Guanxi, social capital, relationships, and health, wealth

INTRODUCTION

If we don't understand the nature of life, we can't possibly reason correctly about the "health" property of it, let alone reason about finding cost-effective interventions to improve or sustain it.

The nature of life is not obvious. I believe we have it all wrong, and as a direct consequence of this we have flawed personal behaviors, corporate behaviors, and a flawed national policy and system of "health care." Until this error is fixed, our efforts to improve "health" will simply fail in baffling ways.

Where did we go wrong?

THE OLD MODEL OF LIFE

Biology 101 teaches us, and we absorb deeply, this model:

1. LIMIT: All life is made of one or more biological cells.
2. LIMIT: Cells are blobs of protoplasm surrounded by distinct walls that clearly separate the inside from the outside. Only cells that touch each other in a more-or-less fixed shape can form "higher" life forms.
3. LIMIT: Although humans and "higher" organisms are both made of cells and have an independent life of their own, even larger colonies or collections of higher life forms cannot and do not form even "higher" life forms with a life of its own.
4. LIMIT: Life can only arise from other life and be "passed on".
   
5. LIMIT: The algebra of living things only includes division -- one living thing can divide to form two living things, but two or more living things don't re-assemble into one living thing. (A notable exception is sperm and egg, which are each separately alive and yet reassemble into a single life form.)
   
6. LIMIT: all life forms die.
   

Although every one of these rules or limits or statements has "exceptions", the model is treated as if it is "essentially correct" and not questioned very much. I will challenge it much more strongly right now, stepping on the toes of tradition and religious faith in the process.

I will propose a much more general model of life that reduces to the above model in the the special case of looking at biological life on the surface of the earth today.


MY NEW MODEL OF LIFE

1. All life is based on processes that have at least one closed feedback loop which is self-aware and self-protective. There is not limit to the special case of biology. A computer network, a family, a corporation, a culture, a nation all are "life-forms" with such loops. One very important class of living entity is called a "relationship" between people. Another class of living entity is the relationship between cells in "an organ" or "a body system", such as the heart or the circulatory system or the digestive system. These are independently alive.
2. A living entity has fuzzy edges which extend outwards, possibly across great distances with gaps in between, to anything else that forms part of its closed regulatory feedback loops.
3. Essentially all living entities are in the middle of a hierarchy of life, encompassing smaller life-forms below, and comprising parts of higher life-forms above, simultaneously. Each "level" has a "life" (closed feedback regulatory loop) of its own, and there are also some loops (lives) which span multiple levels.
4. Life can be created on-the-fly, systematically, on purpose. It is not that hard to create new life. We do it all the time. Various aspects of life can also be extinguished on the fly. It is not that hard to damage or kill life forms. A Life-form becomes "dead" when its primary closed loop no longer functions.
5. Any number of living things can combine, and often are already weekly combined, into larger life-forms with separate independent lives of their own.
6. There is no reason a life form has to die.

So what? WHAT DOES THAT CHANGE?

First, if we recognize that people, corporations, and nations are all linked together into a huge multi-level life form, then we realize that it is not possible to have one part of this "healthy" while another part of it is "unhealthy." We are, basically, all chained to each other and our fates our linked.

Corporations are life-forms, as are nations, but they are not "separate" entities from "people."

It is true, for example that there is a "personal economy" and a "corporate economy" that have separate lives and interests in the very short run, but it is also true but unrecognized that there is a longer-time-span linkage between the two so that destruction of the personal economy in an effort to improve the corporate economy is simply self-defeating and self-destructive.

This means that it is nonsensical for "Public Health" to see corporations as "an enemy". Any solution that deals with personal or family health will collapse if the local economy collapses. Jobs are as important as medicine for personal sustainable health.

Similarly, it makes no sense for corporations to try to build a vibrant economy on the backs of and at the expense of people and the environment -- because, ultimately, they ARE people and if the people or environment are destroyed, the corporate entities and economies will die off as well. It won't work for corporations to try to become computer-based and get rid of all people, for reasons I'll get to later.

Similarly, people do not have "clean edges" where there is "my" health and "your" health. Every day scientists find deeper ways in which the health of "your neighbors" and "your friends" and "your friends' friends" contribute to and often even determine "your" health and "your" behavior. A cell with damaged DNA can go on functioning if it is surrounded by healthy cells that it interacts with strongly. The same is true for people.

"Our" health is not somehow contained within the boundaries of our skin. Things can go wrong with our health that are outside that boundary, and things can go right with our health that are outside that boundary. This is a cruicial fact!

It has been shown that, for an 60 year old American, making a new friend has a stronger impact on their survival rate and than dealing with smoking, drinking, exercise, and nutrition. This should not come as a surprise, with the new model of biology and life.


WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL HEALTH CARE POLICY?


I think it is evident that a set of interventions that improved interpersonal relationships ( life forms) would have more of a beneficial effect on our lives, morale, and "physical health" than most other interventions we can imagine (such as reduced drug costs or new insurance mechanisms.)

In other words, humans are part of a meta-biologicial ecosystem where the health of the relationship-entities sea that we swim in determines, effectively, the health of the protoplasm units we wear (our bodies.)

Similarly, in the business world, the sea of relationship-entities ("guanxi" or "social capital") is as important, or more important, than the individual roles and positions people have in determining the "health" of corporations and the regional and national economy.

Even on the departmental or work-team level, the relationship-sea, the ecology of life forms that occur "between" people is as important, or more important, than individual "skills and experience" in determining successful perception of direction and accomplishment of objectives.


CONCLUSIONS / RECOMMENDATIONS

Any strategy for personal health, corporate success, or a thriving national economy is doomed to failure unless it attends to the needs of the inter-entity life-form community as well.

"Relationships" are not just something that people "are" or "do" -- they are independent living entities that must be nurtured and which have their own "health care" needs and interests.

This is a much stronger mental model that can direct the attention and focus of policy in ways that will be much more successful at building a sustainable world than the old model.

Wade

The end of unity in the USA?

"It was the best of times It was the worst of times." Charles Dicken's description captures the rapidly shifting ground in the USA today regarding the "united" part of "United States". All biological species tend to fly apart, as do all flocks of birds or schools of fish. Species that survive need a strong force that continually pulls them back towards the center of mass of the group.

For humans, research has shown that you can generate a face that will be considered "beautiful" by finding the center of every feature across all races and combining them - giving a result like Catherine Zeta-Jones that seems familiar to everyone and yet a little exotic to all in a pleasant way.

Similarly, the behavior of a flying flock of birds can be generated in a computer with just a few simple rules, one of which is "Move towards the center of the flock", and another being "Don't run into the bird next to you." (If you have Java enabled, there is a cool animated interactive flock simulator that you can experiment with here.)

So it is startling to me to see a collapse of this principle in the central governing body of the US, the US Congress, or in the government of the states of Michigan and California. Congress is playing with fire and a current extension it granted itself on its homework until this Friday, Dec. 14th. (It was due October 1st, and I wrote earlier about the pending US Government shutdown here. )


The mood is described in a New York Times article today : Muscle Flexing in Senate: G.O.P. Defends Strategy, which I excerpt here:

WASHINGTON —...

[...it] was more than a little telling when Mr. McConnell laid down his mark in the current budget fight on Tuesday, informing the Capitol Hill press corps that he was ready to offer Democrats a deal ...the Republicans should get virtually everything they want.

Mr. McConnell and his fellow Republicans are playing such tight defense, blocking nearly every bill proposed by the slim Democratic majority that they are increasingly able to dictate what they want...

It also explains why so little is getting done in Congress right now.

But there are also risks. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found that the stagnation in Congress has made an impression. Just 21 percent of Americans say they have a favorable view of Congress and 64 percent disapprove. And the two parties have been unyielding, calculating that voters will blame the other side.

“I am not seeing much common ground, meeting in the center,” said Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, a Republican who is seeking a third term. “And if we don’t find that, the Senate will fail in its governing responsibilities.

“The thing that’s important to remember is that the Senate was structured to govern from the center, to find the common sense. There is little sense about this place right now.”

Democrats say the Republican stance, especially on spending, is reckless and aimed at shutting down the government.

By the calculation of Mr. McConnell and other Republicans, voters will reward them for stopping the Democrats from doing all sorts of things that the Republicans view as foolish.

Aides to the Republican leadership said they hoped to supplement that message with an agenda that they plan to lay out early next year and that they said would show clear differences with the Democrats.

In the meantime, Mr. McConnell and the Republicans, with Mr. Bush’s support, effectively have a stranglehold on the Senate. That has in turn created bitterness between Democrats in the Senate and House, where Democrats have a larger majority and more leverage.

Mr. Reid met Tuesday afternoon with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California as the Democrats continued to struggle to formulate an “omnibus” spending package that would bundle 11 appropriations bills and avoid a shutdown of government agencies.

So, it seems clear that the strategy of focusing on differences and amplifying them instead of seeking common ground has managed to stop operation of the Congress almost entirely. And it seems clear that the Republicans don't deny that, and are delighted with that result, figuring voters, or maybe corporate supporters, will be thankful and reward them for preventing any motion in the direction the elected Democratic majority wants to go now.

This also seems to be an unprecedented focus on winning everything possible today, regardless of whatever hard feelings or long term damage to working relationships it may cause the future.

It also seems to be an embodiment of the assumption that the way to get maximum long-term benefits is to keep on fighting intense battles for maximum short-term benefits. The belief being apparently that winning every battle will surely win the war.

The fallacy in that logic was a subject here recently. Only certain kinds of things have the property that short-term and long-term values are the same. The Japanese seem to be at one end of the spectrum, focusing on long-term gain, and the US seems to be at the other end, focusing on short-term gain.

Why is that?

One obvious reason may be a simple lack of education in the country that short-term and long-term results may go in opposite directions. This doesn't seem to explain how the US at one point 200 years ago "knew" that, and has increasingly been "forgetting" it.

It is not just the Congress, of course, that shares this misconception. Most US businesses seem to be in the grip of the myth of "EVA" - Economic Value Added, trying desperately to maximize short-term profits, and not understanding why that strategy isn't helping long-term prosperity.

But the article a few days ago by Stanley Fish in the New York Times, advocating a Machiavellian government, ready to cheat and lie at any time to gain its way, seems part and parcel of this approach. Again, there is an obsession with "pragmatism" that seems to me just a code-word for short-term victory and a lack of contemplation of the long-term impact of everyone following such a strategy.

But it goes both ways, and has a feedback loop, and closes in on itself and latches. If, in fact, you assume that the other side in any disagreement is bargaining in bad faith and has no intention of living up to its word or keep its promises, then why should you accept any promise of future benefit at the cost of an immediate loss?

The whole concept of "horse-trading" as it was called assumes that a man's word is good for something. It assumes that people care about their social reputation for honesty, because that is the currency needed to keep the system running. No lawyer will be around to enforce the back-room verbal deals that have to be made, so they must rely on the core value of honor, even among thieves.

So it may be that abandoning all pretense of caring about honest-dealing, as Mr. Fish advocates, and as many other apparently go along with, has the result of destroying the entire basis on which compromises necessary to keep the country from fracturing are based.

Certainly, a flock of birds simulated in a computer, if the instructions are changed to fly away from instead of towards the center, will immediately break apart.

What I think the Republican strategists are missing is that it will not split into two flocks, because there is momentum and a long term impact to deal with. If every person on the Republican side has come around to believing in and advocating emphasis on divisiveness and differences, yes, the flock will split into two -- and then the Republican portion will explode into a million separate pieces.

Because, at that point, why should any Republican trust any other Republican to deliver on promises that are made? Even "loyalty" is based on the concept that present suffering will be rewarded later. If that promise is worthless, why should anyone be loyal?

It's like the old joke of a man who asks a Boy Scout if he would trip an old lady for a million dollars, and the Scout considers and says "Yes." Then the man asks him if he would do it for one dollar, and the Scout replies "What do you take me for?"

And the man answers: "I already know what you are. I'm just trying to find your price."

I'm not on a personal vendetta here against Republicans, and I'm trying to be neutral but scientific. I simply can't see how a strategy of developing strong muscles and momentum pushing us apart instead of pulling us together and overcoming differences can possibly work.

By my calculations and logic if the Republicans "win" that battle, they lose the war.

Maybe I missed something. The hot-lines are open, and anonymous comments are welcome and won't be removed unless they involve personal attacks, inappropriate language, or advertising. I really am curious what the thinking is here of how this is going to play out.

Maybe the thinking is that cooperation is not required, only obedience; and obedience can be obtained by the swift and merciless execution of raw power, punishing those who disobey and break ranks of loyalty. This is "theory X" of corporate power, writ large.

And, there are two things wrong with that strategy.

One is that life is too complex these days to be understood from any one point of view, regardless how strongly enforced. More precisely, the stronger the single view is enforced and dissent suppressed, the more blind that leadership becomes to anything outside their limited experience. People may be brought into line, but Life will not. Global warming cannot be bullied into compliance. Gravity will continue to work. New infectious viruses will not care what you think. Life goes on. Domination of the whole world is simply not possible.

Similarly, the efforts to achieve "control" by continually simplifying the world until it becomes manageable is the myth that has brought many large corporations down. It won't simplify just because you wish it would, and you only end up with a simple model that has no connection to reality, producing results that refuse to stay in line. As any biologist knows, simplification of an ecosystem is the pathway to death. Diversity is power, when it comes to survival. Well, diversity with a continual distributed, voluntary restoring force towards the middle.

The second thing wrong with that strategy is that the most serious risk to stable control is not external, but internal.

No person, or group of people, has some sort of absolute reference frame. As soon as you break off input from outside, the internal world is free to start rotating and twisting, which will be entirely invisible from inside. The rubber sheet of the world stretches and shrinks, and the people embedded in that world stretch and shrink with it, unaware of these changes because it still looks "right" to them. But "right" has become disconnected to the larger world, and starts drifting, both overall, and then breaking apart into separate pools of "right" that differ with each other.

This may be quite visible to those outside that world, but will be invisible and denied to those inside its clutches.

I am not sure, but from the examples I can see I think that pathway leads to a collapse of morale, motivation, and to complete fatigue and depression as well. Certainly this is true, overall, to people who become fragmented from society. Fragmentation is followed very quickly with increasing isolation, depression, deterioration of health on all fronts, and perhaps violence against the world, which seems to be going wrong, or against oneself, possibly suicide.

It's the larger scale version of what our cells do in our body if they are removed from the body -- a process called "apoptosis" kicks in, and the cells commit suicide.

We seem to rely on some connection and alignment with the outside world, through all sorts of invisible pathways that we can only dimly sense, indirectly.

It makes sense. Life on Earth has evolved for billions of years, developing immune systems and the ability to police itself and restore health. If some part breaks off and starts growing on its own, which we'd call cancer, generally the body moves in and destroys it or by cutting it off from nutrition, kills it off. Life is way bigger than any one person, or group of people, and if they go head-to-head with Life, I think Life generally wins. It has about a billion years more practice and experience at this sort of thing.

Our bodies aren't built with a single Rambo-cell using super-human powers to command and direct all the other cells to do what they need to for the body to work. The idea is absurd. No cell could possibly understand, let alone keep track of all the required activities that need to go on for life to continue, let alone manage them centrally.

Past a certain size, either the body manages itself, or it dies. It cannot be "run" from some command post. It's not a question of raw power of the bullying type -- if the King cell had a super-death-ray that could kill any cell that disobeyed, it wouldn't help. It simply can't be run from the top.

That's not how very large aggregates of living things work. There are no successful examples based on the Rambo model. Those simply violate the underlying physics and math of Life. All attempts at centrally planned economies have failed, for the same underlying reason -- it can't be done.

There's just too much to plan, and the best a central authority can do is "prioritize" and work on a few "top things", and that requires building a mental context to get mental arms around a problem, and you can only do a few of those context shifts a day, if that. But reality has thousands of new "top things" that have to be dealt with each day, every day, or they will crash and burn and damage the overall system. Just picture trying to centrally manage how to feed 8 million New Yorkers every day, and what would happen if the Government, any government, tried to "manage" that process and "plan" it. Let alone a government that specialized in paralysis and stopping all planning operations dead in their tracks. So in a month or two we'll restart the food? That's not a plan. Now multiply that by a billion.

For that matter, imagine how much you'd get done if you had to spend your day regulating your own digestion and metabolism on a second by second basis.

That's the task. No one can "manage" that centrally. The more it's managed the worse it gets.

Oh, it does need management and structure, but the control system required is distributed and emergent, a system thing, not central and designed by mere humans.

And that requires all the parts to work together, above their diverse functions, in an overarching unity that recognizes a common bond and a common support system.

That's the model Life uses. It's the only model we know that works. I think we should pay more attention to understanding it and aligning our selves with it, or at least with the principles involved in developing healthy strength and a prospering, functioning body.

So, who's right? Well, everyone's partly right, as usual. A monolithic central planning government, trying to run everything will not work. An absence of any control structure will not work. We need to evolve the same kind of emergent yet distributed control that our bodies have, simultaneously globally aware, operating as with a single spirit, and still locally active, specializing in a billion local issues. We need both "freedom" and "law and order".

That is not, however, the end point of unfettered competition and "freedom" of every part to do its own thing on its own schedule. The parts still have to submit to the whole -- but the whole is not run by any single part. I think they had that idea 200 years ago when the US was formed.

And, curiously, if the shouting and screaming and pushing and name-calling would take a break, I think everyone actually agrees with the goal, just not how to get there.

Maybe it needs a better and more vivid simulation and animation to get more widely understood. There is no solution where one person, or one small group, or one religion, or culture, or political part, or corporation, or one nation-state "runs" everything and everyone.

This jockeying to be "in charge" and to be that "one" is based on a total misunderstanding of what is possible anymore in a small but fractally-complex world.

A different kind of overarching common spirit and unity is where we need to go. We are so close,with instant world-wide communication, and it is the best of times. But we are so much in apoplectic panic about loss of control and the risks of not being "number one" that it is the worst of times.

I agree that humans, or cells, or corporations, or nations left to their own devices and free-will will behave badly. I also believe that, as our human bodies discovered, it is still possible to constrain that free-will without killing it, if some level of submission to the whole is accepted.

It's not a loss - it's a gain. It's giving up a false hope of something we could never have for a real plan for getting something we could all use, and a world economy and political and military system that isn't as unstable and prone to collapse or self-destruction as this one.

I should state that my thinking here is guided by my own limited understanding of the teachings of the Baha'i Faith, and I recommend reading up on it directly for any readers who are not familiar with it. But, I am not the spokesman for the Baha'is, so I'll simply close with their own statement on the subject:

If the Baha'i experience can contribute in whatever measure to reinforcing hope in the unity of the human race, we are happy to offer it as a model for study.
From: The Promise of World Peace, a statement of the Baha'i Universal House of Justice, October, 1985.

Wade


Here's the Dicken's quote in context:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870)

Photo credit: "fighting fan" by K0P (on flickr)

We never talk anymore

Actually, it's not that we never talk anymore, it's that we never ever learned how to talk in the first place.

Like the old tale of the blind men stumbling into an elephant and arguing that it is "like a rope" or "like a tree" or "like a huge leaf", the whole planet is stumbling into new territory without a way to compare notes and rise above voting whether the elephant is "a tree" or not, based on a 51% cutoff of votes.

There is, indeed, a "unity" higher than the "diversity" of views, that is not reached by everyone giving in to the majority view.

The New York Times had an op-ed piece on global warming, with 120 or so comments. Nicholas Kristoff had a piece, Nov 13, 2007, "Avoiding Climate Change: Why Americans Prevaricate and Delay on Taking Action." I read all the comments carefully, then posted this reply:

I think Abraham Lincoln once said that if he had ten minutes to chop down a tree he'd spend the first five sharpening the axe.

For all our high-tech at assembling machine parts and getting them to work together, we are in the dark ages at assembling each other's views of knowledge and coming up with a Big Picture we can all trust.

Sequentially speaking our own views is fascinating, but underpowered, and isn't leading to an informed consensus that has transparency and improves with time. Instead we're still back at trying to find the 51% of the votes to suppress the other 49% of us.

Lots of people want to "educate" me, but fewer want to listen to what I'm trying to say in return.

I agree we need research, but before we research some scientific thing, let's get serious work at how to compare notes, get past hysteria, and figure out which way is actually up -- in general, not just about one issue like climate change.

Sure, it's important. So is poverty. So is pollution. So are governance and human values. So are all sorts of public health issues. So are tyranny and exploitation.

We need better ways to pool notes and educate each other that we can trust, that work in 6 months not 3 generations to bring everyone up to speed on what's going on and why, or what we don't know. Something with enough credibility and transparency that even skeptics are willing to come and participate.

That seems to me what's broken or missing here. Without it, it seems we'll just go on forever disagreeing and shouting and never coming up with solutions to anything that are sustainable.

Our process for getting together and combining views of the elephant is broken, or never existed, but, either way, we need to work on that before we simply go on trying to use a broken process to argue in ever shriller and louder voices that our own views and facts have some validity too.

The complex problems will not reduce themselves to "trees" or "leaves" because those are what we understand easily. We need to figure out how to understand "elephant", which means all of us are wrong, or more precisely, right-but-incomplete.

Maybe social networking technology or Wiki's can help. Like a huge space frame used to reassemble fragments of exploded aircraft parts, we need some way to put all these small parts into a huge 3-D space where they can be compared to other parts and let the larger picture emerge.

That's the kind of thing that scientific peer-review is supposed to do, but the issues these days involve huge social issues, feedback, and interdependencies of the type that Science, sadly, hasn't really gotten to yet. Many of these issues do not lend themselves to being measured by numbers (or, as I've discussed, by "scalars" or single numbers that are rankable.)

Electing people who consolidate 51% of the views and squash the other 49% in order to "make progress" doesn't look to me like a viable solution. It doesn't matter that everyone "agree" the elephant is a "tree", if it's wrong.

It's the unity ABOVE diversity we need, not stronger or more strident voices for trees or leaves or ropes. We need to figure out a civilized way to respect each other and consult with each other and learn surprising things from each other without having to "win" the discussion.

And, it's a multi-level world. There are needs at different scales, not just different places. It's not OK if public health tries to solve needs of individuals and neglects needs of corporations, shocking as that seems. It's not ok to solve needs of corporations at the expense of individuals or nations. It's not sufficient to solve people and corporations at the expense of the nation or the planet's biosphere. It's not an "OR" equation ... it's an "AND" equation.

And it's not OK to solve the problems of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, or the problems of the US at the expense of everyone else -- not for moral reasons, however valid, but because in the end the morality is trying to tell us that we only have one lifeboat here, and all our problems are tangled together. We have to fix all the holes in the lifeboat, not just those at our end, or it will still sink. Either the planet has a functioning biosphere or it doesn't, whatever it is that depends on or doesn't. At some point the damage we're doing matters, and it would be really good to know for sure where that point is, or was.

The complexity is more than you or I or any human can grapple with, as individuals. It is not more than we can deal with as the multi-level planetary sized organized thingie that we are. Large groups of people can deal with massive amounts of detail complexity, but what we're dying on here is the other kind of complexity, interactional complexity. It's not just "more of the same", more details than we can track ... it's a more complex shape and interaction called "elephant", not just more trees than we can count.

Large groups can synthesize emergent understanding of that kind of complexity, the same way termites, individually with barely a neuron to work with, can build nests with advanced air-conditioning features built in. But we need to realize that's the problem we're up against so we focus more social energy on it.

Wade

Baha'i social and economic development

UN-NYC

For reflection, here's a comment from the Office of Social and Economic Development at the Baha'i World Center, from "The Evolution of Institutional Capacity for Social and Economic Development".

Baha'i social and economic development focuses on increasing the capacity of the friends to make decisions about the spiritual and material progress of their communities and then implement them.

While such development activities provide services that lead to a visible improvement in some aspect of life, their ultimate success is measured by the degrees to which they enhance the ability to address issues of development at increasingly higher levels of complexity and effectiveness.

This applies not only to individuals and communities but also to institutions. As development efforts grow, organizational structures should evolve to meet new challenges and opportunities.

And, this from a Letter of October 20, 1983, from the Universal House of Justice to the Baha'is of the World:

The steps to be taken must necessarily begin in the Baha'i Community itself, with the friends endeavoring, through their application of spiritual principles, their rectitude of conduct and the practice of the art of consultation, to uplift themselves and thus become self-sufficient and self-reliant....

Progress in the development field will largely depend on natural stirrings at the grassroots, and it should receive its driving force from those sources than from an imposition of plans and programs from the top....

... All can share; all can participate in the joint enterprise of applying more systematically the principles of the faith to upraising the quality of human life. The key to success is unity in spirit and in action.

And from the 1993 "Baha'i Social and Economic Development:Prospects for the Future",

Activities in the development field should be viewed as a reinforcement of the teaching work, as a greater manifestation of faith in action. ...

Development projects in themselves offer great opportunities to the friends to become involved in the life of society...

Openness to collaboration with people of capacity and leaders of thought concerned with issues of progress and willingness and ability to invite them to participate in applying the Teaching to specific problems, have to be created at all levels ...

The observations made in the previous section suggest the gradual establishment in each national community of channels ... to achieve material progress for themselves and their people.

...to have relevance ... it must, in all cases carry out its projects in collaboration with the responsible administrative institutions.

(credit: UN SED meeting originally uploaded by fozia25 ... click photo for to
go to flickr for a better view and set of photos.).

Village scene
Uploaded to flickr by carf

Detroit Mercy Hospitals scene by hollyziggy

unity without diversity is bad for everyone

It's not the size, it's the lack of diversity -- the world financial markets show us the risks of unity without diversity, and the 366 point drop in the Dow Jones last friday is just a taste of it.

There is also a risk in perverting the language that is not mentioned, as the term "hedge" used to mean "to make safer with a contrary bet" whereas today it appears to mean "to make riskier by highly leveraging the same bet".

Of course, once upon a time, a "bank" was a conservative, responsible place that had long-term plans and stability, not a place with a fortune that could rise or fall, as one shocked European banker noted, with the federal funds rate changing by one point for one quarter.

Here's the highlights from an article today that touches those points.

One World Taking Risks Together
New York Times
by Nelson D. Schwartz
Oct 21, 2007

HUGE financial losses in the United States spark fears in Europe.... the Panic of 1907, which culminated exactly 100 years ago today.

But this time around, it may take much longer to repair the damage and restore confidence than it did a century ago. It’s not only that the sums are larger now...It’s also that the breadth and complexity of today’s global markets create risks so great that no group of business leaders — or even a single country — can control them.

It wasn’t supposed to work this way. Interconnected global markets should make the world economy more stable, according to traditional economic theory, with risk spread more widely and strength in one region offsetting weakness in another.

“In practice, we’re not seeing that happening,” says Richard Bookstaber, a veteran hedge fund manager and author of a new book, “A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation.”

Although international financial links are nothing new, as the Panic of 1907 shows, what’s different now is how closely international markets are correlated with one another.

“As markets become more linked, diversification doesn’t work as well.”

As a result, Mr. Bookstaber argues that today’s global financial markets may actually be more risky than in the past. That’s because the same types of investors are taking on the risky bets and then simultaneously heading for the exits when trouble comes, even if they’re on opposite sides of the world.

Actually, there's nothing wrong with this aspect of traditional economic theory, only with how well people read the book. Statistics says that the overall risk will go down if the individual risks happen independently - which is to day, it's a truly diverse world, where knowing what's going on in place A doesn't tell you what's going on in place B. And that is true.

But if everyone uses exactly the same strategy, the power of diversity reduces to the leaf-in-the-wind behavior of one individual, just with everyone else along for the ride.

This is also why tyranny doesn't work, and cannot work as a governmental system for very long, or why we see the same risks in "Theory X" companies that may be huge but really are only slaves of a few guys at the top with a big magnifying glass.

Diversity is not what unity must overcome - it is what gives unity strength.

An ecology with a single kind of plant in it will collapse as soon as the first virus figures out where lunch is located. Any global world with a single kind of thinking is equally unstable. This is a basic law of nature and statistics and cannot be overcome by wishful thinking or by anyone who was "right in the past."

Including diverse cultures and people in the decision-making process is not "accommodation" -- it is recognizing a case where all of us are actually much wiser than some of us.

It also illustrates the need for actually educating people so that they actually understand basic concepts and don't simply try to echo mindlessly what others are doing. Without "independent investigation of the truth", the system breaks down.

Again, let me refer to the basic principles held and advocated by the Baha'i Faith, as a set of guidelines I urge everyone to investigate independently. These are the kinds of things we should be studying in school.

Whether it is "race unity" or "unity of religions" the "unity" the Baha'is advocate is not the false "unity" achieved if everyone comes around to my point of view - it is the true unity that emerges from everyone keeping their independence on all but those things we need to stop killing each other and talk like adults about common issues.

It involves submission to God, not to some different self-appointed leader, and just enough civilization to have a "learning culture" that doesn't rip itself to shreds over the fact that the world appears very different to different people and at different times.

Global domination or "conquest" by any one nation or culture or way of thinking is a recipe for disaster, as the financial markets are telling us over and over. We do not all want to be clones of any one approach. Those who dream of global conquest are chasing a phantom that only exists in dreams, because simplifying any system that much will cause it to collapse.

That's the key lesson that we need to understand. Systems require diversity for the magic to work. You can prove it with math and you can simulate it on computers. Or we can keep on watching what happens around us when we try to deny that natural law - about like trying to deny the law of gravity.

This is just critical at this stage in nation-state development, where huge countries are in the middle of preparing for a massive confrontation over who will "dominate" the world. No one can "dominate" the world without destroying it and imploding. We are gearing up on a fool's mission that cannot possibly succeed for anyone. There will be no winners of that fight.

The reason world conquest has failed in the past is not that it was incomplete, but that it tried to be too complete. It squeezed the life out of all it touched with a unity without diversity. It didn't work not because of some error in execution, but because the whole idea is fatally flawed. It's impossible. It can't ever work, regardless how brilliantly executed. We need to let go of it.

So here's the take-away lesson.

All the frequencies matter. There's no point in reading the "news" if you don't spend equal time reflecting on the "olds", or you'll end up with a false impression of what's going on, really. In fact, as the Times article begins, we should have learned more from exactly 100 years ago friday and what happened then. Most of what is around us is actually more "old" than "new".

I remember watching two experts play the board game "Go" one day. Every now and then what looked like a surprise move would take a whole army and change the board. When it was over I comment on how much the board changed from move to move. They both looked at me baffled and replied that the board hadn't changed by more than half a point in the last 100 moves. I just wasn't able to see what was really going on by looking at what was changing. I needed to stop looking at the "field" and look at the "ground" instead for a while.

In regards to world conquest? To quote the "Whopper" computer in the old movie "War Games" -- "Hmm. Curious game. The only way to win is not to play."

(photo credit: moto browniano on Flickr)

The benefits of depression - on a social scale

Individual depression may have a benefit to the herd. If so, it may be hard-wired into our genes nd our social structures that reflect our genes as a preserved trait, and that changes how to treat it.

All organisms and organizations need immune systems to detect invaders or parts of themselves that have gone astray, so they can be marked for removal and eliminated.

In the body, one troublesome situation is that some cells or pathogens may get off into a corner, or inside a bone, or up against a steel plate, where they are hard to be evaluated and attacked, so they multiply. Another may be that they no longer recognize the authority of the body, and go off on their own doing something else. But, evolution has come up with one clever solution to this problem - namely, apoptosis or "cell suicide."

If a cell is removed from active, productive, working connection with the body, it is programmed to kill itself. It doesn't need to be found by the body's police force - it finds itself. No castle or moat or steel wall or bone can protect it, because the destruct system is already built in.

It may be than that evolution has similarly built in an "auto-braking" system into human physiology, so that, when a human becomes disconnected from productive interaction with the social body, the human slows to a stop and then shuts himself down.

This results in resources flowing primarily to social members still able to act energetically and confidently. Over time, those who care about interactions with the social body end up dominating the scene. (sources of "altruism"?).

But, what's that model say about treatment of depression?

First, it says that depression is a symptom, not a cause - and so treating depression with drugs to "cure it", while immediately helpful personally, from the social body's perspective is a bad idea -- in that it means that socially discordant individuals will continue to act badly and absorb energy and resources, and, if left unchecked in large scale, eventually the social body will die from a loss of cohesion and trying to carry the burden of all this non-productive tissue.

Second, it would mean that "depression" is not, in fact, a pathology - it is a very healthy normal response of a subsystem of the social body to a disconnection event. From a social point of view, it's good. In fact, the whole terrorist "problem" and the corruption "problem" could be viewed as precisely a breakdown in such a system: people who have turned against the social body should, many people would assert, self-destruct so we don't have to go to the very hard work of trying to destroy them ourselves. That would be very efficient if they'd just get really really depressed, then suicidal. It would be way more efficient than trying to locate them in caves somewhere on earth.

But, it brings to focus a different problem. If we use that model, then why is it that we now are looking at 20 or 30% of the US population that is depressed? And, have all these people broken the connection with the social body, or did the social body break the connection with them, or both in some sort of vicious circle? It may be that the cost of health care is rising because the body of the public is, in fact, becoming unwell. And, again, this may be a symptom not a cause, and masking it with drugs would be "quackery" - treating symptoms while the disease grows worse.

Well, the work of Robert Putnam ("Bowling Alone") and the Duke study (mentioned in myprior post on depression) would seem to indicate that connections are, in fact, deteriorating and rather rapidly. That begs the question of why this is happening, or how.

One possible hypothesis would be that the culture of materialism and self-centeredness, sustained and amplified by television, is causing people one by one to abandon their concern for society and become increasingly self-oriented, which is triggering the hard-wired fatigue and depression responses. The trend towards "Me first" or "Only me, forget you, Jack" is evident and widely discussed in the media.

Another possible hypothesis is that, collectively, whole groups of people, such as the rich or middle class, have turned their backs on and abandoned the poor, the 45 million without health coverage, the jobless, etc. This could cut both ways, both by making the ones cut-off from social life become increasingly depressed or anxious, and by making those who are doing the cutting-off also depressed, because they are losing the other end of the social connection.

In other words, class-ism and racism ultimately do as much harm to the holder of the destructive bigotry as to the group on the receiving end -- it just takes longer. That would predict that even some of the very rich - say Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, would end up extraordinarily unhappy. That's not proof, but it illustrates the point. Britney lost custody of her children to get what? Another drink?

There is a long literature on the harmful effects on the rich and powerful of exploiting, or neglecting the poor and the [apparently] powerless. By this herd model, the powerless actually have their own protection built into the DNA of the powerful, where it can and will be triggered as the powerful cut ties to the powerless.

This is certainly a core lesson of many religions of the world. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The model seems to say that no "enforcement by an angry God" is necessary in fact - that the downstream result of the action of discrimination and superiority culture, both individually and overall, follows automatically from the action, and returns the favor, with interest.

So, if we boost the world, it will echo with amplification, and we will be boosted, and that becomes a self-climbing loop or spiral. If we cut off the links to the world, the world cuts off its links to us, which, surprisingly, we needed to continue to exist. If we actively exploit the outside world (think sub-prime mortgages) it will come back tremendously amplified and damage those who thought they could "get away with it."

This would imply that the same feedback mechanism and pattern might be true for cells, for individuals, for companies, and for entire nations or cultures.

For a company-sized organism, though, I've discussed the need for the "horizontal loop", the living feedback that Toyota calls "pull" that connects the company to the customers. Breaking this loop, as Comcast is described to be doing by many customers in today's Washington Post, may appear in the short run to be "working" and making more money than caring what customers think, but this model says that the resentment and social response is just building up steam and ultimately will come back with amplification.

It's a fairly simple model, but it seems to explain a lot of what we see going on around us. These "scale-invariant" patterns seem important to investigate to see if they hold up under more rigorous investigation. If so, we have some public policy and public health decisions we may want to rethink.

Religion and commerce (the Toyota Way) suggest the model, and system dynamics simulations show that some feedback with delay and amplification like this may be very hard to detect coming until it is too late. As with the Georges Bank model we ran in class, as the sustainable limit is passed and use turns into abuse, the fishing just seems to get better and better and the catch keeps rising as the fishermen build more boats until one day it is exhausted and it's simply over. We've depleted it entirely. The rising exponential plummets to zero.

There are almost no blatant clues this is happening. You have to understand what is going on to "see" it and realize it.

But it's up to Science now to take that suggested model and design careful experiments to test whether this is just an interesting analogy or the handle to some basic principle like gravity that we need to pay attention to. If the NIH or Business Roundtable won't fund it, maybe the John Templeton foundation will. Maybe a business "depression" bears more than a passing resemblance to a larger version of an individual "depresison."

Actually, MIT's John Sterman in his 1000 page textbook "Business Dynamics" lays out exactly how trying to push a company to grow too fast results in an apparent speed-up of profits, followed by a drop or crash, depending on exactly how it went. That implies that the villains of the corporate growth story are the stockholders themselves, from venture capitalists who demand 37% growth per year, to e-traders who chase the smallest fraction of a percent of a rate, punishing any CEO who pauses for breath or needed consolidation.

It also is a lesson for China, one that it is increasingly realizing, that growing too fast can be as much of a problem as not growing fast enough. Living things have natural growth rates, and we don't gain by trying to push them to do unnatural acts.

There's nothing wrong with wealth and prosperity, but vastly unequal and unjust accumulation of wealth by taking it instead of earning it does seem to lead to a "correction" that undoes all of the apparent progress and then some. Short-term greed is a very expensive pleasure, for it quickly becomes the long-run, and the bills come due. Without a deep keel, a culture and a social ethic that can hold off that temptation to maximize short-term gains, we can easily be led astray.

It's time to fund that research and let the data speak for itself. A reasonable search for counter-examples and contrary evidence is required. All models are wrong but some models are useful - so maybe this has merit regardless.

Science meets religion

Speakers at the National Press Club presented new initiatives by the Center for Inquire-Transnational, according to an article in [November 16,2006] Washington Post. I'll summarize the article here and go on below to comment on the philosophy.

Think Tank Will Promote Thinking
Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public Policy

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 15, 2006; A19

Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of strict church-state separation yesterday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote "rationalism" as the basis of public policy.

The brainchild of Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, the small public policy office will lobby and sometimes litigate on behalf of science-based decision making and against religion in government affairs.

The announcement was accompanied by release of a "Declaration in Defense of Science and Secularism," which bemoans what signers say is a growing lack of understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry and the value of a rational approach to life.

"This disdain for science is aggravated by the excessive influence of religious doctrine on our public policies," the declaration says. "We cannot hope to convince those in other countries of the dangers of religious fundamentalism when religious fundamentalists influence our policies at home."

"Unfortunately, not only do too many well-meaning people base their conceptions of the universe on ancient books -- such as the Bible and the Koran -- rather than scientific inquiry, but politicians of all parties encourage and abet this scientific ignorance," reads the declaration, which was signed by, among others, three Nobel Prize winners.

Kurtz, ...said the methods of science,..., "are being challenged culturally in the United States today as never before."

Several speakers also had strong words for the media, ...

Lawrence M. Krauss, an author and theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said the scientific community has done a "poor job" of explaining its logic and benefits to the public....

The goals of the new group are to establish relationships with sympathetic legislators, provide experts to give testimony before Congress, speak publicly on issues when they are in the news, and submit friend-of-the-court briefs in Supreme Court cases involving science and religion. The Center for Inquiry-Transnational, a nonprofit organization, is funded by memberships.

=================
My analysis of that:

There are at least three hypotheses in contention in the policy arena:
1) All religion is bunk and should be replaced by science
2) All science is bunk and should be replaced by religion
3) Science and religion are compatible

The "Center for Inquiry - Transnational" seems to be firmly in position #1.

Position #2 is subdivided into incompatible parts by actually being
2) All science (and also your religion) is bunk and should be replaced by (my) religion.

Position #3 is also subdivided into two distinct cases
3a) -- Separate but equal: so long as religion stays in its place, and science stays in its place, and the two never meet in the middle, they are "compatible". A significant number of researchers and scientists are in this camp.
3b) -- ultimately compatible: there is only one reality which has multiple valid views, the "incompatibility" between religion and science is largely due to misunderstanding, and religion(s) and science need to be brought together and reworked into a new paradigm that embraces both.

Position #3 is certainly is my own working hypothesis and is the way I understand the Baha'i Faith as well. I present this here less as an advertisement and more to make the case that "religion" is perfectly capable of embracing multiple viewpoints and scientific principles, and does not automatically equate to "fanatic" or "closed-minded" or "intolerant."

We need to distinguish, as it were "the baby" and "the bathwater."

Baha'i Social principles include:

• full equality between women and men in all departments of life and at every level of society.
• harmony between science and religion as two complementary systems of knowledge that must work together to advance the well-being and progress of humanity.
• the elimination of all forms of prejudice.
• the establishment of a world commonwealth of nations.
• recognition of the common origin and fundamental unity of purpose of all religions.
• spiritual solutions to economic problems and the removal of economic barriers and restrictions.
• the abolition of extremes of wealth and poverty.

One of the most insidious forms of prejudice is racism, about which the Baha'is stated position is:

Racism is the most challenging issue confronting America. A nation whose ancestry includes every people on earth, whose motto is E pluribus unum, whose ideals of freedom under law have inspired millions throughout the world, cannot continue to harbor prejudice against any racial or ethnic group without betraying itself.

The nature of "competing" versus "complementary" views

Let me bring this topic back to "systems thinking," the theme of this weblog. It is generally recognized in software systems analysis that most complex systems are larger than the human brain can comprehend in a single view or perspective.

Here's a quote from a current best practices technical textbook by Nick Rozanski and Eoin Woods, entitled Software Systems Architecture - Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 2005) :

If you read the more recent literature on software architecture, one of the first useful discoveries you will make is the concept of an architectural view. An architectural view is a description of one aspect of a system's architecture and is an application of the timeless problem-solving principle of "divide and conquer." By considering a system's architecture through a number of distinct views, you can understand, define, and communicate a complex architecture in a partitioned fashion and thus avoid overwhelming your readers with it's overall complexity.... Using viewpoints and views to guide the architecture definition process is a core theme of this book.

Many people are working right now on the problems we've created for ourselves by partitioning the scientific viewpoint of the world into silos which may seldom speak with each other. A major axis along which such silo-building has occured is the scale of activity within life on the earth. So we have cellular scientists, and tissue scientists and individual-being studying scientists and those that study small groups of people and those that study huge collections of people. It's increasingly clear that public health problems cross those artificial historical divisions.

Until recently, scientists who dealt with parts of reality that could be studied in isolation (with open causal pathways and no feedback) couldn't even comprehend or tolerate the work of scientists who deal with parts of reality that cannot be studied in isolation (with complex systems, intractable feedback). The whole nature of "causality" and "the scientific method" are being revamped and revitalized to deal with complex systems. Let's see where that gets us.

The R21 research RFA I mentioned in an earlier post (Houston, we have another problem!) is an effort precisely to cross those artificial barriers between models of the world at different scales and levels of abstraction.

Earlier this week, the National Institutes of Health (in the U.S.)
announced the availability of $3M to fund approximately 10 projects
designed to facilitate "Interdisciplinary Research via Methodological
and Technological Innovation in the Behavioral and Social Sciences."
Complete details about the grant program are available online at:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-RM-07-004.html

In some ways all I'm saying is that, if you keep going up in scale, you'll come to a scale where issues commonly termed "religious" or possibly "theological" are the current common way of modeling and investigating and understanding what mankind has observed about itself over millenia.

It is not surprising that the tools, concepts, and approaches are different from those used by civil engineers. Sociologists and psychologists and biologists disagree all the time. That doesn't say anything about whether the data are ultimately compatible in a more comprehensive model.

We have all heardthe story of the blind men who encounter an elephant, with one finding the tail, one finding a leg, one finding the ear, and arguing about whether they have come across a
huge rope, or a tree, or a huge blanket, or whatever.

What's really pivotal here is that these differences do not automatically make the viewpoints incompatible. "Incompatible" would mean that the viewpoints cannot be reconciled into being fully valid points in a larger picture. The viewpoints of the elephant can be reconciled, and must be, if one is to understand what an "elephant" is.

The question of incompatible is this: after accounting for the different observers' perspectives and viewpoints, are the observations still irreconcilably different?

Humans are not born understanding that others see the world differently than they do. Two very hard facts to accept are (1) sometimes both viewpoints are "right", and (2) sometimes the other person's viewpoint is "right" and your own, regardless how obviously true it is to you, is wrong.

Some of this accounting for viewpoint or "frame" or "reference frame" or "perspective" is something we do every day. If I look at people in the distance, I could say - "Look, people get smaller as they move farther away from me." Then other people could say "No, you're wrong, you get smaller as you move away from me!" Possibly they could fight a war in which "size matters" and battle over who it is that "get's smaller". In point of fact, of course, no one "gets smaller" they just "look smaller".

Why discarding "religion" as a whole is a very bad idea:

Actually, it's ironic that many scientists, who spend all day trying to isolate their work from the rest of reality in order to study it, now abruptly seem to realize that science itself is a social activity and only takes place in a social context.

Yes, religion and spirituality are similar to gasoline and can alternately blow up in your face, or move your fleet of automobiles. The recent work in top-performing organizations, and high-reliability organizations, all point to a need for some key traits to make them work: honesty, integrity, and compassion - variables that religions have kept central for thousands of years, despite their having "no place" in science as it was practiced. "Scientific" and machine-based models of humans, business, and commerce have resulted in as much human carnage as spiritually based models - more, in fact, when the destructive power of mankind was amplified and the integrative, compassionate side demeaned and neglected.

In fact, isn't it precisely because "science" has built huge new technologies of mass destruction and climate change, but neglected the equivalent tools of reintegration and wholeness preached by religion, that we now face the prospect of demolishing our entire planet?

I'd argue that our best route is not to despise and discard religions of the world, but to understand what it is they were trying to tell us and ask ourselves if that's not something we need to hear.

[originally posted 11/16/06 on my other weblob, cscwteam.blogspot.com ]

Unity in Diversity - Talk cites and links

References from my talk at the Washtenaw County Baha'i Center,

Oct 12, 2007.

The slides from my talk are available in a format that is probably only readable using Internet Explorer. (it is a fairly large file (7 meg) and in a format ("mhtml") that can probably only be read using Internet Explorer as a browser, but you do not need Powerpoint.

You can get to the slide file through the first link on my web page here: www-personal.umich.edu/~schuette

If you know how to make this readable on a Macintosh or using Firefox, please email me and let me know.

Please contact me regarding copying or distribution of this material or getting the full powerpoint version. (Thank you!)

Cites and References from the talk:
===========================

Slide 2 - Photo from "Ollieda" on flickr.com (also at the top of this page!)

Slide 3 - "There can be no doubt"

Slide 4 - Baha'is Believe

Slide 6 - National Institutes of Health

Slide 7 - Airline Accidents (74% of on first day)

ICU accident rates (Dr. Pronovost)

Slide 8 - US new $1 coin

Slide 14 - Public Health Competencies

Systems Dynamics Society

Slide 15 - M. C. Escher - wikipedia

systems merge ...

Slide 16 - M. C. Escher - Waterfall

Slide 17 - Magic Dice ("non-transitive dice")

Grand Illusions website (actual dice vendor)

Slide 18 - Demo of Dice

(Excel Spreadsheet will be coming)

Slide 20 - Getting To Yes

Example of the Orange

Slide 24 - Theory X and Theory Y of organizations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y

Slide 26 - Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson and fear at work

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/faculty/aedmondson.html

Slide 27, 28 - "Vertical" and "Horizontal" cybernetic loops

Slide 29 - Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe?

(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. The original covers a larger portion of the torso and the effect is much more pronounced.

Here's a link to an extended discussion of what this implies for conflict generation in society, and some other hybrid image links.

Slide 31 - US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM22 -100)

Slide 32 - High Reliablity organizations

http://www.highreliability.org/

Many links also

"Honey, I lost the nuclear weapons"

and

Positive Organizational Psychology cross-refernces

Karl Weick and "mindfulness"

Slide 34 - National Institutes of Medicine

Crossing the Quality Chasm and other links

Slide 35 - What public Health is about

Slide 36 - TS Eliot - Choruses from 'The Rock'

Slide 40 - Home mortgage disaster

Slide 43 - "Healing is not a transitive verb"

Slide 44 - Making "N+1" larger than "N"

Slide 48 - Positive Deviance

Slide 49 - Positive Organizational Scholarship

Slide 50 - Videos ("Making the Impossible Possible")

( hot links in this post 'There is a way out of this mess")

Please not the advice in read about how to view the video.

The book "Making the Impossible Possible"

Slide 53 - School of Information and "Technology-Mediated Collaboration"

Slide 55 - "We desire but the good of the world ..."

Slide 58 - friends in winter

========================

Other Nifty Thing - How those really tall cranes build themselves.

"How stuff works"

Psychosocial factors, social isolation, and depression

When you come back to me again

(On how closed loops tend to dissolve and merge the parties into one and blur the direction of causality.)

Technical paper (MIT) on high-reliability organizational culture

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

Clothesline:

Ground causes accidents, claim pilots!

Newsflash - Pilots blame ground for accidents! A new federal study has revealed what was long suspected - the ground is responsible for most airline crashes. A working commission will release Guidelines in January for proposals to prohibit having ground in or near airports. "If it wasn't for the ground, we'd still be in the air!" commented First Officer Spock.

That last paragraph of invented news seems absurd, doesn't it?

But, every year, as my wife will confirm, around the time of the first snow, I will be bouncing off the walls at some newspaper headline stating "Ice causes accident" or "Ice causes 23 car pile-up on freeway, 8 dead."

To me, the claim "Ice caused the accident - I hit the brakes but couldn't stop in time!" is in the same category as pilots blaming the ground for accidents. Yes, there was ice present. No, the ice did not reach out, grab the 23 cars, and smash them into each other.

Actually, one of the first things they teach you in pilot training is that "Bad weather does not cause accidents. What causes accidents is the decision by the pilot to continue operations into conditions beyond their skill and ability to handle. "

The place to stop such accidents, then, is not at the point where the plane meets the ground, or the car smashes into a telephone pole -- but way back at the point where an incorrect decision was made to get on the road or in the air in the first place - given weather conditions.

The denial of blame and responsibility in the excuse "There was nothing I could do!" needs to be countered with - "Yes, there was, but it was earlier and further upstream. The outcome was sadly predictable."

I say all this leading up to another day's look at the Mortgage and Foreclosure crisis unfolding around us, particularly hard hitting in Michigan and Ohio.

I will grant that there were "predatory practices" at work in aggressively pushing very bad mortgages on people with zero chance of paying them and no idea what they were signing up for. That's bad in its own right, and should be outlawed.

Still, I and many others are struck by the attitude and mental model shown by some of the "victims." Talking to one homeowner who ran into trouble in the Cleveland Ohio area (Cuyahoga County), the New York Times today reported several comments, which I'll repeat here:

Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town?
by Nelson D. Schwartz
New York Times
September 2, 2007
Maple Heights, Ohio

TAMMI and Charles Eggleston never took out a risky mortgage, never borrowed more than they could afford and never missed a monthly payment on their neat, three-bedroom colonial in the Cleveland suburbs. But that hasn’t prevented them from getting caught in the undertow of the subprime mortgage mess now submerging this town.

Over the last 18 months, the Egglestons have watched one house after another on their street, Gardenview Drive, end up foreclosed and vacant...

It is a scene being repeated in cities and towns across America as loans that were made to borrowers with little or no credit history, many of whom could not even afford a down payment, fail in ever-growing numbers....

Indeed, what was once a problem confined mostly to economically struggling areas is quickly becoming a national phenomenon. ...At current rates so far this year, RealtyTrac expects foreclosure filings to hit two million in 2007, or roughly one per 62 American households — a rate approaching heights not seen since the Great Depression.

Analysts also say that the fallout from mortgages gone bad is spreading well beyond borrowers now in default. It has begun to engulf middle-class communities like Maple Heights, where nearly 10 percent of the houses — or 910 properties — have been seized by banks in the last two years...

“I don’t think we’ve hit bottom,” says Michael G. Ciaravino, the mayor of Maple Heights. “My fear is that foreclosure rates could go to double where they are today.”

IN terms of the subprime mortgage meltdown, Ohio has been among the hardest-hit states, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association....

For a mayor presiding over a town in crisis, Mr. Ciaravino doesn’t seem angry, but beneath an affable exterior is barely concealed frustration that the danger of subprime debt became a national issue only after Wall Street began to wake up to the threat this summer. “We’ve been warning of problems for years,” he says. “I’m just a small-town mayor. Where was the foresight?”

“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” warns Mr. Ciaravino...

It is also clear that the Sweets bear some responsibility for their predicament. “I do blame myself a little bit,” Mrs. Sweet acknowledges. “I feel dumb.” She explains that she was focused on the monthly payment when she borrowed from Countrywide, not the interest rate or taxes due. “Once we got the loan documents at the closing, I just came home and stuck them in a drawer.”

So, when her monthly payment requirement doubled, "There was nothing she could do." Hmmm.

Maybe, one thing she might have done was not put her foot into the bear-trap in the first place. There's little doubt that it was a trap, and it was mis-represented, and she was taken advantage of , and the bait looked very inviting, and the trap part wasn't obvious.

But, then again, that is how traps for the unwary are always designed, isn't it? Find some kind of attractive bait, cover up the steel jaws with dead leaves or something, and put it right in the path where people will come upon it frequently until they "give in" and decide to reach for the cheese in the mousetrap.

This was some kind of surprise, that there are financial traps for the unwary out there? Or that "Fools and their money are soon parted" ? From here, that looks about as unexpected as discovering that ice on a road is slippery.

Again, I'm not saying she wasn't taken advantage of. The same article has a few words from a banker, Marc A. Stefanski, the chief executive of Cleveland's Third Federal Savings and Loan, worth quoting:

“The model has shifted,” says Mr. Stefanski. “It became very lucrative. But it was totally irresponsible for the sake of greed.” Not that Mr. Stefanski didn’t notice the profits to be had. “Absolutely, we were tempted,” he acknowledges. “We arm-wrestled and talked, but we decided not to change the model. We felt it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

Mr. Stefanski is no social worker. He lives in an affluent suburb of Cleveland and earned nearly $2 million last year. But he does not hide his feelings about just what went wrong in places like Maple Heights. “The whole system was based on raping the public,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Not everyone should own a home — just those who can afford it.”

Third Federal has a branch in Maple Heights, Mr. Stefanski says, and in the past, “we owned Maple Heights.” But in recent years, he says, “The predators just jumped on it.”

But what I am saying is that Mrs. Sweet mentioned above was an adult, surrounded by millions of other adults, libraries, the Internet, places of worship, bars, supermarkets, or other places where this kind of thing could be discussed. Oh yes, then there are also schools and continuing education courses. And TV specials. And weblogs.

And, Mrs. Sweet is not alone. Quoting that article again,

At current rates so far this year, RealtyTrac expects foreclosure filings to hit two million in 2007, or roughly one per 62 American households — a rate approaching heights not seen since the Great Depression.

So, this is to me the most surprising and curious part of this whole situation. In this day and age, how can it be that two million households, probably more like 4 million people, could be so naive that they would make a $100,000 or more purchase, probably the largest amount they had ever dealt with in their entire lives, with so little caution or so little getting good advice?

And, this is not just on the poor end of the spectrum. There were also people buying million dollar homes that couldn't afford them by any rational scenario -- people that already owned $400,000 homes, lived in good neighborhoods with good schools and libraries, and probably had high-speed internet to their home and wireless connections to their four laptop computers.

So, while poverty can surely diminish available resources or make them more expensive, it's not an adequate explanation for this. We know predators are out there and greedy - that's nothing new to this century or this country.

But, why did all that social wisdom, and all those resources in the books and internet, have so little beneficial effect?

There is an obsession in education with math and science and problem solving, but it seems those don't help much without this lesson:

"When you are thinking about doing something new, first seek out the tribal elders and talk to them and get their advice."

In turn, when I consider why people don't do that, one thing that keeps coming up is the wide-spread social attitude that we are not responsible for the bad results of our own actions, or expected to have or use any foresight or planning or judgment.

In other words, "Ice causes accidents."

We need to dig deeper into how this total collapse of responsibility has worked its way into being so commonplace. I have a suspicion that the term "freedom" has been confused with "anarchy", and that what people think they can obtain is "freedom from consequences of their own choices and actions."

Rich people seem to think that their wealth, or their attorneys and doctors and pills can provide freedom from consequences. Poor people can blame bad schools, or poverty, or fate for being trained repeatedly that any sort of self-control is either impossible or pointless.

That concept of "freedom" is more like the freedom of a jellyfish or slug from the "constraints" of having bones that are not flexible.

The truth is that you are free to run a lot faster with bones than without them. And, without bones, you are free to be a free lunch to whatever predator comes by next.

We get to pick what kind of freedom we prefer.

Pick wisely.


also see my post from last December: Honey, We're losing the house.
Quotes from that:

[Consultation] is also an intervention point, a leverage point, a place were we can fix something. We could take some of those same people who figure out how to sell us cars and pills, and put them to work selling us on the simple idea that it's ok to ask for help, and it's ok to not know everything, and it's ok to need each other to get by.

I think that would be a better investment than many others we're currently doing trying to clean up the messes that avoidable bad decisions have created.

There are some initiatives underway. One example is the Baha'i faith's emphasis on the process of local "consultation" among regular people trying to figure out how to make hard decisions in an increasingly complex world. In my mind we need a lot more energy put into such initiatives by many more groups, more collaboration, more social networking.

In it's own way, that attention will produce an "emergent" solution to many problems that formal analysis and huge government programs would never address.

Put another way - on a personal, corporate, and national level, it's a really bad idea to toss overboard things like integrity, honesty, self-discipline, and respect for wise people (some of which may be old people or even dead people..) It's a bad idea to be so taken with "face" and "pride" that one can't consult with others on big decisions. That's a bad road to go down. The consequences will always come back to haunt you.

Oh, and one last thing. Today's Washington Post's article on the mortgage crisis has this advice.

And beware of mortgage rescue scams.

"The worst thing people can do is bury their heads in the sand," said Jean Constantine-Davis, a senior attorney for AARP Foundation Litigation, a legal advocacy group in the District. "The second-worst thing is dealing with people that are making promises that will make matters worse."

Yep, now the people who show up with a deal too good to be true to rescue those who fell for the first trap can be actually setting a second trap. Now is a time to be very very careful.

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(photo by crowbert )