Is it OK to ask for help?

Is it OK to ask for help? Reflecting on this question can give us some insight on why it's so hard in the US to adopt Toyota type "lean" operation models.

By "OK" I'm referring to the cultural norms and standards that we live by, the unwritten rules that we are supposed to know without asking. If we ask for help, will we will be punished by society?

All through the educational and socialization process in the US schools, at least Kindergarten to PhD, we are told "Do your own work." Consulting with others on homework is usually a "bad" thing. Consulting with others when it really matters, on "exams" is seriously punished. Tenure tends to depend on having done work that is clearly and recognizably "your own work" and discourages young faculty members from collaboration.

Then, one 25-30 years of such conditioning is completed, "workers" are released into the real world, where they discover that they are now supposed to collaborate and work together to get things done. The boss doesn't care if they check with each other, or use notes, or call a friend, or look things up on the internet -- the boss only cares that the work-product be completed on time. In fact, NOT escalating a problem to available experts who can help crack logjams is now punished and possibly cause for being fired. It's now bad to delay a process while trying to puzzle something out for yourself when someone nearby can just tell you the answer.


Whoa! What a disconnect!

The "workaround" used in the educational system these days is the dreaded "group work" project, generally hated by everyone from the teacher to the students. There always seems to be 3 or 4 students who are loafers and moochers and want a free ride, and one person who does all the work and gets little of the credit. It always slows down the work. No one sees the point of it, and I've had faculty apologize profusely for it but say they were told the have to do this.

That model makes it even LESS likely that anyone in business would want to participate in a "group" project or grant. Then, along comes the NIH and other funding agencies, always demanding multidisciplinary teams, or worse, interdisciplinary teams. ("multi" means they can just divide up the work and engage i parallel play and not talk much. "inter" means they actually have to collaborate on everything as they go.)

Again with the mixed messages!

And, on a larger scale, when work breaks up naturally into disciplines, departments, specialties, or "silos", the comfort level is again attacked by upper management that asks, on this scale, for TEAMS or DEPARTMENTS to "work together". It's "group project" squared!!

Somewhere along the line here the directives from above to "work together" seem somewhat like, to put it crudely, pissing upwind -- the result is unpleasant and shows no learning curve.

It's easier to deal with this issue if we understand the root causes of the conflicting message streams. It's also obvious, since "culture" eats "management initiatives" for lunch, that management initiatives for people to "work together" are, frankly, pissing upwind into the face of the very deep, very strong cultural message that "working together is BAD!!"

And, cultural messages don't come in the front door, throught our consciousness, as "rules". We just "pick them up" sideways somehow, through peripheral vision. We know, for example, that it is not permissiable to eat popcorn at a sermon in church, even though no one ever gave us a rule book that says that. These days it appears OK to bring a 3-course meal to the front row of a lecture, however, and eat it while the lecture goes on - quite a change from 30 years ago. Of course, college males no longer wear ties to class either.

So, it's less that we have a "Rule" that says "working together is bad" -- we just have a deeply trained conditioned reflex to turn away from it and avoid it, particularly when we need it the most (as in exams.) We "feel" that it is wrong, a violation of social norms, that we will be a "bad person" and rejected by society if we're "one of those people who keeps asking for help and mooching off others." It's a diffuse resistance and reluctance that may never be explicit.

And, it's the "wet blanket" that puts out the fires of initiative at collaboration.

So, how do we convert this culture into one where asking for help is OK, and giving help to someone who asks is OK, and our school system reflects that set of social norms? This seems to be important, if it is the primary obstacle to adoption of efficient "lean" approaches to our businesses that can make them globally competitive with other businesses in countries where it is OK, or even expected that people work together on things.

No, leeches who never want to carry their share of the work will still be "bad", but there's no problem if the rest of us swap and rearrange who carries what when, if it gets the job done faster and more easily.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of times a discussion will get up to the point where "culture" is mentioned, and that's almost a signal to give up and change the topic, instead of a signal to go get a cultural-change expert to come assist with that part of the work.

Maybe engineers and IT people and doctors don't realize that there are people who specialize in social engineering and know how to do it? I don't know. It's puzzling.

Certainly experts can be found in seeing the problem and measuring it in cultural anthropology, or in changing group behaviors or population behaviors among "behavioral education" practice experts in Schools of Public Health, or in media/marketing/crowd-manipulation experts with MBA's (on Madison Avenue) or Public Policy backgrounds ( in social marketing firms.) Of course, public health is oriented to helping people improve their lives, and the marketing people often with destroying their lives but paying to do it (tobacco, alcohol, "adult" entertainment and prostitution, harder drugs and hard-core pornography and white-slavery, etc.)

But many corporations have life improving products too - from cars that work to toasters that work, so they shouldn't be painted as "bad" with a broad brush that covers the obviously bad ones.

Still, it's ironic or something that the companies that are merchants of death seem to have mastered the art of population-behavior manipulation, and those that are trying to be merchants of life are still trying to figure out how to remove the shrink wrap from the package.

Nevertheless, there is a deep literature of social engineering for public health behavior change of populations, and doing work that doesn't collapse as soon as the intervention team departs or the grant runs out.

The best book but perhaps hardest to read, and the one used at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health is titled Health Program Planning - An Educational and Ecological Approach (4th ed), by Lawrence W. Green and Marshall W. Kreuter. The first edition was in 1961, and the 4th edition in 2005, so this includes 44 years of experience with the techniques and what has happened trying them on different cultures and problem sizes around the globe.

It's pretty solidly based in "what actually works" by now.

The problem (of course there's a catch) is that what actually works is basically systems thinking, (aka "ecological approach"), and for most of the last 44 years, there weren't even words for these concepts and people didn't believe in "ecology" or "systems". Now, finally, with 1 gigahertz laptops, we have enough power to start modeling what happens with complex interacting systems and the reasons behind what works in practice are becoming clear.

Still, since what works is very heavily based on feedback loops, and since feedback loops are forbidden in classical statistical analysis of causality, this "new" paradigm has been strongly discounted, disparaged, resisted, rejected, opposed, attacked, minimized, dumped-on, and otherwise culturally marked as close as we can (being primates) by being smeared with feces and considered "bad".

Besides, "systems" means we'd have to "work together". It brings to mind this logic:

I'm glad I don't like ice cream - because, if I liked it, I might eat it, and I hate it!

Well, at least the work is cut out for us and we know what to do, and need to apply cultural change engineering to the very concept of accepting social change engineering as something we should all learn, not just the tobacco and fast-foot companies.

And, to model the non-linear and "surprising" (but fully predictable) tendency of complex systems to show "unintended side-effects", tools such as Systems Dynamics need to be used, which, of course, is why I'm currently taking that class via distance education at WPI, the world's experts (along with MIT, where the faculty overlap.)

I think the combination of lean-thinking, ecological model cultural analysis tools from population behavior modification (otherwise disguised as the field called "public health"), discussion and model building tools from Systems Dynamics, I think that's a complete set of what's needed to make this fly.

Meanwhile, I got my first new US 1-dollar coin in change this morning. It's the first coin or bill in the US history (I think) to not have the two phrases "In God we trust" and "e pluribus unum" (from many, one) on either side. (It hides them on the EDGE of the coin.)

It's almost like the US is embarrassed about the idea of trying to take many people and make one nation, and wants to hide or bury the idea somewhere, like a dog scratching dirt over its droppings.

Such mixed messages we get. It's no wonder it's hard to get people to adopt "lean thinking" or "systems thinking" when our schools, employment compensation programs, and government itself reject the paradigm.

Still, our best and brightest thinkers from the last 4000 years or so have urged us to look at cooperative social interactions in a good light. Enlightened managers urge us to follow Toyota's astoundingly successful lead and change to "lean thinking" - which is basically ecological or systems thinking. The National Institutes of Health requires interdisciplinary teams on many new grants because, frankly, they get garbage otherwise. So, the paradigm refuses to die, even if the NIH-Office of Social Science Research gets abused, dumped on, and Norm Anderson pretty much left in disappointment (at least) and forced to try to get the good work done from outside instead of from inside.




Wade

Review: Selling System Dynamics to (other) social Scientists

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

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

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

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

Quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

Credit crunch reaches larger

More "unintended consequences" from the credit market leveraging everything against everything, trying to make infinite profit on zero assets. (a.k.a. "house of cards"):

Was this visible coming? (from the Washington Post discussion with columnist Steven Pearlstein 8/12/07):

Renfrew, Pa.: Steve, Good timing for a Q&A. One question, when you refer in your article to how "we are learning several painful truths about the new global financial system," would you say this is just another situation although the damage is done, there were plenty of sensible economists (like yourself) who knew exactly the danger and tried to alert a dumbed-down administration and its thoroughly braincell-challenged electorate about it? Kinda like Iraq, 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina?

Steven Pearlstein: I'm not an economist, by the way, but I have been warning about this for some time. The response of policy makers was, yes, that's a risk, but we don't see any sign of it. You have to wonder if they need to get their eyes checked.

Scope of the problem:

Tight Credit could stall some buyout booms:
Washington Post

he severe turmoil in the credit markets last week has raised serious questions about the future of the buyout craze that gave rise to the biggest deals in U.S. corporate history.

For the past few years, a group of elite Wall Street players have been buying up major American icons and taking them private. These massive acquisitions have depended on access to cheap credit, which is supplied by a complex relationship between investment banks and hedge funds.

But with credit markets tightening, the pace of these deals, at least in the short run, is expected to dramatically slow. Already-announced multibillion-dollar buyouts, like Tribune Co., Sallie Mae and Hilton Hotels, are likely to be far more complicated to close, analysts said.

If one or two of these big deals were to collapse, it might not send the economy into a downturn. But it would profoundly shake investors' confidence in a financial system already under siege from billions of dollars in losses from home mortgage defaults. That could make it even more difficult for companies and home buyers to get loans.

And, how exactly is this happening? What are the "system effects" where changes over "there" have an impact over "here"?

Steven Pearlstein again:

Steven Pearlstein: Not sure about the difference in the rating system. But the problem really is that when some supposedly sophisticated investors saw a AAA rating for mortgage-based securities, they assumed there was no risk. Indeed, there is very little credit risk, meaning the risk of not getting paid.

But there is liquidity risk which the rating does not deal with -- the risk that, at some times, the market for these securities may dry up and they cannot be sold or priced. If you hold the securities till maturity -- till all the loans are repaid at the end of their term -- then you don't care about liquidity risk.

But if you are a hedge fund or a pension fund or even a bank that has to estimate the market value of that asset every day, or week, or month, or quarter, then you do care.

And if that price temporarily falls below the amount of the loan you used to buy it, then your bank suddenly cares and demands its money back (the dreaded margin call). Then you either have to sell the mortage backed security, if you can, or if not, sell some "good" asset.

And it that sale of the "good" assets that is how this contagion has developed.

Finally, why exactly is it, how is it, that these changes were "unexpected" or "unseen" when so many people saw them coming?

That is the pivotal question that we need to slow down and investigate. Which of the "instruments" on our leaders "dashboards" is broken, and what else could leak through that hole? Apparently making billions of dollars in profit does not make people any smarter or improve their vision -- or, maybe, it makes it worse.

The linkage between things, "systems thinking", does seem to be the part where human intuition fails entirely to grasp the consequences of actions.

Furthermore, increased IQ or education, by itself, doesn't seem to be a protection against such thinking errors, or makes them worse with overconfidence.

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

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

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

Quoting Lewis Thomas (1974):

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

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

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

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

The development of systems thinking is a double-loop learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term dynamic view and then redesign our processes and institutions accordingly. (p18)

Quoting Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon (p26) : The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problem...

These studies led me to sugest that the observed dysfunction in dynamically complex settings arises from misperceptions of feedback. The mental models people use to guide their decisions are dynamically deficient. As discussed above, people generally adopt an event-based, open-loop view of causality, ignore feedback processes, fail to appreciate time delays between action and response in the reporting of information, ... (p27)

Further the experiments show the mis-perception of feedback are robust to experience, financial incentives, and the presence of market institutions... First our cognitive maps of the causal structure of systems are vastly simplified compared to the complexity of the systems themselves. Second, we are unable to infer correctly the dynamics of all but the simplest causal maps. (p27)

People tend to think in single-strand causal series and had difficulty in systems with side effects and multiple causal pathways (much less feedback loops.) (p28).

A fundamental principle of system dynamics states that the structure of the system gives rise to its behavior. However, people have a strong tendency to ... "blame the person rather than the system". We ... lose sight of how the structure of the system shaped our choices ... [which] diverts our attention from ... points where redesigning the system or governing policy can have a significant, sustained, beneficial effect on performance (Forrester 1969.). p29.

People cannot simulate mentally even the simplest possible feedback system, the first order linear positive feedback loop. (p29). Using more data points or graphing the data did not help, and mathematical training did not improve performance. ([p29). People suffer from overconfidence ... wishful thinking ... and the illusion of control... Memory is distorted by hindsight, the availability and salience of examples, and the desirability of outcomes.

The research convincingly shows that scientists and professionals, not only "ordinary" people, suffer from many of these judgmental biases. (p30). Experiments show the tendency to seek confirmation is robust in the face of training in logic, mathematics, and statistics. (p31).

We avoid publicly testing our hypotheses and beliefs and avoid threatening issues. Above all, defensive behavior involves covering up the defensiveness and making these issues undiscussable, even when all parties are aware they exist. (p32).

Defensive routines often yield group-think where members of a group mutually reinforce their current beliefs, suppress dissent, and seal themselves off from those with different views or possible disconfirming evidence. Defensive routines ensure that the mental models of team members remain ill formed, ambiguous, and hidden. Thus learning by groups can suffer even beyond the impediments to individual learning. (p33).

Virtual worlds are the only practical way to experience catastrophe in advance of the real thing. In an afternoon, one can gain years of simulated experience. (p35).

The use of virtual worlds in managerial tasks, where the simulation compresses into minutes or hours dynamics extending over years or decades, is more recent and less widely adopted. Yet these are precisely the settings where ... the stakes are highest. (p35).

Without the discipline and constraint imposed by the rigorous testing imposed by simulation, it becomes all too easy for mental models to be driven by ideology or unconscious bias. (p37).

System dynamics was designed specifically to overcome these limitations. ... As Wolstenholme (1990) argues, qualitative systems tools should be made widely available so that those with limited mathematical background can benefit from them. (p38).

Most important ... simulation becomes the main, and perhaps the only way you can discover for yourself how complex systems work. (38).

Thus endeth the reading for today.

As John Gall has pointed out so well, "Failure is our most important taboo."

I note that these thoughts of human limitations are what I call "volatile knowledge", in that, regardless how much sense these make to you right now, by next week they will have evaporated from your brain. Our minds do not like to be challenged, and killing the messenger is commonplace. If we look in history books, the largest event of 1918, the massive killer influenza, has almost entirely disappeared or been relegated to a single sentence, as if, oh yes, that year it rained a lot.

Like all beginning Instrument Pilots, most humans have a lot of trouble knowing how they should operate if it is true that their brains and eyes are routinely lying to them about what's going on and why. The resulting method used to resolve that conflict is to carefully erase and forget those inconvenient facts, and go back to trusting our senses.

In reality, both computer-aided simulation where available, and consultation with as wide and diverse a group as possible are the best protection we have against ourselves and our stubborn refusal to admit that we actually can't see very well ourselves, and what we do see is suspect, or should be.

Whether in religion or science, that core humility is the first step towards wisdom.

What goes around comes around

It's not just "a small world" we live on -- it's a small "us" we are part of: there is, really just one of "us" here, with plants, animals, and people of all types including those with a "j" as the fourth letter of their middle name, or other irrelevant distinctions, such as "race" or "ethnicity" or administrative governmental unit of origin.

It turns out, viruses and bacteria don't really care about those distinctions that we take as so important. When bad things are let thrive, they come for all of us.

That would be true even if we had all come here from different planets, due to the intense "system effects" that mean anything affects everything, and vice-versa.

It's even more true since we were all born here on Earth, as were our parents, and our grandparents, etc. on backwards. (aside from my 2nd grade gym teacher, who I think was from Mars.)

So, we need to be very careful of the glee we take when someone "else" has managed to shoot a hole in the bottom of "their end" of our lifeboat -- and more so if we were involved in handing them the loaded gun.

This basic physical truth is one basis behind the various religions' description of the Golden Rule - some variant of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Or we have the Christian Scriptures, where Jesus says (see other versions)

KJV: And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:40).

Or, Islam's Book of Sincerity -'The believer will not truly believe until he wishes for his brother that which he wishes for himself.'

So, in today's papers we see some of that effect coming into play.

First, the home mortgage market. I wrote about the present disaster that is unfolding on us now back when there was still time to do something:

Honey, We're losing the house - Dec 7, 2006 (Pearl Harbor Day).
The Mortgage Trap Begins Closing - Dec 11, 2006
How does that help me? - Average American -- May 22, 2007
Rising Rates and the Soon to be Homeless - June 15, 2007
More on Foreclosures for the Baltimore Sun - June 15, 2007

So, what started as a large scale scam to dupe poor people into buying homes they couldn't afford and then close the trap on them has now turned into an international incident roiling stock markets around the globe. Now even rich people are being affected! Here's something from this morning:

In a Spiraling Credit Crisis, Large Mortgages Grow Costly.
New York Times
August 11, 2007

When an investment banker set out to buy a $1.5 million home on Long Island last month, his mortgage broker quoted an interest rate of 8 percent. Three days later, when the buyer said he would take the loan, the mortgage banker had bad news: the new rate was 13 percent.

“I have been in the business 20 years and I have never seen” such a big swing in interest rates, said the broker, Bob Moulton, president of the Americana Mortgage Group in Manhasset, N.Y.

“There is a lot of fear in the markets,” he added. “When there is fear, people have a tendency to overreact.” ...

For months after problems appeared in the subprime mortgage market — loans to customers with less-than-sterling credit — government officials and others voiced confidence that the problem could be contained to such loans. But now it has spread to other kinds of mortgages, and credit markets and stock markets around the world are showing the effects.

Those with poor credit, whether companies or individuals, are finding it much harder to borrow, if they can at all. It appears that many homeowners who want to refinance their mortgages — often because their old mortgages are about to require sharply higher monthly payments — will be unable to do so.

Some economists are trimming their growth outlook for the this year, fearing that businesses and consumers will curtail spending.

“You find surprising linkages that you never would have expected,” said Richard Bookstaber, a former hedge fund manager and author of a new book, “A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation.”

... There were reports that a surprisingly large number of loans made in 2006 were defaulting only months after the loans were made.

There have been sudden changes in the mortgage market before, but this one may be both more severe and more damaging than those in the past.

I Investors made the mistake of assuming that housing prices would continue to rise, said Dwight M. Jaffee, a real estate finance professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “I can’t believe these sophisticated guys made this mistake,” he said. “But I would remind you that lots of investors bought dot-com stocks.”

He added, “When you are an investor, and everybody else is doing the same thing and making money, you often forget to ask the hard question.”

And that is how a problem that began with Wall Street excesses that provided easy credit to borrowers — and made it possible for people to pay more for homes — has now turned around and severely damaged the very housing market that it helped for so long.

Not everyone had evil intentions, although predatory practices certainly worsened the problem. We have yet another case of what Jay Forrester called (50 years ago) "The law of unintended consequences", although at this point in our history I don't think these can be called "unexpected consequences" -- aside from the expectations of the structurally blind who have been deceived by their own myths.

In fact, this area of self-induced blindness is fascinating, and scary, and relevant to understanding why so many personal, management, and governmental level policy decisions look so stupid in the morning. Or, as the cartoon strip Calvin says: "How come dumb ideas seem so smart when you're doing them?" And in turn, that is akin to my favorite Snoopy cartoon:

Did you ever notice
that if you think about something at 2 AM
and then again at noon the next day
you get two different answers?

I was trained as an instrument pilot, and we were carefully taught how to read each instrument so we could navigate when you couldn't see out the window. One item in the tool kit was curious - a 3 inch disk covered with suction cups, suitable for holding soap in the bathroom. "What's this for?" I asked. Well, it turns out that is to save you from the alternative, which is smashing the face of an instrument on the cockpit panel so you stop paying attention to the blasted thing when it has decided to lie to you convincingly -- you can stick this over the instrument so you don't see it anymore.

Because, it turns out, all our instruments, and senses, lie to us. It's only by comparing notes that we can detect that one of them is "acting up". It's invisible by itself, in isolation, as are the tricks our own minds play on us. As Calvin says, - why do these things look so smart at the time? This is a serious question and worth reflecting on.

But cockpit instruments, computer readouts, or the minds of Calvin, Snoopy, or you or me, all can lie to us in the most convincing way. Most of the time they are right, some of the time we know the results look "funny", and some of the time they are very wrong but still look perfectly right. The altimeter tells us we're climbing when we're descending and about to crash.

That's what "consultation" is for. We need independent confirmation by others, preferably others who are not subordinate to us or trying to please us, or selected as friends because they always seem "agreeable" - ie, agree with us whether we're right or not. One of the strengths of "diversity" is that a diverse group doesn't share the same blind spots. So when that hand goes up, even though that person is "obviously wrong", we need to pay attention, because maybe our "obviously" unit is broken. It happens a lot, it turns out, to all of us.

I have an entire book titled " Why do smart people do dumb things?". It's a good thought. Getting caught up in the herd stampede is often one of the wrong things to do, even though we've been genetically selected from those who did listen when the herd detected a predator coming that we had missed. The impulse to go with the herd is "hard-wired" into our DNA now, and hard to even detect, let alone block.

This is well known in stage magic, which my dad taught me. Even if some guy in the third row sees what you're doing, if no one around him believes him, he will actually "un-see it", and by a few minutes later will have forgotten he ever thought he saw it, even though the videotape shows him seeing it, and asking people around him if they saw "it".

Well, I said at the front that there were two items where what went around came around - or where efforts to discriminate against and exploit poor people turned out to come back and bite us. My point is, those aren't unusual events, and don't require "God to see what we did." -- those are "system effects" in a small world.

Throwing out the concept "God" and being "scientific" does not remove our ultimate accountability for our own actions. We are still in our own prop-wash, and need to adjust to that fact of life. We are not finally free to exploit our neighbors or even distant lands with impunity, and no "terrorist" or "God" is required to bring the deeds of our hands back into our lives, often with amplification.

The bogus mortgage scam is one. The other is the concept that we can deny some people health care, and "get a way with it" or even "be further ahead because of it." Obviously, that is the unspoken assumption -- that the fate of "them" over "there" is completely distinct from the fate of "us" over "here."

The lessons of small-world systems thinking is "Not!". We're in the same lifeboat, and look identical to invading viruses and bacteria, that we have much more to fear from than "immigrants". In the US alone, it's now estimated that over 75 million people go without "health insurance" each year.

Actually "insurance" is a bogus concept and not necessary to the equation, and only muddies the water with middle-men concepts and fragmented thinking. So let's be clear. About a third of the US population has primary care health problems that could be taken care of, that should be, but aren't, each year. This number is rising, inexorably.

God may or may not "see", but viruses and bacteria and other bad things can detect "lunch" when they see it, as well as predatory corporations like Tobacco or Alcohol can. And, given air travel, our own "backyard" now includes most of the globe. Diseases that find a portal into our world through the poverty in India or China can result in deaths from disease here in the USA in under 48 hours. It's a very small world to viruses as well, who get to ride international flights, first-class for free.

But when they get here, where will they gain a foothold? Hmm. Maybe they can start in the sections of our towns where we let people get ill or die, more or less abandoned, because "there's nothing we can do?"

A while back I reported on the lady who died slowly, screaming in pain, on the floor of the King hospital in LA. , while everyone stepped over her and the janitor mopped up the blood she was vomiting. We do have a culture capable of doing that, of not seeing, on so many scales.
( A Patient Dies in Los Angeles - System Views. May 20 2007)

Well, the scale has just moved up one more level in LA, as that hospital failed inspection and was closed this week - removing the only hospital for miles around for poor people in that area, replacing poor care with none at all.

Los Angeles Hospital to Close after Failing Tests and Losing Financing.
New York Times
Aug 11, 2007
Jennifer Steinhauer and Regan Morris

Excerpts:

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 10 — Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, built in the aftermath of the Watts riots and one of the few hospitals serving the poorest residents of South Los Angeles, is headed for closing after federal regulators found Friday that it was unable to meet minimum standards for patient care.

At a news conference Friday, county officials said the hospital would probably close within two weeks, after patients were moved to other hospitals. All 911 calls will direct ambulances to one of the nine other hospitals in South Los Angeles. An urgent care center will operate on the site 16 hours a day.

he loss of the hospital for residents of the Watts/Willowbrook area of Los Angeles.

“They are going to be left without a safety net for health care,” said Janice Hahn, a Los Angeles city councilwoman whose district includes Watts. “There will be no trauma care, no emergency care and a lack of the basic services this community needs and deserves.”

Nearly since its opening 35 years ago in Willowbrook in South Los Angeles, the center has been a symbol of both the political neglect of South Los Angeles and its struggle to emerge from blight.

It pointed to many successes — it was once a teaching hospital for the nearby Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science and featured a respected neurosurgery unit — and in a neighborhood riddled with gang violence and myriad health problems common to poor urban areas, it was a safety net, though an increasingly imperfect one, for the poor and uninsured. The nearest public center is several miles away, which, in an area with many poor residents without cars, means nearly inaccessible.

Debates over the hospital’s future have always been tangled in racial politics. “It is actually quite tragic that this hospital that came into existence with such high expectations now dies because of the culture of incompetence,” said Joe R. Hicks, vice president of Community Advocates Inc., a Los Angeles research group. “It suffered what has often been called the soft bigotry of low expectations, because the Board of Supervisors were aware that the hospital was being nicknamed killer king by people who lived in the neighborhood and they continued to hide the ball.”

Others echoed the criticism. “The Board of Supervisors failed to put enough money and personnel into the hospital,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a Los Angeles political commentator. “And now,” he said, “we are asking the question we always ask: Where are all these people going to go?”

What's the thought here - that "these people" should just die quietly and not bother "us"?
Regardless, I'm struck by the quote referring to the "soft bigotry of low expectations", that saw problems and just kept on doing nothing , or maybe never actually really "saw"the problems, but just kept on stepping over the writhing body on the floor.

That was true of the ER staff there that night, and of the management of the hospital, and the oversight Board, and of the State of California, and of the whole United States. We continue to just keep on "stepping over the body" as if it's not there or not our concern.

At that IS of concern, because the larger scale analog to the hospital closing is the whole health care system of the USA collapsing under its own weight, like some bridge in Minnesota.

Blindness is contagious, like the measles. We have to learn how to be blind to the pain of others, but then, once we master that, we can apply that blindness to being blind across the board.

Maybe, that's not the best strategy for keeping the plane in the air. We made this mess, and we can clean it up, but first we have to come to grips with national-scale denial that there is a very serious problem.

So has everyone simply stopped thinking?

A few recent posts have been about my observation in my class that some students weren't engaged, more than I expected. I was aware that I might be over-generalizing.

But, in the last two weeks, while finishing my last paper and dealing with a hospital stay, I ran across two other authors with similar recent observations - one for undergraduates, and one for medical residents. They both are equally puzzled as to whether they are just noticing this, or whether something real has changed in the just last few years.

Since the early Greeks, at least, every generation seems to feel the next generation isn't really doing very well, so we have to start with some skepticism.

But, for what it's worth, here's a brief summary of two recent books.

My Freshman Year - What a Professor learned by Becoming a Student, is by a cultural anthropology professor (pseudonym Rebekah Nathan) who put it this way:

After more than fifteen years of university teaching, I found that students had become increasingly confusing to me. Why don't undergraduates ever drop by for my office hours unless they are in dire trouble in a course? ... How could some of my students never take a note during my big lecture class? ...

Are students today different? Doesn't it seem like they're .. cheating more? Ruder? Less motivated?... Why is the experience of leading class discussion sometimes like pulling teeth? Why won't my students read the assigned readings so we can have a decent class discussion? [emphasis added].

Here' some excerpts from the book How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman, M.D. Dr. Groopman "holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He has published more than 150 scientific articles and is a staff writer at The New Yorker."

The idea for his book came to him, as he describes it, in 2004. He continues:

I follow a Socratic method in the discussion, encouraging the [medical ] students and [medical ] residents to challenge each other, and challenge me, with their ideas. But at the end of rounds on that September morning I found myself feeling disturbed. I was concerned about the lack of give-and-take among the trainees....[they] all too often failed to question cogently or listen carefully or observe keenly.... Something was profoundly wrong with the way they were learning to solve clinical puzzles and care for people. [emphasis added]

He also asks himself if this isn't just the same old intergenerational bias, and concludes:

But on reflection I saw that there were also major flaws in my own medical training. What distinguished my learning from the learning of my young trainees was the nature of the deficiency, the type of flaw.

Dr. Groopman goes on to consider whether this is the fault of efforts to follow preset algorithms, like computers, instead of actually thinking, or on "evidence based" thinking that is linear and algorithmic, and incapable of going outside the box when the situation calls for it.

I have further thoughts, but those will wait for another post. At least I am in good company in thinking that something very important has just changed in our youth.

A good epidemiologist would next wonder how widespread is this? Is this also true in Europe? In Asia? In Africa? Only in North America? In Canada? Is this something we can go back and reanalyze existing data sets and trace an "epidemic curve" on to see when it began and if it has peaked or is still rising? And, of course, if real, is this a change in the students, or a change in the way the older generation perceives students?

And, finally, with the "Where?" and "When?" nailed down, we could look at "Why?" and "How?" and then work our way to "What to do to fix it."


Wade

The tipping point concept of non-transitivity

(above - picture of a set of 3 non-transitive dice from Grand Illusions website.)

What I'm seeing is not that people can't "think big", because they can. The US President can go from tying his shoe to considering Armageddon in a heartbeat. We all are free to consider BIG problems or TINY problems and the "auto-zoom" feature of our brains makes whatever we're considering fill out mental screen.

So, it's easy to be misled by small examples into thinking they're BIG issues. We don't seem to come with "ground wires" that keep our feet on the same ground.

That's probably a lot of what goes on in my favorite Snoopy cartoon where he's lying on top of the doghouse and thinking:

Did you ever notice
that if you think about something at 2 AM
and then again at noon the next day
you get two different answers?

But this morning I'm focused on why it is that a loop is so surprisingly hard for people to grasp.

I think it's not the wider view or scale, because people can do that "zoom" so effortlessly they don't even see it happen.

I think its that

• The value of "constants" changes with scale, and
• the relative ordering is non-transitive.

People aren't overly baffled when what looks like a short-term great idea turns out, in the long term, to be a terrible idea. As Dennis the Menace said, standing in a corner for punishment, "How come dumb ideas look so great while you're doing them?"

But each time people run into this, it's like suggesting to a Labrador Retriever that it might be time to go for a walk. "Oh, my God! Yes! A Walk! What an astonishing idea!" (Thank you Dave Barry for that thought about Labs.) The idea is visible, and logical, and sensible, but somehow it fades away to nothing between uses. We keep forgetting it.

The most likely reason I can imagine for that is that there is a larger idea, a context idea, that this change-with-scale property violates or offends, and, as soon as our conscious mind lets go of it, the cleanup crew in our brain looks for where to put it back and, mystified by it, decides it must be trash, because it doesn't fit anywhere with something bigger we preserve.

That's the easy one.

The loop thingie is ten times harder for people to grasp, even once. Even when people see it, touch it, play with it, some part of their brain rejects the concept as "clearly false" and is preparing to disassemble and discard it as soon as possible to restore sanity and normalcy.

And the problem isn't with a loop. People grasp the concept "circle." People don't run screaming from a "hula hoop" toy. It's more subtle.

It's more like the sense when you put a twist in a loop of paper, ending up with a Mobius strip. This does not feel right. This is uncomfortable, and barely tolerable, regardless how many times you've played with them or tried to cut one apart lengthwise and failed.

But, no, it's even worse than that. It's an M. C. Esher type loop, with a twist in a dimension that we don't even recognize as a dimension when we TRY to focus on it with our full attention.

It's a property of the children's game "rock paper scissors" - where there are three rules:
rock smashes (beats) scissors
scissors cuts (beats) paper
paper covers (beats) rock

So, there is no "best" one. This turns out to be a much more widespread phenomenon that we would prefer. We see it but reject it. For most things with multiple dimensions, the term "best" is meaningless, but we're so attached to it, we want to make it true anyway. We can't get resolution if we admit that there is no "best mate" or "best house" or "best job" or "best employee" or "best candidate" or "best football team". If you compare them by pairs, each pair seems to have a "better", but if you make a map of "better" it has no top or "best", but instead goes in a loop, or more than one loop. It's uncomfortable and a little scary. Things we thought we could rely on turn out to be shaky. We try to forget it, and succeed. Over and over.





Here's the classic example - the "non-transitive dice" that Martin Gardner described decades ago, and that Ivars Peterson attributes to Bradley Efron, a statistician at Stanford University.


You can read about these, but you just have to buy a set, or build a set out of construction paper, and even then you can see it but you can't believe it. There is no best one of these 4 dice, or of the 3 at the top of this post. A beats B, B beats C, C beats D, and D goes around the end of the barn and comes back and beats A. It's a loop and it just seems wrong.

(So, warning, don't try to win money with these, because the loser will be convinced you must have cheated.)

Well, as always, you must be wondering what this all has to do with health care or the problems of the world. So, back a few days ago I posted an analysis I did of why so many airlines are running late these days. Included in that was this loop diagram, that I made up, that you can click on to zoom up to readable size.



This one is a circle of "blame", where the blame is "non-transitive." Each set of people, in their local world, can blame the next group down the chain for the problem, and is clearly "right" -- which would be OK except that the list of blamee's goes in a full circle back to the "blamers."

Again, if you view this one box and it's neighbors at a time, it seems fine and makes sense. But if you put them all together in a circle, something seems to have gone terribly wrong.
Like this Esher print I love (from Wikipedia)


Or this one of stairs from Wikipedia.

There is wrongness there. But the wrongness is subtle.

That happens a lot more than we hold in our heads to be true.

So, where this comes down to Earth is the following conclusion. If people are going to learn about system dynamics and feedback loops, we need to get them past the point where very simple loops like the ones shown above, are perfectly sensible and acceptable, instead of where they are now, which suffers the mental version of tissue-rejection.

The problems will not come to us. We must go to them.

There is no way to make a circle into a line, regardless how "linear" a little part of the edge is if we simply elect to ignore the parts that go out of sight on each side of a narrow field of view.

Three facts seem to be true:

• Closed circles of causality make us queasy.
• Closed circles of "blame" make us and our legal system very uncomfortable.
• Closed circles of "blame" that show that what's happening to us is our own fault coming back to haunt us with a lag time and amplification are just intolerable thoughts and are rejected out of hand instantly. That's crazy talk.
  

We need to learn to be able to see BOTH lines and circles of causality without becoming queasy and needing a drink.

Suggestions welcome as to how to do that.

Wade

-------
from Ivar Peterson's MathTrek

Gardner, Martin. 1987. Nontransitive paradoxes. In Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments. New York: W.H. Freeman.

______. 1983. Nontransitive dice and other probability paradoxes. In Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements. New York: W.H. Freeman.

One possible source of nontransitive dice is toy and novelty collector Tim Rowett. He offers a set of "Magic Dice" along with rules for several games at http://www.grand-illusions.com/magicdice.htm. You can find out more about Rowett's collection at http://www.grand-illusions.com/tim/tim.htm.