppose your car, with a manual transmission that can be roll-started on a hill, is at the top of a large hill, but slightly down a driveway from the road. If only you could get 3 or 4 people to come push you four feet up the very slight incline, you could then roll down the large hill and get it started and moving. Could you walk over to a neighboring street or store or tavern and persuade 4 people you've never seen before, and can't pay (say) to come assist you? Would this be likely or unlikely? Would it be easy or hard to do? Is it "unthinkable" or can't you imagine NOT doing it and succeeding?

Or would your only alternative that you can imagine be calling AAA and paying them to tow your car, or to jump start it? Have you institutionalized an inability to utilize the ocean of potentilal help that is all around you, and replaced a small part of it with some service agreement you must pay for?

• Clearly, some people are better at this than others.
• Clearly, there are some real advantages in being able to do this.
• Clearly, if you are confident that you can persuade people around you to help you out, not only is life easier, but the number of places you can dare to go, and the types of things you can dare to gry is much larger.
• Clearly, all the way THROUGH school, it would be great if, every time you needed help on something, you could manage to rustle it up and recruit it and get it.
  

So, then, my very serious question is, why isn't this taught in Western school systems?

What is going on that our school system spends months, if not years of teacher time attempting to teach you algebra, and spends zero minutes on attempting to teach you how to recruit helpers when you need them?

Let me skip ahead and head off certain answers to this question. First, "it's hard" is not an answer. Heck, algebra is hard, but that doesn't stop them from trying to teach it.

No, I'll contend here, and ask you to consider, that Western society is so deeply committed to "rugged individualism" that the omnipresent "THEY" consider it to be an error, a character flaw, perhaps even a fault or sin, to ask for help. We hear the unspoken (or spoken?) message that "We just don't do that."

Huh? Why is it OK to ask for help retrieving a baseball, but it is NOT OK asking for help on how to do problem 5 on the homework assignment? What's the difference here?

And, let me leap ahead a few years, until after college, when everyone is on a work team that is supposed to accomplish a task or carry out a mission, and you realize you don't know how, exactly, to accomplish something that you really should do, but might be able to get away with faking or punting on. Will you be comfortable reaching the better solution, by asking for help? Or will you do your best to cover up your failing, your flaw, your inability to "do your own job" and fake it, perhaps fraudulently saying you did it, or perhaps fraudulently hoping that no one asks, since, you know, it's not exactly lying if no one asks.... is it?

I've run teams of professionals charged with serious missions, and this problem was one of the most central issues, consistently, in getting the mission accomplished. People in the work force do not know how to say "I don't know". They are not trained to say "I need help" and get it. If the situation is novel and the ball goes beyond their reach or easy access, they are MORE LIKELY today to rationalize like crazy about why they didn't really need that ball, than they are to successfully look for, find, and get the assistance that would get the job done CORRECTLY the first time.

It is not possible, in fact, to build a high-reliability team out of people who behave that way.

We seem to have an entire society of people who were given such normative training, and consistently had the lesson reinforced in their minds that it is NOT OK for them to go seek help when the realization arises that they are unable to complete their task efficiently without it.

This is a serious problem, not a minor issue. It also means that everyone is walking around with a secret, silent terror in their heart that one day they will slip up, and their weak areas will become visible, and then, oh my God, ....

It means some of those people go on to become managers, or hold political office, or become military officers -- carrying with them the habit of covering up their own weaknesses, and consistently doing their best to avoid tackling any area that might reveal their terrible secret and ignorance to others. In reality, we know how this plays out --- their weaknesses and errors are incredibly visible to everyone else EXCEPT the manager or officer involved. Tasks, projects, even entire industries go down the drain and fail when they could have been saved and succeeded if only the person or persons in charge had been open about saying "I don't know" or "This is out of my ability to deal with" followed with, "... so here's what I"m doing to recruit those who can help me get this done", and doing it.

I started this post and will end it with the same assertion, that it is MORE important to our childrens education that they learn how to ask for and get help when they should, than that they learn algebra.

If there is not time for both in the curriculum, then we should drop the algebra, not the social skills.

In a future post, perhaps even in an hour, I want to deal with a second suggestion for the mandatory required courses and mastery learning in our school system -- "How to make friends." I will assert again that the average student who graduates from high school, or college in the USA has poor skills, if not outright illiteracy, in the area of "How to make a new, good friend."

I will also assert that the average student who DROPS OUT of school is even more likely, if not certain, to be a person who doesn't know how to ask for help, and doesn't know how to make friends.

Once again, we, the elders, the wise ones, the creators of requirements, bitch and moan about the students' inability to master algebra, but offer them no training in the social skills that would fix the problems for us. Instead, we are baffled as we keep running into push-back, resistance, resentment, and then violence if not outright homicide, in our schools -- almost always by people who are in desperate need of social skills and get no help from us.

Again, I will say, "more math and science" is NOT what is missing.

How to get higher math scores - New York Times

The New York Times asks how we can improve our nation's children's math scores. Here is the comment I submitted.

In short:

FIRST, we should address our nation's problems. THEN if we have time and energy left, if people want to learn math and increase our math scores, great.

But at the current time, "math" is a distraction from dealing with our actual problems, and, as such, efforts to put MORE resources into it are, in my mind, absolutely misguided.

If we want to teach people HOW TO REASON, we don't need math for that, and, besides, the people I know who are great at math are no better at reasoning on social issues than anyone else, and are, in many ways, WORSE at "being reasonable" at communicating with other human beings who were not socialized in the academic-math mould.

I still have nightmares about the recurring front-cover stories in Time, Newsweek, Fortune, etc. all of which say

TECHNOLOGY IS WHAT WILL SAVE US!

No it won't. Actually, by itself, blind applications of technology in local contexts is tending to make things worse. The more we "solve" local problems, the more we create even more global problems, out of sight of the local "solution". The harder we work, the worse state we're in.

If you've dug yourself into that kind of hole,
my advice is: "stop digging."

Here's the comment that I posted to the Times, that may or may not show up later today on-line:

========

Improving math competency (and scores) is a hard task, and one that requires understanding psychosocial factors. In particular, we need to recognize the fact that cultural context is a more powerful determinant of behavior and mediator of learning than anything teachers or parents can do locally in a school environment. So long as we immerse our children in a TV culture that debases knowledge and intelligence, and doesn't even mention wisdom let alone revere it, what we get out of that context-determined schooling is exactly what we built into it -- we get adults that are proud of their ignorance. We did that, not the teachers, not the \"school system\", that is immersed in that culture. If we don't like the output, we need to change the context, not the \"contents\". If that's hard, then it's time to buckle down. If we don't know how to do it, then that's what we should allocate research dollars towards finding out.

That said, what's up with the almost worship of math and science, when we simultaneously depict scientists in the media as fools, dupes, or evil forces? Who wants to grow up to be a scientist or engineer any more? And if they did, what are the odds of competing with the candidates from Singapore or China? For what job in what industry located in what city?

It might appeal more to our personality-type to decide instead to develop our children into true world leaders, trained in mediation and leadership skills, and make that our new specialty area. That would require developing reasoning skills, ability to create or analyze an argument, ability to listen and communicate to many different perspectives, etc. Non-linear systems thinking would be great, but that doesn't require math so much as exposure.

Put it this way -- how much better would our nation be if our congressmen and women all had joint PhD's in math and science? Would THAT break the logjam in governance that's destroying our ability to act in our own behalf these days?

In short, if we really want higher math scores, let's get crystal clear in our heads, and our media, WHY we want them, and WHERE such accomplishments are actually going to take us.

A big enough \"why\" will create the \"how\". But be prepared to be challenged by the children when they ask what job, where, is at the end of that long march -- and if we don't know, then start there and work backwards towards math, if, indeed, more math is our best route to that objective.

==========

Prior posts on this issue:

W. Edwards Deming on the "deadly disease" of relying on technology to solve social problems and what's wrong with our educational system as a whole.

Why more math and science are NOT what we need.

The ten most important lessons from physics, none of which require math.

Problems with "reason" as a problem solving approach.

Overall, as T. S. Eliot warns, we have become a society "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good." Mathematics is not by itself evil -- I love math and am very good at it, due to an astounding number of hours of effort to learn it and a good school system. But math is not some kind of automatic ticket to social prosperity, nor is math excellence a guaranteed ticket any more to a career in science or technology, and THOSE are not, in turn, some kind of automatic ticket to solving our social problems either.

Our largest social problems are now, basically, ourselves and the "solutions" that we, in short-sighted efforts, came up with for the last round of "problems" we had.

Yo. LISTEN UP! STOP DIGGING, PEOPLE!


Even more of the same will not improve our lot in life, but WILL consume our time, energy, and resources. More of the same is the ultimate in "quack solutions" to symptoms, and won't even cure those, in fact.

If the problems are NOT technical in nature, then the solution is probably not technical in nature either, people!

The LAST thing in the world we should do is divert resources from social sciences into math or the physical sciences. That would only seal our doom, handcuffing ourselves to a sinking cinderblock the in sea of troubles.

If you want to see clearly, remove ALL TECHNOLOGY from the table. Erase it from the picture. Don't fret about technological problems, including weapons of mass destruction, adequate water, adequate food, adequate energy, climate change, etc. Don't look to science for answer, solutions, or careers. Erase all that.

Then, look at what's left on the table. Here's what I see:

1) The biggest problem is us -- other people
2) A huge issue is the delusion that our technology is a "magic bullet" that will fix things.
3) An issue is our unwillingness to perceive, to believe, that blind faith in the magic bullet actually is now making our lives worse.
4) Until and unless we learn how to reason together on this, how to be reasonable and good listeners, there will be no solution.
5) Math and science do NOT teach us how to be reasonable people. Scientists, bless them, if anything, live in their own fantasy world where the messiness of human society does not intrude. Their solution, to only look at the parts of the world that are easy to quantify and express with math, is not a good solution and doesn't fit the problem at hand.
6) This phrase has the key to the answer: "Spiritual solutions to economic problems."
7) Figure out what's wrong with the human spirit and our human community, and the rest will yield to you. You don't need math for that -- you need EYES and an open HEART.
8) If teaching math in school distracts from learning how to work with each other, defer it until we master those lessons first.


9) Oh, and wake up people. The REASON you have inattention, drop-outs, and violence in school is that school doesn't even come close to providing ANSWERS for the actual human problems that the students face today.

If something is going to be PUT OFF and DEFERRED, the wrong thing to put off is the students' actual needs for something that actually, in the real world, helps them with their perceived problems. The right thing to put off is mathematics, etc.
It's not the students who are broken here, and not listening or learning. It's the school system. It's US. Children are, by their entire biological nature, astoundingly powerful learning machines. If they're not learning, we're doing something terribly wrong.

Closing feedback - learning Chinese

This is a multi-level post, so I'm going to post this particular post here on newbricks.blogspot.com, a weblog dealing heavily with feedback and social intelligence, and also on my weblog for learning Chinese, whatseas.blogspot.com.

In particular, this is a perfect case in point of how to use social intelligence and feedback to reshape and create behaviors, in this case, to help new students learn a new language. It is crucial to recognize that learning a new language for a new student is not primarily a COGNITIVE activity, but a social one, which requires bringing new expectations, new hopes, and new motivating energy to the task.

Here's my mental model, my understanding, of the key variables:

While advanced students and faculty may find comfort in grammar and rules and cognitive techniques for learning, they are already assuming that a basis of confidence, optimism, and hope of success is in place. They know they can master this material, from experience. Short term difficulties are minor obstacles, which they know they will overcome. They have, in short, a kind of psychological momentum that carries them across stumbling points. And they have a social role that includes skill in this new language as part of their accepted and acceptable identity. Their lives have assurance from experience, and optimism about the future.

NEW students, on the other hand, come with none of that. They are very UNsure about their ability to complete this task. The skills and knowledge have no home in their head and lives at this point. Every obstacle seems like one more argument that this was the WRONG course to pick this semester, that they are NEVER going to learn this, and maybe they should drop the course now before it becomes a complete disaster. Their lives are filled with anxiety and depression. They do not yet know for sure that society and their peer group will find this action, learning Chinese, an acceptable activity. Maybe they will be hounded and punished by their friends for even trying this.

Given the above, here is a proposed activity, and then a discussion as to why this activity meets the emotional and psychosocial needs of the students in an efficient way, as well as teaching them Chinese.
========


You can use the flashcard memory game for FREE. They have the character sets for all the major textbooks. The character set for our own book, Intergrated Chinese, Version3,
level 1, part 1, is here.

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/mtch-options.php?deck=ic3-1-1



Use SHIFT + CLICK to highlight more than one chapter to pull characters from.

If you select "Novice", you have 2 minutes and 30 seconds to find every match per page. I think my first effort at this I got 5 pairs (out of the 32 pairs) in that time. It gets much easier all by itself if you play it every day.

"Effortless learning!"

I was trying to think of ways to get the class more excited about helping each other.

What do you think of this?

We could divide into two teams, and compete to see who can complete the YellowBridge memory game for Chapter 2 in fewer seconds.

We could use the projector to show the grid on the large screen.

We would have to do all of the grid for one team, and record the time, then scramble it and pick a new grid for the second team, and record the time.

Each team would have a "batting order" and the team players would have to take turns in that order.

As each person "comes up to bat" they can pick any two squares they think match and point to them on the screen,and the person running the computer would click those two. If they match, or not, that completes that person's "turn at bat".

We could tell everyone that the best strategy is for each person to pick the HARDEST MATCH they are sure of. It would be silly foran advanced student to pick a really easy match, leaving only hard matches for the next players. Each person could find their own level. Be sure to leave some easy ones for the weakest team member to be able to pick from, or you will lose time as that person tries to find what might be a match.

I think it would be fun, and it would make people realize that their TEAM IS DEPENDING ON THEM to know these characters!

We could do this once or twice every Friday, say, and keep a running score for the rest of the term (9 more weeks / innings.)

The winning team gets... something. Some small prize.

What do you think?
========
Ok, so here's how that activity meets the psychosocial needs of the beginning students.

First, successfully finding a match is a relatively easy task. The odds of success are high, so it is possible to do SOMETHING that wins social approval of a peer-group, your team. Peer-group approval is at least as powerful, if not more powerful, for this effect, than approval of an authority figure, the teacher.

Second, the rest of the team has to focus emotional energy on helping, urging, boosting, pressuring each member to successfully find a match, and rewarding them with a pulse of social approval when the match is found. For at least some time, they have to take on a nurturing, supportive, encouraging role to each other. This has a persistent lingering effect on both parties, those having that role, and those being held by it.

Third, these effects compound, in a closed feedback system, because the people you are boosting and adding morale to and encouraging to be stronger are, in fact, the same people who will turn around and be boosting you -- but now they will be boosting you in a stronger, more encouraged way.

Fourth, a clear message is sent to the brain's wiring that this type of associative recall has some time-pressure on it. It has to not just be recalled, it has to be recalled QUICKLY. In an era of school systems that don't teach mastery learning, this is a hard lesson to find a way to teach, that the recall needs to get faster, faster, faster, until it becomes effectively instantaneous and effortless.

Fifth, even experiencing this on a regular basis in class, such as once every friday, for all of 5 minutes (2.5 minutes per team), is sufficient to keep it "hot" in the brain, making it much easier to practice this exact same skill off-line, out of class, but now in a virtual social context where, with every successful "hit" or match, the brain is ALSO adding the psychosocial FLAVOR element that "AHH, THAT will make me more attractive to my peer group and make them happier with me as a team member!"

So the lessons that are being laid down are not just that this character has this meaning and this sound, but that knowing this character boosts my social standing in a tangible way, more so ever week, so the brain should keep on working on it in background mode even when the conscious attention goes off to work on other things. We expect to find, and I'm sure we will, that a great deal of BETWEEN-LESSON learning takes place. A grid that takes an average of 4.5 minutes to do today, revisited tomorrow, with no conscious work inbetween, will amost certainly take LESS THAN 4.5 minutes tomorrow, possibly 20% less time.

For me, the same grid took about 8 minutes the first day, 5 minutes the second day, 4 minutes for two days, and suddenly dropped to 2 minutes after two days off.

Also, this is just a satisfying activity -- the ratio of pulses of success to failure pulses is high. Not only that, but due to the nature of the game, removing some characters makes the remaining ones MORE EASY to match up, because there is less and less competition. So, again, there is a compounding effect, in that success leads to even MORE success.

So we have multiple, compounding, socially validated, socially encouraged feedback loops pushing on an associative-link formation in the brain, which is exquisitely wired to make exactly such links. The better the OTHER people on the team get, by the way, the higher the bar is raised, gradually, raising expectations on each of the team members to get faster and faster as well.

All of the mathematics works. This forms a grid that attracts, holds, persists, and evolves a stronger and stronger sense of certainty, confidence, and socially approved recall behavior.

Fluency at character and phrase recognition then takes that burden OFF the part of the brain needed to deal with grammar and other cognitive portions of language, and puts those into a socially supportive soup of confidence where THEY, in turn, can take root and find a home, which then releases further confidence and energy back into vocabulary building and fluency acquisition.


Oh, yeah, -- I included the picture of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, mmm mmm good,
just to demonstrate the power of associative context to change the mood and feeling around a subject. It works! Your "rational" self may not see the difference, but the social animal host you are riding around it surely does.

global emotional climate change

You can say that again!

Here's a simple change that will improve all the relationships in your life.

When someone around you does something that is worth a compliment, don't settle for just one. Give them a complement, wait a day, and then give it to them again.

If everyone does this, it will double the power of these words to shape and recreate behaviors around you in a way that justifies the compliments. Positive thoughts will persist longer than negative ones.

It seems so simple.
It is so powerful.

The basic lessons from computer science and neural networks is that you can get whatever behavior you want to train out of the network without ever requiring "negative" feedback. Negative feedback is inefficient, in that it says " Picture X -- now don't do that!" It gives no clue as to what to do instead, and it brings back into mind the wrong picture while doing it.

In fact, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) would say that the brain processes the "not" in a different place than the X, so you are basically refocusing the person on X, with a distant "not" in there. The result is to hit the emotional brakes, remove energy, and suspend operations.

Alternatively, praising the correct behavior, or even an GLIMMER or GLIMPSE of the correct (or desired) behavior focuses energy on THAT track, and at the same time BOOSTS energy and morale.

Also, even if it did succeed, negative feedback would get less and less frequent, and therefore less and less powerful, as behavior shifted to the desired course. On the other hand, positive feedback would get more and more frequent, and therefore more and more powerful and effective, as behavior shifts.

Again, the conclusion is -- expect and reward any trace of behavior you are looking for, and do that consistently, and you will in fact create and generate the behaviors you are looking for.

Roger Cohen on hope (for a Nobel Prize)

Roger Cohen writes in his column today in the NT Times of his hope for humanity, and for his column to win a Nobel Prize. :)

There are a few snippets I want to grab out of his Chex-party-mix-like posting today. (As if I'm in any position to complain about such writing! Or about anyone who can STAY INSIDE the 820 word limit!)

To wit:

NEW YORK — I want this column to be good. I want it to be so good, it wins a prize. One of those big prizes, like the ones they hand out every year in Stockholm and Oslo.

I want it to be subtle and full of goodness and infuse all humankind with hope. Let me be clear: I want it to be uplifting, conciliatory and bold. In fact I want it to carry some miraculous quality.

I’ve traveled the world, seen the forgotten silos on the plains, the rusting railroad cars, the forbidding watchtowers, the scavengers in the garbage, the fatigue-smudged faces, the refugees sprawled on the school room floor, the lonely lingerers, the freighters hardening the horizon, the beautiful and the damned.

Along the way I’ve learned this: We deny our connectedness at our peril. Let me be clear: ...As children of Abraham we are all responsible for one another. This is the age of responsibility.

... And I want there to be no doubt: The problems we face can only be solved together.

...May the spirit of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad — peace be upon them too — spread in the Holy Land.

Some will say I’m a dreamer. Some might find themselves unable to engage with these engaging aspirations even if this is the age of engagement. But there is no alternative to engagement except, perhaps, divorce, alienation, separation, enmity, competition, rivalry, envy, misunderstanding, threats, intimidation and rage — all of which I reject on principle.

...The hopeful will inherit the earth.


... But, well, I’ve lost my train of thought.

In conclusion, I know this column has fallen short. I am aware of its shortcomings, its banality and its immodesty. I am humbled by all the great practitioners of this 820-word craft — “art” would be going too far — in whose illustrious footsteps I tread. But I know this: If I’ve given momentum to some global fantasy, my time has not been wasted.

...Hope trumps experience every time.

Finally, let me be clear: All prize money is payable to me.

end wit.

To which I can only add, "AMEN!"
As well as a resonating quote from T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets	70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!	75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?	80
...
	85
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,	90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—	95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

Still, the truth is that "hope" matters. "Faith" matters. They matter because reality has a wonderful capacity for helping us become prosperous and surrounded by beauty, regardless where we are now, but that endpoint requires that we climb a path that curves upwards, which our primitive intuition and primary sight cannot grasp as we extrapolate it out linearly, and say, "No, that won't work. That is not what I meant at all, at all. "

Nor is it what we the hopeful are pointing at. We are referring to the place we can end up if we get into mutually supportive feedback loop shape and let that lifting-body shape attract energy and lift us up in the resulting "thermal" updraft.

And, even that hope is a second-order bounce-shot in pool, because we cannot simply "get into a different shape" or "adopt a different culture" -- those actions, in turn, ALSO require us to reach them through a slow, patient, evolutionary feedback process that starts off ever so slowly on the spiral path upwards.

So slowly, that no politician, speaking to an untrained audience or set of voters, could say, "See, look what I did, I set us on this path forward!"

Here we need faith, hope, trust, belief. Somethings we need to believe in order to see, and this is one of them. ( Well, we can also SIMULATE the behavior in computer simulations and virtual reality, which is what I'm up to today, so that we can lay down a template, a signature in otherwise unprepared minds, of what a climbing, energy-attracting feedback loop lifting-body shape looks like, and behaves like. And then, I hope, we can say "Yes, I can see how that might work!" And then we can dare to look for ways to accomplish exactly that, and if we look, we will find them, because they are all around us and easily within reach.)

Incidentally, the most POWERFUL engines we use in the world of physical technology have the same property -- they compound their power in a feedback loop so that, the faster they go, the easier it is for them to go even faster. On the other hand, what this also means is at the very start of that journey, the first step on the "yellow brick road", they go agonizingly slowly. It is precisely here that our WISDOM (and experience with simulations and new insightful-eyes) has to assure us that we should continue this path, because it is succeeding.

Example -- jet airliners, and even jet fighters, require runways that are over two miles long. The first second when they hit the throttle, there is a lot of noise, but very little motion. If we looked at that and said "nope, this doesn't work!" and cut the throttle and budget, we'd be wrong.

At the start they are very very ponderous and slow. Don't be misled by that. Some kinds of "small progress" are huge. This is one of them.

I need to teach you how to RECOGNIZE and DISTINGUISH between small things that are actually small, and small things that are actually huge.

Then, we need to teach that to policy makers, and to the public, so they too can recognize the tiny steps, well within our budget, that we CAN do, that have more power than all the LARGE steps combined.

Meanwhile, remember jet fighters. They start very slowly. There's a physical reason for this, and in that reason, and that feedback loop process, is the hope for our future. The road curves upwards, so trying to "look down it" we miss the curve and say "That can't possibly work!" We are wrong. It can work. It does work. It will work.

But first, we need new glasses, so that we can see the sucker.



Wade