What's that called again?

What do you call it?  That thing where people get together,  compare notes, and leave with everyone knowing more than when they arrived?

There are many low-odds high-damage risks, way too many to deal with them all individually.

There is at least one certain high-damage risk, that corruption will infect high-places and passivity infect low-places, and stupidity and paranoia will infect us all; that we will turn into squabbling children instead of mature adults, and resort to screaming instead of reasoning and learning from each other.

There is a big difference among risks, though: if we could solve the "reasoning together" problem, it would give us the necessary tools to prioritize and solve the other problems we face. Productive civil discourse and learning from dissenting voices can open our eyes.

We don't have that many more trillion dollars to spend defending ourselves from risks. We should select the few we plan to address wisely, not impulsively. I suggest that protecting civilized discourse and learning from each other should be in the short list.

Yet for all the emphasis on fundamentals,  over time variously learning Latin and Greek, or music or Math and Science,  we remain far from the ability to learn a thing or two from every person we disagree with.

We seem to not teach that it is easy, as a human, to be sure of things that turn out to be false, and to approach our certainty with a grain of salt, and at least civility towards those who come out on a different side of issues.

It should never be about "which side is right", but about what "we" can learn from "them", despite the "obvious fact" that "they" are "wrong" about so much.   It's not a question of tolerating "them", it's a question of honestly accepting,  despite all evidence, that maybe "they" might have some fact, some data point, some wisdom that we are totally blind to, and tolerating our differences while we work at while investigating what that actual news might be.   And expecting the same from them.

"Put your heads together and come up with your best answer" should not be about one "side" dominating and trampling down the other until it "wins."

Learn how to learn at least one thing from each other!   Not "I'm smart and you're either obviously evil or obviously stupid!"

"There is nothing I can learn from you" is not a statement about them-- it's a statement about a gap in your ability to "eat the meat and spit out the bones."

We don't seem to teach that in school.  It doesn't seem to just flow from learning math and science or logic.  It doesn't seem to have a recognized name we all agree on to refer to it.   It's some kind of core value of civilization,   a necessary factor in the totality of us having more wisdom than the brightest individual one of us.

But,  we're missing it and we need it.  Now more than ever.

The promise of World Peace (1985)

Long before "Occupy Wall Street" some saw events unfolding and started building a response to them that will "survive spring break."

Excerpts from "The Promise of World Peace",  
a statement by the Baha'i Universal House of Justice, 
October 1985

Peace .. is now at long last within the reach of the nations.  For the first time in history it is possible for everyone to view the entire planet, with all its myriad diversified peoples, in one perspective.  World peace is not only possible but inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of mankind -- in the worlds of one great thinker, "the planetization of mankind."

Whether peace is to be reached only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity's stubborn clinging to old patterns of behavior, or is to be embraced now by an act of consultative will, is the choice before all who inhabit the earth....

Among the favorable signs are ...the spread of women's and youth movements calling for the end to war; and the spontaneous spawning of widening networks of ordinary people seeking understanding through personal communication.

Baha'u'llah wrote ... The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective....

Flaws in the prevailing order are conspicuous in .. the threatened collapse of the international economic order, the spread of anarchy and terrorism, the intense suffering which these and other afflictions are causing to increasing millions.  Indeed so much have aggression and conflict come to characterize our social, economic,and religious systems that many have succumbed to the view that such behavior is intrinsic to human nature and therefore ineradicable.

With the entrenchment of this view, a paralyzing contradiction has developed in human affairs.  One the one hand, people of all nations proclaim not only their readiness but their longing for peace and harmony... On the other, uncritical assent is given to the proposition that human beings are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive and thus incapable of erecting a social system at once progressive and peaceful... based on cooperation and reciprocity.

... Satisfaction on this point will enable all people to set in motion constructive social forces which , because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and cooperation instead of war and conflict.

To choose such a course is not to deny humanity's past, but to understand it.  The Baha'i Faith regards the current world confusion and calamitous condition in human affairs as a natural phase in an organic process leading ultimately and irresistible to the unification of the human race in a single social order whose boundaries are those of the planet.  The human race as a distinct organic unit, has passed through the evolutionary stages analogous to the states of infancy and childhood in the lives of its individual members and is now in the culminating period of its turbulent adolescence approaching the long-awaited coming of age.

...That the human race is today experiencing the unavoidable tumult which marks its collective coming of age is not a reason for despair but a prerequisite to undertaking the stupendous enterprise of building a peaceful world.

That such an enterprise is possible, that the necessary constructive forces do exist, that unifying social structures can be erected, is the theme we urge you to examine.

The resurgence of fanatical religious fervor occurring in many lands ... testifies to the spiritual bankruptcy it represents.

All too many of these ideologies, alas, instead of embracing the concept of the oneness of mankind and promoting the increase of concord among different peoples have tended to deify the state, to subordinate the rest of mankind to one nation, race, or class, to attempt to suppress all discussion and interchange of ideas, or to callously abandon starving millions to the operations of a market system all all to clearly is aggravating the plight of the majority of mankind, while enabling small sections to live in a condition of affluence scarcely dreamed by our forbears.

Those who care for the future of the human race may well ponder this advice. "If long-cherished ideals and time honored institutions, if certain social assumptions and religious formulae have ceased to promote the welfare of the generality of mankind, if they no longer minister to the needs of a continually evolving humanity, let them be swept away and relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines."

The inordinate disparity between rich and poor, a source of acute suffering, keeps the world in a state of instability, virtually on the brink of war.

Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole.    Baha'u'llah's statement is "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."

The emancipation of women, the achievement of full equality between the sexes, is one of the most important, though less acknowledged prerequisites of peace.

Entire Document
The Promise of World Peace

More on the Baha'i Faith
   International
   USA

On restructuring government and power on earth

I think you (Yangbo) touched a key issue, and a systems thinking one, in the comment that "Of course, no system of governance can be perfect but can nonetheless be amended through continuous improvement. "

The twin questions of what a "more perfect" (!) system of governance would look like, at all, let alone how to get from here to there, are central. In general I'm biased towards trajectories that involve evolution, not revolution, given the long and inglorious track-record of revolutions being extremely expensive in lives and wealth, becoming co-opted, going bad, and ending up being as bad or worse than what they replaced.

More precisely, ARE there systems of governance which can, in fact, be amended through continuous improvement, and which do not, ultimately become corrupted, self-serving, and viewing efforts at improvement as some type of "enemy action"?

If we don't understand the mechanisms by which systems "go bad", it's hard to imagine we can make one that won't. This is indeed a systems thinking and modeling question, I think, and this group is a great one to reflect on that.

Much more specifically, all personalities, morality, and hidden motives and agendas of individuals aside, what are the STRUCTURAL feedback loops which comprise "governance"? Which structural loops are crucial to an on-going process of incremental improvement? And in what way have these loops failed to be load-bearing when ramping up in scale?

I'll assert without proof that all large organizations face this same question.

I think a wonderfully profound and delightful place to start that discussion is with John Gall's book "Systemantic... How Sysems Really Work and How They Fail", with a summary here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

A quote from the introduction of that book captures the thought: "Reformers blame everything on 'the system' and propose new systems that would - they assert - guaranteed a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point - that their own System would work very well if only it were universally adopted. The point of view espoused in this essay is more radical and at the same time more pessimistic. Stated as succinctly as possible: the fundamental problem does not lie in any particular System, but rather in Systems As Such."

Of course, Gall goes on to point out that we are surrounded with previous efforts to build what TS Eliot would call "systems so perfect that no one will need to be good", and that our landscape is now dominated with the still-living artifacts of those "solutions" which have now, in fact, become "the problem". Rather than repeating that mistake yet one more time, hoping for different results, Gall suggests maybe we should understand better what exactly it is about systems we've misunderstood.

Wade Schuette • One thing about systems that was made clear by Jay Forrester and illustrated by Peter Senge's "beer game" is that it is not SUFFICIENT for human beings to be well-intentioned if they have a limited range of perception of the distant ("system") effects of their actions and are caught in a feedback loop.

And John Sterman in Business Dynamics notes that essentially all humans, even MIT grads (!), have very poor perception of what parts of their environment are due to feedback from their own prior actions.

I'll toss in my own two cents here, and add that the perceptual problems in LARGE organizations will always occur because of a fact left out of most models, namely:

*** Reality is scale-dependent ***

My background is in physics and I side with Einstein, almost always misundertood and misquoted, who affirmed that there WAS INDEED an underlying reality, but that even perfect unbiased observers would perceive it differently due to space-time-curvature, AND SO THEY WOULD NEED TO CORRECT FOR THAT IN ORDER TO COMPARE NOTES AND SEE THAT THEY AGREED ON THE UNDERLYING SINGLE REALITY.

So, assume that all humans have a finite capacity for information, a finite-radius of perception, and even within that must vastly oversimplify the flood of data to come up with one or more mental models they will attempt to "snap observations to" in order to make sense of what is going on and respond to it. (Basic cybernetic behavior.)

One example of scale dependence would be the question of whether an molecule of H20 ("water") is "free" to move or "captive". On the scale of molecules, the molecule is free to move about. On the scale of plumbing, the "water" in the "pipe" is captive to go from the water-tank on the hill OUT the faucet. Both are true, but they are different. It is wrong-headed to ask "WHICH is true?" It is right-headed to ask "How can both of these be true, and what do we need to correct for before we attempt to compare and align them?"

As organizations become larger, EVEN WITH PERFECT NON-DISTORTING communication by levels of "management", the nature of reality at the top must diverge from the nature of reality at the bottom, because they operate on different scales of space and time.

Since this effect isn't recognized, it leads to increasing friction between "management" and "front line staff" in which each group views the other as being increasingly "out of touch with reality". (Which is true, in a sense.)

It has nothing to do with "intelligence". Here's a more specific example - a "hybrid image" which has the property that if you view it from normal screen distance is "clearly" Albert Einstein, yet if you view it from across the room is "clearly" Marilyn Monroe.


http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/08/are-you-my-mommy-what-shape-am-i-anyway.html

If we have any hope of building very tall structures in social space (ie, corporations, governments, etc) then we should take into account that this effect will come into play RAPIDLY, and figure out how to make load-bearing feedback loops that take it into account.

Right now, what happens is that as the top and the bottom of the organization diverge in scope, animosity, blame, and finally fracture occurs. Pretty much every time, and pretty much everything we've ever attempted to build to large scale has collapsed along this axis.

Designing social architectures to take this fourth-dimension into account will require computer modeling, because we as humans are not very good at 3-D geometry, let alone 4-D dynamic feedback geometry.

The only clean solution I can see to this type of fractally complex problem is precisely encapsulated in how fractal shapes emerge from very simple recursive rules. Namely, reverse the process. Seek eigenvectors, as it were. Seek simple recursively-stable governance structures such that at each level the problems remain "the same shape." Then we break the height constraint.

Wade

Related links:

More on Hybrid Images (like "Marilyn Einstein")
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/10/discussion-of-hybrid-images.html

 "Hypnotized in High Places"
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2009/10/hypnotic-trance-in-high-places.html


"Why we have so much trouble seeing"
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2008/10/why-we-have-so-much-trouble-seeing.html

Blindness at the Top  (bandwidth issues in central planning for crisis management)
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/09/whats-wrong-with-decision-making-at-top.html


Unity and adaptation  (design of control systems)
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/11/adaptation-versus-control-and-army-fm-3.html


Unity and adaptation (part 2)
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/11/unity-and-adaptation-continued.html


Why are so many flights delayed?  (system factors leading to blame and conflict)
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-are-so-many-flights-delayed.html


Baha'i Faith principles for developing a world government that would work as intended
http://www.bahai.com/Bahaullah/principles.htm


Why Blind and Stubborn Management is not a winning hand
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2010/11/blind-plus-stubborn-is-not-winning-hand.html


Surprising case of Authority with listening - the US Army Leadership Manual
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2006/12/us-army-leadership-field-manual-fm-22.html