Are you my mommy? What shape AM I anyway?

I'm working on turning my thinking to the practical problem of the economy of Southeast Michigan, the area of the USA near the city of Detroit - on the Canadian border.

Actually, from Detroit, you cross the bridge Southeast to get to Canada, which everyone knows is to the North of the US. It's a perfect illustration of how things that are "true" at one scale can also be "false" at another scale at the same time. In general, on the world-sized map, yes, Canada is to the North of the USA (above it on the map for those with no sense of direction.) At the same time, on a city sized map, Canada is Southeast of Detroit.

Please try it now. Take this Mapquest map and slowly change to larger views by clicking successively lower buttons on the left. Watch as the city of Windsor (and the country of Canada) "move" from the south to the north of Detroit. Don't just think about it -- actualyl do it. Interacting helps the idea come forward in your mind which you'll need in a minute.

Both are true and not in conflict, because the "fact" varies with the size of your map. This kind of "fact" is common, but not discussed in school, and many people didn't pay attention in school anyway.

It seems to turn out to be a huge conceptual error to assume that things that are "true" at one scale must be "true" at every scale. Cultural, governmental, corporate, and personal mistakes due to this single, simple error are responsible for much of the misery we face in life.

I gave another example before, of the visual equivalent - a photograph of, well, either the female movie star of old, Marilyn Monroe, or of the male scientist Albert Einstein. Which it is depends on how far back from your computer screen you are. -- Up close, it is CLEARLY and OBVIOUSLY a picture of Einstein. Walk across the room and look back, and it is CLEARLY a picture of Marilyn Monroe. In between it is just confusing.

The original post was here: "The Sixth Discipline for Learning Organizations." And here's the picture:


(That picture is the work of researche rGregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com -- subscription required to get to it online.)

Now, imagine trying to achieve any meeting of the minds, or trade agreement, or corporate policy, or an end to conflict between groups sitting close to the screen and another group sitting far from the screen, that depended on what it was showing on the screen. "See, how we help you?" one group might say. "Help us? You're killing us!" the other group might say, and new fighting might ensue, or both groups could walk out of the room because the other group is "being unreasonable."

We've adapted to the fact that which building is larger needs to be adjusted for "perspective", so that now we automatically "see" a tiny skyscraper on the horizon as "being" much larger than a one-story house nearby, despite the fact that on a photograph of the scene or on a TV view of the screen, the house takes up most of the screen and the skyscraper is tiny.

Now, this is a really strange thing, if you stop and think about it, which we normally don't. It's not that our eyes "are broken" or "don't work" at all - our eyes are fine. There's a physical thing going on that changes what we see depending on where we are. The "one world" contains within it millions of "perspectives", as we try to reduce a real 3-dimensional world into a single two-dimensional image. The image is not the world. Same world has many different images, which may "appear" to conflict.

The only conflict is in our confusing the image with the world. The error is in "reducing" the complex world to a simple picture, which has a result that differs depending on where you are.

Note that it's not WHO you are. If you and the other person swapped places, you'd now see what they see, and vice versa. It's the same "you" near the screen with the picture of Einstein and across the room with the picture of Marilyn Monroe. The only thing that changed is where you are looking from.

Our language has terms "different perspective" and "different viewpoint" but they have become twisted around to mean that something inside the person is different, and that those viewpoints would persist even if the person swapped places with us. That's an error in thinking, responsible for much bloodshed.

So, with that discussion of Detroit and Marilyn Monroe in mind, let's turn and look at a recent news article , one of many recently on researchers discovering that "we" aren't at all shaped like what "we" thought "we" were.

And, again, this conceptual error is responsible for many failed policies across the spectrum.

The article is from the August 11-17, 2007 issue of New Scientist, an article by Chris Frith on Determining Free Will. This is a great subject for killing time and getting nowhere - back in the 70's I used to attend a conference out on Star Island of the group IRAS - Institute for Religion in an Age of Science, and we'd spend a week happily arguing about the existence or non-existence of "free will", or temptation, "demon possession", fate, etc.

So, anyway, the article goes on to talk about some presentations at a conference by the John Templeton Foundation on that subject. Frith discovers that in many cases, "we", our conscious selves, seem to actually just be inheriting actions that "our brain" decided for us long before, and sort of tells us about after the fact, when "we" swiftly pivot and act as if, then actually belive, that "we" made that decision and "took" that action.

I have noted, of course, a similar phenomenon among CEO's of companies, and Kings and Presidents, and the "pointy-haired boss" in the Cartoon "Dilbert", who act as if, and come to believe that they are "running things". They get all puffed up with their "greatness" and carried away with taking credit. Recently Forbes had a "Titans of Industry" article where some CEO's were astoundingly arrogant talking about why they, singlehandedly, had "done" such and such and why they, single-bank-accountedly, should indeed receive that bonus of $250,000,000 for the company's success.

Uh, actually, the other 350,000 people had something to do with the success.

But, again, this is the work of "perspective" and "viewpoint" and "scale" -- from the Office of the CEO, it really honestly LOOKS LIKE they are the one doing all the work, against the arrayed forces of decay and opposition and enemies and inertia. Of course, to the people actually building the cars with their hands and labor, it appears that the actual work is being done by them, and the CEO is some pompous windbag totally out of touch with reality.

Thus, management and labor, subject to the subtle and insidious power of "perspective", end up deciding each other must be some combination of demented, evil, uncaring, and stupid -- and productive work drops off, and the company becomes "non-competitive." Management then, to "lighten the burden" of all those excess useless moocher employees, lays off 10% or 20% of "the workforce" (a term whose meaning they have lost, as with the term "labor".) Wall Street applauds the great move and stock prices go up.

Then, curiously, output at the factory goes down for some reason. Management keeps on laying off more and more "workers" but, dammit, there STILL seems to be too much dead weight holding the company back from the efforts to lift it up that management is exerting.

In the extreme case, management lays off 100% of the "workers" trying to make the unit more "productive." I actually saw this happen at Cornell University, when times were rough and the Buildings and Grounds unit laid off 100% of the employees that they sent out to do actual work, for which B&G charged $60/hour, their only source of income. No one in management could understand why this still didn't improve the profitability of the unit.

The illusion at the top that "they" are in charge is very, very strong. It's not an "illusion", but a "perspective" effect, like the size of the buildings. To their eyes, their little 1-story house looks huge in comparison to the labor "skyscraper" that is very far away from them.

Well, it appears, as is so often the case, that important processes are the same across all scales. Some design patterns that work at one scale work at every scale, and those are the ones to focus on first -- and possibly the only ones we ever need to look at to understand what's going on.

So, "you" and "your body" and "people around you" are just the same as the "boss" and the company. In fact, yes, it turns out that most of what "you" end up doing was actually done by some other part of your mind or body, or by the people around you, or even your spouse or employees, when "you" weren't looking. And, in fact, it turns out that most of what "you" think "you" decided to do, because it was "obvious", is also the doing of all these other invisible actors that "you" tend to forget exist.

This repeated finding has startled and baffled some academic scientists, most of whom are deeply committed to the dogma of isolated experts being the only "actors" of importance.

This is a critical realization that impacts our health, the public health, the cost of health care in the USA, the competitiveness of General Motors, the productivity of Southeast Michigan, etc.

In health, for example, Johns Hopkins researchers have found that about 70% of the USA's health care bill is due to "life-style choices" - that is, what we decide to eat, or smoke, or ingest, or whether we decide to exercise or not, or whether we are "compliant" at taking those pills the doctor said we needed, etc.

Actually, the number is a lot higher than 70% if we include the downstream damage from bad choices at work, or "not feeling like" studying, or shutting off our friends and taking that "incredibly low cost mortgage" that now has turned into a nightmare.

While the focus for the last several thousand years has been on what we do and how we behave, and why we do things (belief, attitudes), that is now just at a "tipping point" and starting to change to go back again and revisit that word "we".

After many tens of thousands of efforts to change "people" or intervene in foreign cultures, it's becoming clear that, as soon as the effort stops, "people revert" to their old behaviors. It's also clear that this is due to the larger set of people who "have influence" over the first person, who we had always assumed up to now was the "actor" and the one "making the decision".

Now, that's all turning upside-down.

Now, it appears that many choices are already made for people by the group they are in, so, in fact, it appears that "we" have far less "free will" than assumed. In fact, yes, it appears that sometimes people are "not responsible" for what "they" do because they were "caught up in" a wave of humanity doing something else.

This, of course, as discussed before, totally messes up our concept of morality, and justice, and "criminal justice" and "blame". When Systems Dynamics demonstrates that problems in production aren't due to any person making mistakes, but due to "the system" making a mistake, that doesn't help the argument. When hospitals and airline companies talk about not punishing a person who "makes a mistake" because the "team made a mistake" it further confuses the issue. "What up?" we may well ask.

But, here again our reductionist thinking leads us astray. Yes, it is true that, at a given moment, we may find ourselves, to our surprise, unable to overcome our habit, or tendency to do something, or the impulse to do something that the herd or crowd around us is doing.

That does NOT mean that we are helpless victims, however, because if you change lenses, shift to a larger time frame and scale, you see that we did get to pick our friends, and our job, and the crowd we hang with, and which activities we wanted to pursue, so, in that larger scale we made the bed we are now sleeping in. So, we're responsible again.

But, no wait. It turns out that choice of housing is not a "free choice" but is limited by our language, our culture, our income, social discrimination that forces us to live in an immigrant ghetto, etc. It turns out that our employment is not a "free choice" - or is, more to the point, like "free choice" on network TV or "free choice" of who to vote for for President -- there's not much choice left by the time it's our turn to pick one.

But, no wait, those levels of discrimination are caused by actions that ... etc.

This apparent mess of seemingly contradictory arrows of causality can be quickly and neatly resolved if we simply recognize two things:

1) the near and far worlds are in a feedback loop, each influencing the other. There is no point where you can cut that loop and say "A" causes "B", because you will aso find that you left out the fact that "B" also causes "A". This is confusing to academics not familiar with loops, so they either leave it out of the analysis, or put it in a footnote, or go work on something else.

Sidebar: It's quite remarkable to watch as they erase a data point they don't like with some hand-waving justification for their total violation of intellectual honesty to get the "data to fit." My wife and I attended a conference on "Self-regulation of health behaviors" at the University of Michigan with all the big world-famous researchers - Prochaska, etc. - on a panel. It was clear as they talked that the most effective strategies each of them had found involved group interventions, not individual interventions. They would pay a woman's children $5 for each point she lost instead of paying her and it worked way better. But, I asked in the Q&A, am I imaginging it, or did you each find it's the group that matters, not hte perosn? Yes, after discussion, the panel agreed. Why, I persisted, is none of that in your published papers?
Oh, they said, none of us could figure out how to compute a p-value and do the analysis.

Oh. So, the most successful interventions for the largest health care cost in the country were left out on purpose, because they didn't make sense and fit the model of "an individual actor".

2) To make sense of it, the easiest thing to do is to redefine the shape of a human.

Now, maybe, this is not a profound thing to do. Maybe this is just practical, like treating the sun as if it goes around the earth, not vice versa, because the math is easier and, well, that's what it looks like from here anyway.

But, for "people", it appears that the relevant shape for "a person", or the unit that we're trying to change or understand, is actually a larger shape than their biological body.

In fact, "a person" can be thought of, for planning purposes, more like the combined human in the middle of the mix and the feedback loops out to include the other relevant persons, cultures, and organizations that influence "that person's" behavior and that, effectively, make the choices that we have "ascribed to " or "attributed to" that person.

What I'm trying to do is expand the circle of DNA included in "a person" to cover all the DNA that is involved in the "simple" act of choice or "making a decision." Clearly this includes more than just the DNA inside the skin of the person we're looking at. It includes the DNA of all people, present or past, near or remote, who had or are still having a "controlling" effect on the behavior, attitudes, and choices "this perosn" is making - as well as a "defining" effect on the set of things "this person" gets to choose FROM.

THAT entity, that larger glob of DNA spread out across space, time, and multiple "bodies", is the entity that is actually "making the decision" among "the remaining choices" that "person" has left to them at that time.

We need to stand way, way back in this analysis. Joe may have "no choice" about what happens on this road in life, except that he did select this road back at the last corner and that was his choice. OR was it. Or, more to the point, WHICH JOE are we talking about?

The little Joe, with one skin and one set of genes and DNA? Or the bigger META-Joe, with many people pushing for something, many hands on the steering wheel, many TV ads resonating through his head and shaping his perceptions, etc?

The bigger Meta-Joe seems to be the smallest unit that gets back to being a "causal" actor, but it's not clear that there is an edge here. Because everyone of THOSE other people is tied in a feedback loop to a larger set of people, etc. ,etc.

IN some very real sense, WE ALL are Joe, and Joe is US. The choices he makes, given the choices he has made, given the people pushing on him, given the resources he had available, given the choices he had to work with where he was, all come home to roost in the current "action" and "choices".

Many prior actions are now encoded in habits and patterns of thinking. Many are encoded and stored and persisted as the house or apartment or neighborhood he lives in. Many are now encoded in the friends he hangs with, his job, his boss, his education, his language and culture and sub-culture.

So, 2000 BC to 1900 AD or so, we had a clear model that people were little separate beings, who occasionally interacted. Yes, there was some strange anecdotal talking about marriage as being a "becoming one flesh" but that was just flowery language. Yes, there was talk of "possession" and temptation and not being able to control oneself, but that was ascribed to demons, devils, and maybe bad blood or bad company.

After World WAr II, the psychological warfare crowd realized that it was possible to change people's behavior by simply changing the advertising messages they received, and the unemployed psyop crowd became Madison Avenue, and started trying to control the shopping, eating, driving, buying, and voting habits of Americans - sometimes with startling success.

Finally, this century, we have the computing power and the concepts to start actually getting our hands around swarms of actors interacting, and stop discarding these data points, and look at how things actually come down.

The bad news is that it will appear, as with the New Scientist article, that much of our lives is determined outside "us". The good news is that, with another click of the microscope stage to a larger view, we see that, in fact, "we" get to pick our friends, our city, our job, what we watch on TV, whether to have a TV at all, what country to live in, etc. So, it's not a simple "either or", but a "both".

Yes much of what "we" do is influenced by others, if not actually determined 100% by others, or our subconscious, at this given moment. Longer term, though, we get our turn to determine which others are significant to "us". There is a feedback loop, which causes identities to merge, and we become more "waves" than "particles" -- there is no "me" and "you" there is only "us".

This isn't a "bug" -- it's a "feature". This is what will allow us to interact and build a new society based on the model our body uses to hold ten trillion cells together and act as one person.

It's also a terrifying thought for those who have a mental model of being "above the rabble" and higher class, not subject to this sort of weak-willed nonsense that the poor seem so prone to. As the housing crisis shows, foolishness spanned the rich and the poor equally.

It does suggest, however, that our prisons are filled with people who had less choice in their actions than our penal system considers. It suggests our CEO's are way over-paid, and should be more thankful for their labor force.

It suggests we can get either "active strength" from hanging with the right crowd, or "active weakness" by hanging with the wrong crowd.

It suggest that we don't live in this moment alone, but our second grade teacher's training on us is still operating today, which means, in that sense, she is still alive even though her body isn't.

This is, indeed, a "paradigm shift." It is inexorable now. Having seen it, it won't go back in the box. We're going to have to learn a whole lot more about getting along with "other people" because, it turns out, "they" are actually "us".

If we want to "control" how "we" act in the future, we do have levers to do that -- it's just that the levers look like changing the people around us and how "we" interact with "them".

Just because our internal self has only 5% control of what "we" do at any given moment doesn't mean that's not enough to get us anywhere we want to go. It just takes time and persistence and recognition that much of the "self" we need to change is outside our skin, not inside it.

So, bottom line - what is it? Are we "free" or not?
Well, it's like the Einstein/Monroe picture - - it's BOTH, depending on what SCALE you look at the problem with.

In the short run, over a few minutes or a day or week, perhaps, no, we are not very free, and have almost our whole life determined by "outside influences", constraints, and habits. In the long run, over years, we are pretty much free to determine our life, if we manage to get linked up with enough stability, perhaps a religious institution or a scientific one, so that we can actually make long-term plans and stick with them, despite local setbacks.

As motivational speaker Tony Robbins puts it -- "We overestimate what we can do in a year, but we underestimate what we can do in a decade. "

Amen.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Gentle primer on feedback control loops

Here's yet another pass at the basic concepts using mostly pictures. Let me know if this works better for you or your students! I can adjust what I'm putting here to your needs and interests, but only if I get feedback!

The first picture shows rising and falling output. This is often what people mean or think of when they talk about "positive" and "negative" feedback.

Unfortunately, it's also their concept of where the "feedback" concept stops, so they missed all the good stuff.

The next picture shows converging output as a result of a simple control ("goal seeking") feedback loop.

The output rises or falls to some present value or "goal".

Then, the system can be "tweaked" a little so it converges faster on the goal, but that often will result in overshooting and coming back with a little bit (or a lot) of bouncing.

The next picture, of the car getting to a hill from the flatland below, is supposed to show how a speed control system should do a good job of maintaining the same speed, even when the outside world changes a lot.

Then the picture of the car going up and down the mounntain explains more about that. Without speed "control", the car would slow down going up the hill, and speed up a lot going down the hill. Instead, the speed is almost constant.

But, this whole effect of locking down or "latching" or "clamping" a value, such as speed, to some predetermined value is really confusing to statistical analysis. The effect is that a variation that is expected to be there is not there. There's no trace of it. So far as statistical analysis shows, there is absolutely no relationship between the slope of the hill and the speed of the car. Well, that's true and false. The speed may not be changing, but the speed of the engine has changed a lot.

The same kind of effect could be seen in an anti-smoking campaign. The level of smoking in a region is constant, and then you spend $10,000 to try to reduce smoking. The tobacco companies notice a slight drop and counter by spending $200,000 to increase advertising. The net result is zero change in the smoking rate. Did your intervention have no effect? Well, yes and no.

The output (cigarette sales) has been "clamped" to a set value by a feedback control loop, so it varies much less than you'd expect. Again, this is hard to "see" with statistics that assume there is no feedback loop involved in the process.

For that matter, the fact that the "usual" statistical tests should ONLY be used if there is no feedback loop is often either unknown or dismissed casually, when it's the most important fact on the table.

(The "General Linear Model" only gives you reliable results if the world is, well, "linear" -- and feedback loop relationships are NEVER linear, unless they're FLAT, which also confuses the statistical tests, and sometimes the statisticians or policy makers.

The good news is that there is a transformation of the data that makes it go back to "linear" again, which involves "Laplace Transforms", which I'm not going to get into today. But, stay tuned, we can make this circular world "linear" again so it can be analylzed and you guys can compute your "p-values" and statistical tests of significance and hypothesis testing, etc.)






OK, then, I illustrate INSTABILITY
caused by a "control loop" . In this case, a new driver with a poor set of rules thinks ("If slow, hit the gas. If fast, hit the brake pedal."). Those result in a very jerky ride alternating between going too fast and too slow.

Note, however, that the CAR is not broken. The Pedals are not broken. The only problem is that the mental rules used to transform the news about the speed into pedal action are a poor choice of rules - in this case, they have no "look ahead" built into them.


Then I have a really noisy picture that's really three pictures in one.

The left top side has a red line showing how some variable, say position of a ship in a river, varies over time. The ship stays mostly mid-stream until the boss decides to "help". Say the boss is up in the fog, and needs to get news from the deckhands, who can actually see the river and the river banks.

Unfortunately, the boss gets position reports by a runner, who takes 5 minutes to get up to the cabin.
As a result, using perfectly good RULES, the captain sees that the ship is heading too far to the right. (well, yes, that's PORT or STARBOARD or some nautical term. For now, call it "right").

So, she uses a good rule - if the ship is heading too far to the right, turn it more to the LEFT, and issues that command.

The problem is that the crew had already adjusted for the too much to the right problem, but too recently for the captain to know about, given the 5 minute delay. So, the captain tells them to turn even MORE to the left, which only makes the problem worse.

The resulting control loop has become unstable, and the ship will crash onto one or the other shores - not because any person is doing the wrong thing, but because the wrongness is extremely subtle. There is a LAG TIME between where the ship WAS and where the captain thinks it is NOW, based on her "dashboard".

That "little" change makes a stable system suddenly become unstable and deadly.

People who are familiar with the ways of control systems will be on the lookout for such effects, and take steps to counteract them. People who skipped this lesson are more likely to drive the ship onto the rocks, while complaining about baffling incompetency, either above or below their own level in the organization.



The last picture shows some of the things that "control system engineers" think about.

These are terms such as "rise time", "overshoot", "settling time", and "stability". And Cost.

These terms deal with how the system will respond to an external change, if one happened.

But a lot of the effort and tools are dedicated to being sure that the system, as built, will be STABLE, and won't cause reasonable components, doing reasonable things, to crash into something.

This kind of stability is a "system variable" in a very real sense that is lost when any heap of parts that interact is called "a system." It is something that has a very real physical meaning It is something that can be measured, directly or indirectly. It is something that can be managed and controlled, by very small changes such as reducing lag times for data to get from person A to person B.

And, my whole point, is that this is something people analyzing and designing organizational behavior and public health regulatory interventions should understand and use on a daily basis.

Maybe we need a simulator, or game, that is fun to play and gets people into situations where they have to understand these concepts, on a gut level, in order to "win" the game.

These are not "alien" concepts. Most of our lives we are in one or another kind of feedback control loop, and we have LOTS of experience with what goes right and wrong in them -- we just haven't categorized it into these buckets and recognized what's going on yet.

One thing I will confidently assert, is that once you understand what a feedback control loop looks like, and how to spot them, your eyes will open and the entire world around you will be transformed. Suddenly, you'll be surrounded by feedback loops that weren't there before.

The difficulty in seeing them may be due to the fact that what is flowing around this loop is "control information", and it can ride on any carrier, as I showed yesterday with the person getting a glass of water. The information can travel in liquids, solids, nerve cells, telephone wires, the internet, light rays, etc., and is pretty indifferent as to what it hitches a ride on.

The instruments keep changing, but the song is what matters.

You have to stop focusing on the instruments and listen to the song.

Control System Engineering is about the songs that everything around us is singing. Once we learn to hear them, they're everywhere. Life at every level is dense with them. And, they seem to be a little bit aware of each other, because sometimes they get into echos and harmonies across levels and seem to entrain each other.

It's beautiful to behold. I recommend it!

W.