Clergy take on US Mortgage Mess

Martha Graybow, from Reuters, looks at what the US Clergy think about the mortgage mess in today's Washington Post. I agree wholeheartedly that there are "spiritual solutions to economic problems" but don't see them mentioned in that article.

One characteristic of spiritual solutions is that they tend to look at the bigger picture, in all three dimensions of space, time, and social scale. Like great health care, the solutions are proactive, preventing the car crash in the first place, not miraculously repairing the damage and deaths following it.

The solutions involve what seems to be a lost art these days - understanding the actual causes of outcomes, and the consequences of our own actions, and then, gasp, altering our behavior so we don't get into trouble next time.

The USA has made the news lately for the poor state of health here, and I'm not talking about insurance but simply the physical health of people. The upper quarter of white American males, for example, are less healthy than the bottom quarter of white males in England.

Why? Compare the strategies. England, with universal care, tries to prevent health problems and helps people eat well and stay fit and not do dumb things. The USA tries to have the most astoundingly heroic rescue and repair service so we can smoke, drink, and do dumb things, and then not have to face the consequences, sometimes. Of course, the culture of abandon of self-control is spread widely, and the access to repair-services is restricted, which makes for many sick poor people. What's less recognized is that even the rich end up worse. No doctor can make you better after a heart attack and transplant than you would have been if you'd stayed fit in the first place, either physically or psychologically.

With airplanes with those T-shaped tails, with the small wings ("elevators") up high on the tail, there is a design issue. If the plane descents at the wrong angle, turbulence ("stalling") from the body of the plane surrounds the tail, which loses the ability to change the angle of the plane. If you get into this condition, typically, the plane will descend into the ground before the airport. Not good.

Pilots have a question: "What do you do when you get into this condition?" and the answer is "Don't get into that condition."

And here is the difference between a novice learning lessons too late, and professionals. Professionals figure out what it takes so they don't end up in that condition, and what kind of training they need to do that, and build it into the training program so they can, in fact, "not do that." Social wisdom from other people's experience is built into everyone's training or retraining. That works, going forwards. It doesn't fix the past, of course.

So, when we look at an equivalent question to the mortgage mess, such as "What would it take to get young people not to drive too fast on icy roads?" the answer that comes to mind is "It would take a miracle."

Precisely.

It would take maturity, training, a social ethic of responsibility, a social ethic of competence, and an ability to overcome the impulse to rush and damn the consequences. All of these things are possible for people, and some people can do all of those.

The "miracle" isn't that the people wake up one day and are suddenly good drivers, but that they have the social support system that, over a long period of time, gives them the internal capacity to master skills, to survive the short-term costs of responsibility, to overcome temptation and the short-run impulses to cheat, etc.

What's "miraculous" is that this "bounce-shot" works, when you can't sink the pool ball in the pocket directly. If you try to do this activity on your own, you'll generally fail. It's hard, and it involves persistence and local costs for some distant future benefit, and you'll run out of steam regardless how well intentioned the start is.

This "steam" to keep on going is crucial. We aren't taught about this in school, sadly, despite the fact that everyone knows about it and I believe it would stand up to rigorous experimental designs and tests.

Where does this "steam" come from? What gives young people the ability to say "No!" to drugs or speeding or ill-advised sex, or the ability to stay in school, or the ability to say "No!" to a dangerous mortgage, or the ability to rise above ego and consult with others and avoid putting their foot in that mortgage bear-trap in the first place?

Some kind of larger scale, persistent social structure is needed to hold this learning and navigational advice, and some kind of practice and habit is required to develop the strength to "obey" or "submit" to that outside higher authority when the inside impulses all want to go the old way.

For pilots, professional organizations and ethics may be enough, although federal standards help somewhat. Great pilots are far above what standards require, because they use outside social support to keep themselves in line.

For most of us in daily life, we need some kind of equivalent. Organized religion has historically served this role, when it doesn't get lost in itself and lose its own way.

So, while the government's "abstinence only" method of birth control is demonstrably broken and ineffective, the reason is not that abstinence may be a good practice for teens (and others), but that it is simply not possible for fragmented individuals, on their own strength, to carry out that practice and survive temptation.

In between the chaos of everyone repeating every mistake over and over, and the rigidity of dead dogma controlling every aspect of everyone's lives is a sweet spot that can provide make good pilots or drivers of us all.

These kind of problems are not healed by prayer after the crash, but by organized activity long before the crash designed to prevent it from ever happening.

Like Mr. Rodney Dangerfield, prevention "don't get no respect." It works, it can work, it has worked, it will work - but it's an organized social activity, not something an individual does for or to themselves.

In the mix of making it happen are deeper spiritual issues of identity, motivation, purpose, awareness, externally-based stability and power, and "steam".

God, we all could use more "steam." We just wish it was free.

It's not free, but it is affordable. It's something we can do for each other that requires no huge government program and, in fact, would probably choke and die if the government tried to run it.

At this point, most people look, sigh, and turn sadly away saying "They'll never do that."

I'd like to see what would happen if the 3 hours a day of TV indoctrination encouraged social responsibility with eyes open, instead of discouraging it and encouraging blind yielding to whatever impulse the advertisers or politicians can create in us at that second.

I think the change would indeed justify the term "spiritual" sufficiently to use that word even in an academic sense. Actually, I think the reconnection to the larger "us" goes deeper, but even if it only went this deep, it would be worth investigating.

And I'm confident that, like discovering the planets, if we charted out all the known effects and watched behaviors, we'd see patterns of unexplained variation that would cause us to look even deeper for something else going on.

It's a fascinating question. Meanwhile, short term, there are solutions to our problems but we refuse to accept them, wanting, I don't know, something more glamorous or short-term.

Being able to say "yes" to saying "no" is enough of a miracle to pray for daily.

We're still trying to build some sort of moral-Rambo model, where we have internal strength that doesn't require external support -- a GPS that works without satellites. And, sure, there are inertial navigation units that weigh 200 pounds we could carry around with us, even though they drift over time. That's a stupid solution when there are satellites in place already, so the GPS in our phone can be so tiny we don't notice the weight.

Same with wisdom. Satellites and a receiver is a better model.

Is this hard to do? Well, yes and no. Is it hard to use structural and civil engineering principles and computer-assisted design to make graceful bridges that don't fall down? Yes, but it is doable and we'd be pretty stupid not to have some group of people that learn it and do it for us.

Is it harder to make social structures that don't fall down, don't become corrupt, give us daily strength to persist our lessons and still have dynamic ability to adjust to changing times? Probably not that much harder.

We've just never tackled the problem that way, because even pondering questions of what determines our behavior or allows corruption to creep in raises emotions and resistance.

Still, it seems an obvious way to go. We just need to keep on asking "Why" one more time, and saying, ok, how can we tackle this problem in social engineering even with resistance and opposition and those who prefer these subjects not be studied?

This is nothing new. T.S. Eliot, in Choruses from the Rock (1934) says

There are those who would build the Temple,
And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.
In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet
There was no exception to the general rule.

and

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
and clay for new brick
and lime for new mortar
where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech.

and

If men do not build
How shall they live?

That's the "new bricks" metaphor this weblog site is named for. It's a good idea.

photo credit: I35W bridge collapse photo from Poppyseed Bandits

PISA - OECD Programme for International Student Assessment

Comparison of students in the OECD countries was in the news today, with the latest report on science and math among 15-year olds. I want to present a contrary view, that "individual" performance that matters today, now, this decade, has little to do with math and science, and a lot to do with how we interact with and relate to each other. That's where we should be looking.

A typical AP news item is here "Other Countries' Students Surpass the U.S. on Tests" and the actual Programme for International Student Assessment report is here. US scores for reading are not included, since, ironically, the printed test in the US was not proofread adequately and was offset a page, making all the references to "the diagram on the facing page" nonsensical.

The report itself is 350 pages, and even the executive summary is 56 pages long. Results for the US are rather dismal, and you can read those yourself. A few highlights that I thought were interesting related to differences between males and females, which I quote further below.

I object to the entire test, not as being "wrong" so much as being misleading and supporting the efforts to "teach to the test" we see in the US, and certainly here in Michigan.

Local news shows that the areas called "social studies", "civics", group music, literature, history, government, and humanities in general, as well as team sports, are being neglected or eliminated in order to improve school rankings and funding. Ratings of schools in New York City recently have created a hornet's nest of debate over "corrective action" required for "bad schools."

I've thought about these issues most of my life. Early in my life, I taught one year at the high-school level in trade school, 10th-12th grade "problem students" from a tri-county area in upstate New York. I taught MBA's for two years at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. And I've spent most of my adult life in a large university setting, paying attention to educational issues. At Cornell University, at one point, I was the Director of Institutional Planning and Analysis, and very focused on long-term directions in education. I'm currently involved with work involving "leadership training" and quality improvement among teams and executives.

And, my undergraduate major was Physics, heavy on the Math, with a lot of Computer Science thrown in, at which I did very well, so I'm not speaking as one biased against something I can't do, motivated by "sour grapes."

But I have to say that, after a lifetime watching this issue, I don't believe that an increased focus on "science, math, and reading" is where we need to be focusing our attention.

There are two crucial assumptions behind this focus on science and math in this multi-level world we live in. One assumption, on the individual level, is that a child in the US, say, can get the best future for himself or herself by seeking to become excellent in these areas, and in fact to become competitive with international students for good jobs. The other assumption is that, if many or most students succeeded at this goal, things would be much better for the country as a whole -- economically, on a corporate level, militarily, and in terms of the quality of our health and daily lives.

Both assumptions seem patently false to me. They represent the worst of denial, "tooth-fairy" wishful thinking, and unexamined models of how things work.

Regarding the first assumption, the US is so far in the hole at this point, after years of neglect and unjustified self-confidence, that the odds we can make our students individually competitive in a global marketplace are very low, in my judgment. We have a whole generation, if not two, of teachers in place who don't really understand their own subject areas. We have an ethic and status quo of speaking and reading only one language, and being proud of not doing very well at that.

And, we have a hugely anti-intellectual culture in many places, where students attempting to excel are punished by their peers. In fact, the only thing US students seem to rank highest on, based on research studies, is their self-esteem. In other words, there is a disconnect between how they actually perform and how they think of themselves as performing. At that, the USA seems to excel.

This has been a long time coming, and the resistance to the perception of a problem is deep, despite vivid descriptions of this by educators, industrial leaders like Bill Gates and Ross Perot, etc. In the late 1980's, the B-school at Cornell considered setting up an outreach program in Europe, and did a survey of alums living there to get a sense of what we should be teaching. The answers were uniform and startling. Basically, they were a mix between laughter and scorn that the US management education had anything to offer Europe. We weren't even in the running.

Meanwhile, our graduate schools have been making it in science and engineering only by a huge influx of foreign students, in some cases 70% of the graduate student body, because we couldn't find qualified American students. In the life sciences, the ratio seems more like 90% from walking around and peering into labs, but I don't know the exact numbers. It seems clear that, if China stopped sending graduate students and post-docs, the Life Science mission in Michigan would be essentially gutted.

So, the top 10% of our students might be able to compete in that marketplace, but it's just not clear to me that the other 90% of them will stand much of a chance, in the next decade, of catching up. The odds would shift if we could use the power of television and marketing to market multi-lingual, multi-cultural education, familiarity with the world, and an ethic of hard work and putting off present pleasure to invest in the future benefits. Instead, despite whip-cracking from above and jawboning about a need for education, the country seems to be heading towards increased parochialism and isolationism, rejection of science, rejection of reading, and focusing on instant gratification and distracting "entertainment" as the end-point of life.

This seems to me part of a consistent and predictable pattern of denial of inconvenient truth, combined with a helpless/hopeless syndrome, combined with a startling inability, at every level, to carry on reasoned discussion and reach agreement on "hard issues". As I'm writing this, the Michigan government still hasn't sorted out the budget, due last October 1st. The Federal Government is ten days from either a shutdown, or a bitter "showdown", knock-down, screaming public battle over the budget, also due last October 1st. Social security is probably out of control. Health care costs are clearly out of control.

Oh, and the credit markets and home mortgages are out of control. The US debt passed $9 trillion, almost half of which was incurred during the current administration and is accelerating in the wrong direction, out of control, and for that matter almost entirely out of sight of most citizens who either don't know, don't care, or care but feel helpless to do anything about it. It is unmentioned in the political debates. Whatever is going on in the middle East isn't impressing anyone either.

So, I have to ask, what fraction of that mess would be improved if all the participants were simply better at math and science?

Right. Essentially none of it. We are not dying, as a country, because of a lack of math and science. It is something else entirely.


We are dying, I would suggest, from an inability to work together and to reason together and to make hard choices together.

So, now we get to the second assumption I refer to well above, that if only we had more technology, oh boy, then things would be fine for the country, you betcha.

Not.

I'm not a Luddite. We don't have to return our technology to the store and get a refund since it didn't work as advertised, although that's an interesting thought. This "better life" we citizens were promised seems to be less and less likely. The promise of having world control and dominion through advanced technology and weaponry also seems to be surprisingly distant.

Maybe, it is not true that "technology will save us." Either individually or collectively.

If more of the same results in more of the same, I'd say we're going the wrong direction.

So, before we rush off to focus what's left of our national treasure on a solution to our problems, we need to have a serious look at whether we're addressing the right problem, and, if so, are we doing it with an intervention that has any chance at all of working as designed. We need to be alert to signs of wishful thinking and denial and avoiding hard-choices and painful subjects, or subjects which produce high-emotions and social conflict.

What about the argument that if we just had more math and science, that level of logical thinking would fix everything? I have to look at our centers of academic wisdom, our universities, and ask how good a job they do at dealing with internal conflicts and making hard choices. I am not impressed. They don't make the choice that a world composed almost entirely of highly trained people, who are strong in math and science, seems to be any better than the rest of us at making hard choices and managing its own affairs.

I referred in an earlier post to the University of Oxford, which has been in business for over 1100 years now. If there was any place that highly educated people should have had a chance to sort out these issues, you'd expect to find it there. Yet what I read in their on-line documents is that they have spent years arguing over what e-mail system to use, and cannot reach any resolution on the issue.

Would more math and science knowledge help them out? I doubt it. Do they just "need more time" on the exam? I doubt it.

Frankly, I'd suggest doing this. Take technology off the table entirely. Imagine for a moment, as I have, that the problem is not that we have insufficient math and science and engineering to be able to thrive and prosper and be healthy and happy as individuals and as companies and as a society.

Then, hmm, what is the problem? Where is this process of prosperity-reaching breaking down?

Whether it is a symptom or a root-cause, it's clear that our ability to get together, put our heads together, and come to grips with our own problems is not very good. In fact, it probably deserves a failing grade, based on how well the annual budgets are coming along and how civil and rational the discussion is about selection of the next US president.

So, back to my opinion of this whole PISA - Programme for International Student Assessment.

It appears to me that the mental model of that assessment is that only one level matters of the multi-leveled biological world of life that we live in - and that is the "individual." And even there, I find the conclusions unhelpful.

I think we need to take that level off the table as well, keeping technology off it, and say, yes, but what else is needed to make this baby fly?

Very bright individuals, by themselves, can deal with some issues -- fewer these days than you'd think, after accounting for not only internal roadblocks like depression and unexplained fatigue and ill-health, but for external roadblocks in getting almost anything done - which is like trying to get anywhere on an airplane this holiday season in the short 2-3 hours that you'd think a jet aircraft could deliver.

In fact, that's a perfect example. We have jet aircraft, that can go 550 miles per hour, and cross the country, potentially, in 4 hours. Yet, to travel from Detroit to Miami, say, for Christmas, it would be good to leave, oh, 1-3 days for the trip.

Would it help if we had even faster planes? Nope. We've run out of what we can buy with faster individual planes, and need to look at how the system of many planes, interacting, behaves.

This is exactly what's going on with education. We've run out of what we can by with brighter individuals, and need to look at the system of how many individuals, interacting, behaves.

Pouring our remaining bank-account into making faster planes or brighter individuals have equally likely chances of fixing the problems, which are not at the individual level but at the "system" level.

Now, this is nuanced and subtle. The behavior at the system level is dependent on what sort of internal decision-making and behavior-generating rules individuals use. If you change the nature of the individuals, you will definitely change the nature of the emergent system behavior. All research in complex systems shows that.

So, I come full circle. The "problem" has to do with something "wrong" inside individuals that our educational system should strive to make "right' -- but the something has close to nothing to do with math and science, per se.

Yes, maybe if science advanced another 200 years at the speed it's going, you could get to the root problem that direction, but we don't have 200 years, so that's not very helpful.

We need to leap ahead, pull our heads out of the box, climb a tree, and see where this path goes.

It seems to me that a closer first-approximation to where the "wrongness" is that we need to address is suggested by words like: morality, integrity, honesty, humility, sincerity, trust, compassion, civility. In fact, a really big word is this one: maturity.

As a society, in the US, the term "adult" or "mature" seems to have been hijacked to mean "old enough to buy pornography and alcohol and cigarettes and drive a car and generally behave like an adolescent jerk and not have to listen to anyone anymore or take advice about anything."

What the educational situation highlights instead is that the US students are the world leaders in what could be termed pride, arrogance, self-esteem, or conceit. Which means they are also world leaders in unawareness of reality or denial of same.

Which means they are breaking precisely the key feedback loop required for any adaptive entity to, well, adapt to changed conditions in its environment -- namely, it has to be aware of the gap between where it is and where it should be, and it has to be responding to that awareness.

Of course, awareness of a gap produces internal conflict, that seeks to be resolved. It will, in fact, be resolved, come what may. So, if the gap cannot be closed, then the awareness of it will generally be shut off instead. That seems to be what has happened here. We don't want to be so far behind, we don't like being behind, it doesn't reflect well on our leadership to be behind, we can't deal with being behind, so we will effectively agree to ignore it and act as if it doesn't matter one bit to us. And maybe it will go away.

Not.
Summary so far:

• Houston, we have a serious problem here.
• It's not going away.
• In fact, it seems to be getting worse.
• Pouring another decade of math and science into it looks unlikely to help, on any level.
• Technology will not save us this time.

and

• We are going to have to grow up and learn how to act like adults and work with each other and with hard-choices and sacrificing some short-term desires for long-term needs, and some personal desires for some social requirements of continued existence.
  

In other words, the "individual" performance that matters today, now, this decade, has little to do with math and science, and a lot to do with how we interact with and relate to each other.

That's what we need to develop metrics and tests for, and that's what we need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to do, since we obviously don't know it now.

And, incidentally, that's why so much of this weblog is devoted to "religion" and "social feedback".

There are things outside science that we need to get good at, whether science can help us with them or not. If you get past the high-profile single-issue religious zealots, a large fraction of what religious people are trying to tell scientists is the above message.

I care less about whether life was created in 7 days or 7 billion years than I do whether people have some basis on which to grow up and deal with each other that doesn't involve killing the other party as the only imagined "solution." All major religions attempt to provide such a basis.

Scientists say that atheistic philosophy can serve the same purpose, but that's not obviously true based on any society that has thrived based on technology, absent some embedding religion.

The problems we face as a society are not "in the box" or "in the org chart" that science is good at dealing with. They are in the context, the "white space" between boxes, where, historically, science and mathematics have not gone. To be fair, science is increasingly aware that there is something important going on in this "complex adaptive living system" space.

Our solutions involve things like "norms" and the word "should", which are areas, again, that science, trying to fight off a legacy of "proof by intimidation or inquisition" thought it could get away from by being scrupulously "objective" and "distant" .

While there can be a lot of debate about which "norm" is "right", I'd suggest that norms which result in the destruction of all life on the planet, or of our own society, are probably worth re-examining. It would seem to be a wiser choice to select our norms from the set of norms that actually generate a future for us.

That issue can be thought about scientifically, maybe even at some point using mathematics or simulation and animation to gain insight about the implications, downstream, of processes too complex for our finite brains to comprehend.

These advances require focusing attention on how people relate, how they work together, what works and what doesn't, what's worked out how in the past, what works in different cultures and countries, etc. But, those are the humanities, the subjects that "science and math" fixations are driving out of our school systems.

We have to address how we "should" treat each other. It's a hard issue. It's a bootstrap issue, because our inability to face and deal well with conflict and emotion and differing perspectives makes it hard to deal with precisely those issues.

So, it's a feedback loop. We need to spiral it towards better mutual understanding, not away from that. We need to take on pain to do that. And face reality. Both of which we cannot do in a single step, but these have to be approached slowly, hesitantly, but insistently.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that seems relevant. "I will speak the truth, even if my voice shakes."

The answer is over there, I think.

==========
I promised some interesting information from the PISA executive summary, so here it is.

Males and females showed no difference in average science performance in the majority of countries, including 22 of the 30 OECD countries. In 12 countries, females outperformed males, on average, while males outperformed females in 8 countries. Most of these differences were small. In no OECD country was the gender difference larger than 12 points on the science scale.

This is different from reading and mathematics where significant gender differences were observed.

However, similarities in average performance mask certain gender differences: In most countries, females were stronger in identifying scientific issues, while males were stronger at explaining phenomena scientifically. Males performed substantially better than females when answering physics questions.

Reading is the area with the largest gender gaps. In all OECD countries in PISA 2006 , females performed better in reading on average than males. In twelve countries, the gap was at least 50 score points.

Photo credits:
Amish barn raising (Swarming) by heyburn3 (click on it to go there).
Team crossing stream photo credit: Ollieda
Houston Graphic by the author.

Survival of the selfless

"The consequences of regarding evolution as a multilevel process, with higher-level selection often overriding lower-level selection, are profound." This under-statement is in the latest issue of New Scientist, in a must-read piece titled "Survival of the selfless", by sociobiologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. (New Scientist , 3 Nov 2007).

Indeed. Since I've been presenting the case for multi-level co-evolution in my weblogs for the last 2 years, I am ecstatic to see some big names in the field take the same position.

This furor is about whether it is "genes" that evolve, or "individuals" or groups of individuals such as tribes or species. Views were and are still held by many otherwise rational scientists with religious fervor in the worst sense, and arouse equal vehemence when challenged, akin to that between creationists and evolution-supporters.

This matters because higher level groups may have a whole different "fitness" measure than individuals, and while individuals or genes might evolve faster by being "selfish", the whole society of individuals might evolve faster if everyone was cooperative and altruistic. This battle continues to rage today, and is a core issue in whether "competition" and "free markets" are a good idea or not. So it is tangled with social ramifications, just like all science ultimately is.

This is also a core question in whether a "Theory X" company, driven by internal competition between managers, can ultimately be out-performed by a "Theory Y" company, like Toyota, driven by massive internal cooperation. A lot of egos are at risk of being bruised. A lot of justification for public policy is at risk of being overturned. It's a big deal.

Well, which is it? Do individuals evolve by being better at beating each other, or do groups of individuals dominate by being better at collaboration?

Peeking ahead, of course, I usually argue that "or" is a bad concept, once feedback is involved, and the right solution to look at usually involves "and" and "all of the above, simultaneously, interacting." But, "all of the above, interacting with feedback" was way beyond anyone's ability to compute or analyze, and not an attractive model for most researchers or grant writers.

Well, back to this article. In the face of enormous opposition, and tacking a consensus in the field that group-level evolution is a dead concept, they really settle for the weak claim that "we cannot rule out group-level selection."

Hmm. What's this all about? The concept is fascinating, and the sociology of science is equally fascinating here. The Wilsons ask "Why was group selection rejected so decisively [ in the 1960's ] ?" What a great question in how Science works!

Now, I should note that I'm one of the casualties of what seems a similar disastrous and mistaken turn of a field, namely Artificial Intelligence ("AI"). I got hooked by a course at
Cornell in 1965, taught by Professor Frank Rosenblatt, titled "Learning and Self Reproducing Machines".He and his lab had developed a "perceptron", a maze of switches and wires that connected up to a 20x20 grid of 400 photocells, on which letters of the alphabet were projected.

The perceptron, a model of human vision and learning, was slowly learning to tell the letters apart and identify them. At the time, this was astounding, and many scientists confidently argued that this could never be done. Later, of course, Kurzweil and others carried this technology forward and made OCR text-scanners that are now about 99.5% accurate or better and can read license-plates at an angle from a speeding car. But, in 1965, telling "A" from "B" was a big deal, especially if the "A" wasn't always exactly straight up and down, or in the same place on the grid.

The perceptron's insides were a network of wires and "nodes", a model of our brain's neurons, where the total strength of signal coming into each node was added up, multiplied by some factor, and either triggered or didn't trigger an outgoing signal to the next layer. The system learned by changing these multiplicative factors, searching for some set of them that would ultimately trigger the highest level "A" node when an A was projected on its primitive retina, and trigger at "B" when a B was projected, etc.

Then, the field was devastated by a very authoritative and persuasive paper, ultimately retracted, by highly regarded MIT professor Marvin Minsky that this approach "could never work." Funding dried up, and researchers moved on to other projects. Labs closed.

It took over a decade until somone finally figured out that Minsky had simply proven that a two-level neural net had irrecoverable gaps in its logic, and was not "complete". What he failed to look at, or see, was that these gaps went away when you got to three-levels or more.

Wikipedia has this quote:

Its proof that perceptrons can not solve even some simple problems such as XOR caused the virtual disappearance of artificial neural networks from academic research during the 1970s, until researchers could prove that more complex networks are capable of solving these and all functions.
(source: Hassoun, Mohamad H., Fundamentals of Artificial Neural Networks, The MIT Press, 1995. pp. 35-56.)

Oopsie.

Anyway, it appears to this observer that a similar phenomenon has occurred in socio-biology. Some very persuasive people published papers "debunking" multi-level evolution, well before there was enough computer power to actually simulate it and see what happened. ( In 1978, the mainframe computer I was programming had 4,000 bytes of memory to work with. Not 4 Gig, or 4 Meg, but 4 thousand. Any cell phone today has more than that.)

The social climate at the time made this debunking seem a better idea. World Communism was the mortal enemy of all that was good and holy, threatening "our way or life", justifying huge military expenditures, and anything that suggested communal good or community was more important than individuals was instantly suspect and risked being dragged before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, where the proponent had to renounce their views or be thrown out of their jobs or locked up as being "unAmerican." Everyone was building bomb-shelters for protection against that day's terror threat.

In addition, religions had held for thousands of years that there was really nothing of importance between man and God, and man was God's noblest creation, so the idea that something larger than humans but smaller than God mattered was suspect dogma. (These days, the evolution of the earth and global warming is in fact dominated by such a larger life-form, "corporations", which have more or less hijacked the role individuals used to play in influencing governmental decisions and policies. But that observation lives in world "A", and discussions of evolution live in world "B", and the two don't talk to each other or trade notes.)

Then, of course, some people didn't like the idea of evolution in any form, and rejected it and most of biology and science based on that view.

So, for many reasons, some good, some not so good, the idea of group evolution as a dominant or even important force was denounced, rejected with emotion, and painted as an example of wrong thinking to be avoided at all costs.

Now, by what the Wilson's say, the whole question is being raised again, this time in a climate with much more powerful computers, where cooperation and collaboration in corporations are not always dirty words, and where the old theories, frankly, didn't explain why there was just so much altruism and goodness in people.

As I say, I'm delighted.

Also, finally, as I've posted on before, finally "feedback" and dynamics are starting to be considered in models, and finally multi-level causality keeps on increasingly showing up in how individuals behave, to the point where the National Institutes of Health and the Institute of Medicine talk about the necessity of using multi-level models to understand social interactions and how the things we see around us, like poverty, are held in place by many subtle but very powerful forces at different levels.

Fascinatingly, this gets us back to what Charles Darwin himself said in The Descent of Man, published in 1871, and the lead sentence in the Wilson's article:

Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe ... an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.

The Wilsons say that group evolution, versus individual evolution, doesn't yet explain the observed rise in altruism, although they can computer a visible imact.

Immodestly, I'll suggest that they need, like Minsky, to look at three levels, not two, to see the effect start to dominate.

In fact, all around us, we see corporations trying to survive and be more fit than competition, by pouring resources into internal cooperation and collaboration. So while individuals may continue to follow "greedy algorithms" and seek their own advancement, the corporation is making the playing field non-level and rewarding collaboration as the method of getting ahead personally. In that sense, Corporate policy is serving one role of religion - seeing the larger picture, thinking globally, and then trying to shift the local context so that relatively less visionary individuals, acting locally, will do the right thing if they just follow the rules.

This "think globally, act locally" function is the key role that "unity" has to handle, and it works best if people stop fighting the behaviors and yield and embrace the behaviors instead.

People have to let go of their own ego, "die to themselves" as it were, only to be "reborn" where their ego now includes the other people in the larger village or familiy or corporation they now have committed to belong to. In some sense, they now are just selfish at a whole larger level, as now those villages or corporations or religions or nations start competing, and the whole cycle begins again at a higher level, as they too have to learn that collaboration beats competition hands down in the long run, even if it doesn't seem obvious locally.

This phase transition is one we should be looking for and supporting. It's built so deeply into the fabric of space and time and control loops that it is inevitable and always working in the background, at ever higher levels, simultaneously. At least, that's how I see it.

Of course, that would imply that it won't be long before earth discovers we're just one inhabited planet of millions such planets, and we have to deal with the whole unity/diversity and competition / collaboration thing all over again at an even larger scale and scope.

Which is a model that some people don't like, so this can get emotional again. Still, I think we need to get used to the idea that we are not on top of God's creation, just below Gods ourselves, but maybe quite a few levels lower than that. Earth is not in the center of our galaxy, nor in the center of the universe.

It's a very scary concept to some people, if the world is seen as a place where competition and dog-eat-dog dominates. That belief leads to an imperative to dominate the world, before someone else dominates you. On the other hand, if the world is a place where cooperation and collaboration dominate, then it is a far less scary place, and we should "get with the program."

Already our corporations, internally, are undergoing this transformation. Kicking and screaming, often, but they cannot deny that the Toyota model outshines the GM model.

We need to speed the transition on the level of nations and religions as well, and find that sweet spot where cooperation and collaboration work so much better than competition for dominance and attempts at mutual destruction.

All of those struggles are tied up in this question of the way nature, life, and/or God operate here and what the design principles are that we can rely on to work. The cells in our bodies don't triumph in "beating" each other, but in collaborating with each other. It's a good model, and it's been field tested, and it works.

We should stop fighting it and use it.

Wade


The New Scientist article says of itself:

This is an edited, abridged version of a review in the December issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology. Further reading: D. S. Wilson's book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's theory can change the way we think about our lives describes multilevel selection theory for a broad audience. D.O. Wilson and B. Holldobler's forthcoming book The Superorganism analyzes how insect colonies can be seen as products of colony-level selection.

On suffering, evil, the existence of God - NY Times

I don't want to argue about the nature of "evil" here, but I do want to reflect on the nature of arguing. Stanley Fish of the New York Times recently posted a column "On suffering, evil, and the existence of God" which made the top-10 most popular list for on-line readers, and has 150 comments posted covering a wide range of opinions. If you ponder "theodicy", it makes interesting reading.

The University of Aberdeen Philosophy Department's glossary defines this as follows:

THEODICY: An argument which tries to explain how a good and all-powerful God could create a world with suffering and evil in it.

I used to spend much time wrestling with such arguments, but finally decided that they are largely a waste of time, akin to one person I recall who had been struggling for a year with whether the word "satan" should be capitalized.

Most of us are not well trained or equipped to develop chains of solid qualitative reasoning that will stand up to time or peer-review, and for many people I observed these arguments largely served as an excuse to avoid doing the chores or facing problems in their own lives. such as how they themselves treated their neighbors.

For my own part, I have observed that it is difficult, or possibly impossible, to extrapolate from one "level" of this physical universe to even the next higher level, let alone extrapolate across a billion levels. Even within humans, children have little knowledge of what adults spend time worrying about, and I've spend many posts on why "management" and "labor" are effectively blind regarding each other's concerns and perspectives and, frankly, realities.

On a very slightly larger scale, if viruses or cells could reason, I doubt that their certain pronouncements about the nature of "life" would remain valid as seen by people.

So, I would suggest a different approach, and take a page from Science's book here, and ask that an instrument or technique or approach be validated and calibrated before being relied upon.

If your lab equipment cannot correctly measure a simple known sample, I wouldn't think you should rely on it to measure a complex unknown one.

So, I'd suggest people who have logical chains of reasoning they think extend "upwards" lower their sights to simply helping us figure out what's going on, say, at the scale of galaxies or even our own neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy. Are the the first ones here, or is the evidence that someone was here before us, and is maybe still here? Is what is going on on earth of our own making, or is there a larger agency involved?

In this case, by agency, I mean simply and literally that - some agency, institute, corporation, secret government, the CIA, or Club of Rome, or some boring group of "aliens" that is busy growing, mining, or shaping human affairs.

Does anyone know how to make robust measurements of anything, in any way, that lets them determine, with both certainty and correctness, whether "someone else" is meddling in the affairs of some large group of people? And, if so, can the measurement locate either the route or the mechanism or the "source" of the meddling?

Do we have an advanced compass we can set down in a group of people and have the needle spin and point towards some outside group meddling in their affairs?

Or, these days, maybe it needs to make a list of the hundreds of groups who are meddling in the affairs of everyone else, in order to remove those factors, and see if there is still some huge unknown factor meddling in the lives of all of us.

(If you have such a device, I think it has a very high market value and the CIA would love to talk to you.)

Anyway, to my knowledge, no, no one can do that. And, compared to tracking down "God", that should be an easy task.

I'm not saying it's an impossible task, or one that is not a great thing for Science to work on, from a public health point of view and from a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) point of view, or from a Homeland Security (or X-files) point of view.

The problem runs immediately into the questions I've posted on numerous times before, and not by coincidence. Can we recognize and describe and measure and reason about the kinds of causality that happen over long distances and long times, instead of being immediate and local? Right now, no. That is the current frontier of public health - multilevel distal causality.

When do you look and how do you look? For example, say there is a cake baking in an oven in my kitchen. (I wish!) What would a scientist "measure" to "see" that the cake is an artificial construct that I am "making", and not some natural phenomenon that is simply occurring and carrying out chemical reactions following physical laws?

If you know the answer, please comment or write me. I can't think of any way to make a local measurement of the cake that would nail down that relatively simple fact.

If you enjoy that sort of thinking, I'm also curious how you'd measure a water molecule and tell whether it was just bouncing off its neighbors blindly, or whether it was, viewed from further back, part of a flow of "water" in a "pipe" on the way to fill a glass of water for me to drink.

Unless I'm mistaken, which I'll allow, Science has no way to make such "local" measurements about "global" realities, even on boring things like water or cakes, let alone on whether a parent is "raising" a child or neglecting them when letting them learn something the hard way, let alone making judgments about impacts or influences on whole societies over thousands of years, etc.

Science has other measurement blind-spots right now, such as detecting that something, exposed to many forces, is changing far less than "it should" or, for that matter, not changing at all. Most statistics has trouble going from "As I vary X, you can see it has no effect on Y" and concluding "AHA! Something's clearly going on here!" So if I launch an anti-smoking campaign and smoking doesn't change one bit, is that because my campaign had no effect, or that it was way too effective and immediately cancelled out by an increase in marketing by the tobacco companies in reaction to my original action?

We are not very good at determining the constants of the motion, and even worse at detecting "loop invariants" of the motion - things that can vary but, if you wait long enough, always end up getting reset back to some original value. Those kinds of relationships fall through the standard statistical net, even though they are well-defined and common in computer programming. We can't even always detect things we are sure are there because we put them there.

Or, you can take all the scientific measurements you want to on my car, and extrapolate all you want to, but you will never predict that next Tuesday it will suddenly go to Chicago, which, by some miracle I can predict. That's a very real, observable, physical outcome that doesn't show up on the radar at all before it happens. What else is that radar missing?

Now, my car does not have a "going-to-Chicago-ness" property hidden inside it somewhere that is making it go to Chicago. Yes, the car burns gasoline, but the aspect of life that makes the car end up in Chicago has to do with the nature of human affairs, not with some property of the car. As T.S. Eliot said, "A thousand policemen directing the traffic / Cannot tell you why you come or where you go." There is more than one "reality" at work. The fact that the car is "just sitting there" tells you nothing, it turns out, about what it will do next Tuesday.

There is, literally, a gap large enough to drive a truck through, in the ability of Science to predict, using proven physical laws, what motion the center of mass of my car will take next week. The laws are correct, but incomplete, and in some ways very misleading.

This is not a small thing. When we are considering the nature of humans and society, this little "gap" is huge. It changes everything.

We are way past the simple case where we can simply neglect interactions between the parts. We are deep into "complex adaptive systems" where you can't understand a part without understanding the whole. Almost everything around humans is a created world, dominated by effects that Science, to date, has generally "left out" of the equations.

The gap is done silently, as an obvious, implicit assumption, that, "well, of course, we leave out the case of someone coming along and messing with the equipment." Fine, unless that is precisely the case you are trying to measure.

Even Science recognizes that it is an error to assume your conclusion. The right way to set up an experiment is to do all you can, in good faith, to try to disprove your conclusion and see if you can do it. You can't take a billion experiments, every one of which assumes no one is messing with the equipment, and conclude anything from them about the case where someone is, in fact, messing with the equipment. You threw out all the relevant data. You have to start over.

As we always ask in computing, when finding a "bug" or flaw in a program, "Well, if that's wrong, what else is wrong? What else slipped through this defect in our mental model?"

So, it seems to me, that taking such inadequate tools and boldly extrapolating to an infinite number of levels over all time and space is, well, a tad unjustified.

It's a fascinating question, but, right now, that method of coming up with an answer we want to rely on is not well developed or reliable. I'm all for developing it further as a way of better understanding all the forces on "me", and all the different worlds and dimensions and time-scales in which "I" exist, whatever that means.

The only conclusion Science can responsibly come up with so far is that this question isn't one that can be answered yet. We can't track down causal forces that take a decade to operate, let alone those that take centuries to operate, let alone larger ones.

The water molecule in the pipe doesn't understand the concept "municipal water supply", and probably never will. It's own little world cannot perceive the new niches and dimensions that come from "nowhere" into view when expanding the scale of the view outward.

If there are symmetries across different scales, it may be able to see an analogy on its own scale that suggests the right direction, but it cannot possibly span the other possible cases.

It's like trying to extrapolate out the room you are in now, and, on the basis of what you see around you, stating definitively what is going on in China right now, or on Mars.

Small steps, though. Let's see if we can solve some smaller, simpler problems first. And let's not neglect the chores or doing our homework or treating our neighbors well or dealing with our own personal short-comings because we are wrapped up in a grand challenge problem about the true nature of everything.

More on "What's the Point of Religion?"

Continuing my last post, on the New Scientist's question of "What's the Point of Religion?" I'm looking at reasons for "religion" that scientists in calm moment should be capable of understanding and accepting, in their own terms.

Probably the major point is that the social enterprise Science is not "complete." There are very large, very substantial portions of the universe which you cannot get to in finite time using the approach Science is taking, starting where we are now. Many of those portions we don't even know about, and some of them we can already see.

Furthermore, "Science" and "The Scientific Method" (or as I call it to make a point, the Scientific Method version 3.1) are, astoundingly, not even playing by their own rules and calibrating their equipment before using it -- a sin a junior scientist would get grief for. The resulting blind spot is huge, and in critical areas related to religion and social systems in general.

If scientists all admitted that the Scientific Method v3.1 (hereafter SM31) was a model, and, like all models, "wrong but sometimes useful", that would be OK - but when they implicitly assert that they have the universe covered and Religion can go home now, it becomes problematic.

I have no doubt that they don't "see anything" when they look for God, but I also don't see that they have ruled out "equipment failure" by demonstrating that they are capable of seeing far easier synthetic test case patterns with known answers.

Model-imposed blindness is widespread in all fields, including Science. Pulsars, the radio-frequency strobe lights in the sky, are the third brightest thing in that spectral range after the Sun. They were missed for years because they have low average energy but huge pulse energy, and all the equipment radio-astronomers used had electronics in place to average signal strength, because "everyone knew there as no signal there, just noise." They were found only because a female graduate assistant asked "What if we take these out?", didn't like the put-down she received, so she did -- for which discovery her male faculty adviser, who had discouraged her action, received an award. ( I was in that field at the time and heard all the details.)

Or, the "hole in the ozone" over Antarctica. That was missed for years because the satellite had been programmed to simply discard any low readings, because "everyone knew" that those would just be due to equipment malfunction.

Quantum mechanics was rejected as impossible in physics. Plate techtonics was rejected as impossible in Geology. Sure, now they are seen clearly, but before that point, they were invisible. As Thomas Kuhn noted, there is a huge resistance to a "paradigm shift" even among, or perhaps especially among, trained professionals.

Right now, the shift away from deterministic machine models of physics to chaos theory, non-linear math, distal causality, etc. is not widespread. The certainty and simplicity of the old theories create a huge reluctance to let go and move forward.

But to study social systems on a planetary scale will require moving forward. There is no way to "extrapolate" smaller scale or shorter-term mechanical or electronic systems to such large scales in space, time, and feedback complexity.

And, as astronomer Frank Drake pointed out to our astrophysics class one day in the late 1960's, every time a new window of the electromagnetic spectrum is opened up we see not only a new side of known phenomena, but we also see entirely unexpected and new phenomena that we never knew was there. This universe is dense with things going on that are not obvious.

Science can't even resolve fairly simple questions such as whether it is genes that evolve, and species are a byproduct -- or species that evolve, and genes are a byproduct. Are people just genes way of making other genes? Probably this evolutionary process occurs at multiple levels simultaneously, with bidirectional feedback loops. Most scientists don't like that idea because it's too complicated for them to follow or research. Right. So is a lot of life.

But understanding clearly how the hierarchical thing we call "Life on Earth" evolves, and what relationship higher level processes have to lower level processes is a rather central problem, I'd say. This is a very small scale, small-space, small-time model for a much larger scale hierarchy that extends upwards to ... well, we don't know where it goes. Religion says "God" and Scientists wince. But Science can't give us a reliable extrapolation either, because Science, today, can't even get its hands around what is going on on our own little plane and what principles govern evolution of planetary sized entities.

Science has exactly one data point, and all the data on that one are not in yet. That means, let's see, uh ... one minus one would be .. oh yes, ZERO. Science, then, is happily and confidently telling us that there is nothing going on at cosmic scales and time periods, on the basis of ZERO data points. Wow, that's powerful stuff -- or unreliable fluff, to use polite words.

Scientists are mostly involved in further extrapolatiting the fractal shaped knowledge-base deeper and deeper into secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and whatever comes next specialties. That's what they get paid to do. There is very little pressure, or reward, for spending time trying to put all the pieces back together again and see what they spell.

In fact, I can't imagine any PhD adviser recommending that his student consider looking at "the BIG PICTURE" and trying to say the first thing about it. That is not considered "Science" but something else, never very clear what. Narrow, narrower, narrower is the advice, the training, the research. I can't even think of what "scientific field" spends its time trying to figure out "what it all adds up to" if you reassemble all the pieces we have found.

So, that's the gap, the role, the place where religion comes in and says "THIS is what is it all about." (or 20 different "this" versions for 15 different religions.)

Science asserts confidently "there is no purpose to all this universe" based, again, on what? On a long experience with different kinds of universes, some with purpose, some without? Hardly. Do we know how this one will turn out? No, not yet. Again, we have zero data points to work with.

And, for that matter, exactly what "purpose-ometer" is used for making this judgment, and how was it calibrated? I'd really like to see that device and the test results. -- which is impossible since there is no such device.

For instance, please look at this "cake" in this hot oven and tell me for sure whether it is "being made" or simply "evolving according to natural chemical and thermodynamic principles."

Or let's see the algorithm or device or statistic that can differentiate between "coincidence" and "enemy action" with high accuracy. Or one that can tell "criminal intent" from simple incompetence with high reliability. We have no devices that can detect "purpose" on easy test cases, so why should we trust them on much larger and more complex cases? Why do scientists trust them is the puzzle to me.

Or, try this one. Do tobacco companies' Advertising cause people to smoke and die from tobacco-related medical conditions? On a small scale, viewed person by person, there is no "causality". Some people ignore ads. Etc. On a population scale, yes, of course, the billions of dollars spent on advertising have a deterministic effect, or it wouldn't keep on being spent. We have "causality" that is scale-dependent, that is not visible at short-range scales but is visible at large-range scales. This isn't news to Science.

Which is stronger - the strong force of Electromagnetic attraction or the weak force of gravity? Well, on the scale of this room, electrostatic charge can hold a balloon up on the wall despite gravity. On the scale of the galaxy, electromagnetic interactions have vanished, and gravity dominates evolution. We have no idea what even "weaker" forces their might be, so weak that we can't detect them yet, that, on the scale of billions of galaxies, might determine evolution.

Science has been great at the large-self-energy, low-interaction energy end of the spectrum, with rocks and billiard balls interacting. It has very little power, as currently constituted at the other end, where self-energy is reduced to vanishing and interaction energy dominates the scene, or a the limit point where there are no "objects" only pure "interactions" remaining.

The only place we know of so far that is near that end is apparently the center of our galaxy, and, well, we've never been there. We didn't even know there WAS a galaxy until a hundred years ago. On the scale of the universe we've sampled zero, or, if you stretch it, one incomplete case. By normal statistics, that makes the confidence limit infinite, meaning we know nothing.

I am not sold on the argument "That couldn't possibly happen because I personally can't think of how it would happen."

If Science wants to make arguments about social issues, fine, but first let's see your demonstrated capacity to manage anything whatsoever on the societal scale.

The problem is, there is no such capacity. Science so far has been going deeper and deeper into the microscope, not further and further up society's ladder. Or, any scientists left reading this, please let the rest of us know what the cure is for corruption in organizations and politics and how to stop it. Just run the numbers or something for us and show us your strength in that area to produce spectacular social outcomes - not to be confused with analysis or writing papers.
Or, heck, take something simpler and just fix the economies of the planet and prevent World War Three. When you have that one mastered, come back and let's talk about God again. But if you can't even get one single planet to work, what arrogance to consider yourselves authorities on the whole universe and how it works.

From what I can see of calibration of your equipment, you are very good at solving very small problems that cause large-scale things to decay or explode, but very bad at solving any scale thing that makes social-scale entities heal and grow, when actually attempted in the real world, not in some simulation or power-point presentation or paper.

This could be, and should be, a legitimate question for bright people of any persuasion --

what does it take to overcome the darkness and bring forth growth, peace, stability, and a thriving ecology?

What does it take to get us sufficiently organized that we can get off this little rock that's being pelted by asteroids and spread across the galaxy or farther? What does it take to roll back corruption and recover healthy growth?

Hint - the answer isn't "more technology", because technology, by itself, appears to be a centripetal force that threatens to rip our planet apart or demolish the ecosystem and biosphere. No number of cameras or high-tech walls will stop that enemy, because the enemy is already within the walls, already inside us.

We are our own worst enemy.

That's the problem we have to face, and address, and solve.

Or, frankly, we all die.

Unless you're on the verge of announcing a solution, I'd stop kicking religion in the shins and start asking what religion knows about human beings and social structures that might be helpful in this situation.

Maybe, together instead of at each other's throats, we could get somewhere.

A question of baseline

One possible scientific working hypothesis about religion is that it's just remarkable how many people are delusional. Another is that there is something under all that smoke, regardless how poorly it has been resolved and how artfully it has been decorated.

Given my understanding of both humans and feedback loops and psychology, I can see the power of shared myths to persist and feed and grow, as effectively a living thing. On the other hand, given what I've learned about the computational power of massive parallel "connnectionist" architectures, and neural networks and human vision models and computer vision models, I tend to think that there is indeed a very real potential for emergent power in crowds to detect signals that any individual would miss.

A species as a living thing may perceive a different world, dimly but correctly, that is not accessible to individuals in the species -- just as your brain perceives a world that would not make any sense to an individual neuron. If you and your neuron could meet for coffee, there's not much you could talk about in common, except for things like the problems with control, and how hard it is to get good help these days. Taxes, defense policy, immigration, college applications are simply not sensible on the scale of one neuron.

Under a slight extension of the general Cosmological Principle ("there is nothing special about where we are, when we are, or what scale we are") we have to assume that this principle of "insensible larger concerns" is true as well for people-level thingies (us.) That is, there may be a lot going on that not only do we not know about, but that, given our size, we will never know about. In fact, if we use some sort of iterative reasoning, and apply this Cosomological principle yet again, there must also be some things that even earth-scale species, regardless how electronically wired in the future, will never be able to comprehend. And so on, who knows how far upwards. Maybe in this universe even Galactic scale (10 to the tenth stars) thingies will have galactic-cluster events that they will never be able to comprehend.

So far, I think that is pretty solid scientific reasoning. In short it is a more reasonable hypothesis that we humans are permanently shut out of certain knowledge, due to our finite size, than that we're almost gods. Yes, we can wire up the blogosphere and let the huge connectionist engine start cranking and discovering Things that it can respond to, but it can never really tell us fully what those Things are, any more than we can explain a 1040 tax form to a neuron. It's a simple bandwidth limit. None of us have 500 years to listen to the details, for starters, so anything that takes over 500 years to explain is out. It's a very strong assertion to say that that set is empty, and a much weaker assertion to say that there may be stuff in that set.

These days, most of us cannot and will never grasp things that take more than 5 years to explain, except in very narrow tertiary specialty areas. In business and politics, sometimes it seems that 15 minutes is the cut-off, and any concept that takes over 15 minutes to explain is simply in the "insensible" or "incomprehensible" set. I think that political advertising assumes that anything that takes over 30 seconds to explain the the public might as well not even be attempted.

This cut-off frequency to the full spectrum of knowledge in turn must result, by signal theory, in some rather major distortions in what it is that we do think we see with what limited capacity we do have. A classic result in radio-astronomy for example was Ron Bracewell's realization, around 1926 or so I think, that the best details that could be resolved, even with infinite observations and averaging out the noise, was limited buy a resolution of lamda over D, where lamba is the wavelength being monitored and D is the diameter of the radio telescope "dish" or "grid" or "lens" or "mirror" being used. Similarly for eyeballs - if you want eyes like a hawk, you need a wide-diameter pupil, and humans just can't go there with out tiny eyeballs.

So, the question comes then, are the "details" important or negligible? This is worth stopping to ponder. I spent 5 years at Parke-Davis pharmaceutical R&D division generating cross-sectional images of blood-vessels to assist in research on coronary disease. With microscopes as with people, we had a choice of picking a high-power lens, and seeing details down to the individual cells staining structure, or a low-power survey lens, and seeing the big picture, but we couldn't do both. It turned out that was a critical problem and gave wrong answers. We needed both the details and the big picture to grasp what was going on and how and why. So I developed techniques to take many high-resolution images and assemble them into a high field-of-view montage, and then we finally had something the computer could analyze and get meaningful results that corresponded to biological truth.

The image at the top of this post is one such montage I made in 1995. (repeated here).

There are some other examples of that sort of work on my quantitative biomedical imaging website, at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~schuette.

So, at least in that one case, yes, the details mattered. Hmm. OK, then in at least some cases, the details matter and change the answer. Do we know anything at all about which cases that might be? Well, it will certainly include cases where the details add up to more than the low-resolution/high-field of view facts. This could easily include feedback loops, where those tiny details ( like,say, a persistent 5%/year drop in value of the US dollar ) add up or compound over the span in question, and end up dominating the computation of the final value in your dollar-denominated bank account.

The distortion caused by cutting-off a portion of the spectrum is also not negligible. You can't just chop off a signal and get the middle part you hoped for, but instead you get large scale distortion that is mathematically the Fourier transform of your chopping function.

Here's an example:

Skipping the math, if you try to "look at" a point source, like a star, through a hole in a piece of metal, say, even if the point source "fits" in the hole, what you see will be distorted as shown on the bottom. You'll "see" a sort of diffuse bell-curved shape source in the middle, surrounded by a dark ring, then a bright ring, and another dark ring, and yet another dimmer bright ring, etc.

You cannot get around this, known in the optical domain as "diffraction". It's a law of physics and signals. If you look up diffraction in Wikipedia, you'll see another example of what you see looking through a square hole:

OK, wow. So the size and shape of the hole or "aperture" through which you are trying to look can dramatically change what you "see" or directly perceive or detect with film or an imager or a radio signal detector.

Now, that's not a fatal problem if you know your distortion pattern, because you can "back it out of the equation" and computationally figure out what shape actual signal must have been there to generate the signal you "measured".

That works for optical and radio astronomy and optics in general. For microscopes this is the "psf" or "point-spread function." You can use the magic of Fourier Transforms to undo the distortion and get a clean image of what you'd see without it, mostly.

But here's our problem as a society. To me, the same effect applies to looking at the world through a finite aperture, or gap, defined by a limited set of "scales" and time-frames we are going to observe. So as humans, we are making observations on smaller and smaller scales of time, and on magnitude scales that tend to be about the same size as us, whoever "us" is (person, corporation, nation, culture.)

But by blocking out larger scale information (that we might call "context") and smaller-scale information (that we might call "negligible details") we are then bound, by the laws of physics, to be directly perceiving a distorted signal. The problem is, we don't realize we need to undistort it before paying attention to what it says.

How distorted will it be? Well, look at the point source viewed through the square hole. Pretty distorted.

The same thing is true on one-sided "holes", or simply blocking out everything to the "Right" of a point source with a sheet of metal, we'll still get distortion near the edge.

Hmm. So, if we don't realize we're cutting off all signals above a certain scale (slowly varying, long-wavelength) and below a certain scale (rapidly varying "details" of very short wavelength), we won't realize that we cannot help but see a distorted picture of the real world out there - the one we'd see without such distortion.

That brings me full cycle back to pondering what sort of "receiver characteristics" a massive array of people-shaped sensors over 1000 years might have. We can say something, with no further details, about what kinds of signals and patterns and frequencies it would be able, in theory, to "pick up" or detect, what it would be blind to, and what sort of distortions it would necessarily have.

If that social-shaped antenna "sees" something it resolves into a pattern it calls "God" or some of the other aspects of "religion", we need to reflect carefully on simply dismissing that data point as "noise". It is not at all obvious that it is receiver noise, and it is the worst abuse of science to discard a data point simply because we don't like it, or because it doesn't fit our preconceived notion of how things are and what "should" be there.

Besides, we don't have much opportunity to do such long-baseline (1000 year long) observations ourselves, so we should treasure the few we do have.

We know a few things with a fair amount of certainty. We know lamda over D will be a limit on resolution of details, unless it is computationally broken using a technique of hyper-resolution.
That means, in lay terms, that the wider the baseline diameter, the more we can potentially "see". The more diverse the observing group is, the wider it is spread out along any dimension, the better the group can triangulate in on something and resolve how far away it is from us. A very wide baseline will let us sort out foreground from background. A totally uniform set of sensors will have zero resolution and be totally blind to telling foreground from background. Diversity matters, in a purely information-capture sense.

The question for Science, with respect to Religion, then, it seems to me, is not to be obsessed with the persecution of Gallileo or Iowa's decisions about evolution, but to ask what this irreplaceable observational unit in our heritage may have seen that we, here, now, looking over a few year window, could never possibly see.

Even lousy sensors, such as the cells in our retina, can give you a good picture of the world if you process the signal correctly, which is what much of our brain is hardwired to do. There is value in those low-grade signals, if processed cleverly and assembled into a big picture.

It's not a question of "right" versus "wrong". It's a question of baseline.

There is no scientific justification for discarding one of our longest-baseline observations, regardless how "bright" or "technical" the individual sensors in that array were compared to us. We are stuck in the narrow "now", and they have the advantage of a several thousand year baseline. Nothing we can do with gigahertz processors and PhD's can overcome that physical law on signal processing theory. A crowd may see things our most brilliant scientist missed.

Wade

Rising rates and the soon to be homeless

(This and other photos of homeless in Chicgago by crowbert )

The housing boom in the US appears to be over in a big way. Now they estimate that 1 to 2 million families will lose their homes this year to foreclosure, unable to pay the mortgage. It's a good time not to be prejudiced against the homeless.

Anywhere, here's a summary of the bad news, and then some reflection on what's going on here from a public health perspective.

The local reason is that their monthly payments will jump, and in some cases by a lot, meaning they will go from affordable to "not enough to buy food and pay the mortgage."

This is how today's New York Times put it today in
Rising Rates Squeeze Consumers and Companies
by Gretchen Morgenson and Vikas Bajaj

Now that party may be coming to an end....
The fallout is likely to be widespread, and felt most immediately by homeowners and people looking to buy a house.

Particularly hard hit will be consumers with weak credit — known as subprime borrowers — who are faced with mortgage rates that will soon reset to higher, in some cases double-digit, levels.

How many is that in real numbers?

Higher rates are already contributing to an increase in foreclosures. ...Foreclosures in May were up 90 percent from the period a year earlier... the total foreclosures of 176,137 in May were sobering. [ my note - that's a rate of over 2 million a year already]

For struggling homeowners, the rise in rates could not come at a worse time.

And even that number is low compared to what's coming, because many of those sub-prime loans had a 3 year grace period of low rates and the 3 years is just about up.

Last year, adjustable rate loans accounted for 25 percent of mortgage applications, up from 11 percent in 1998, Freddie Mac said. Demand for adjustable rate loans peaked in 2004 at 33 percent; many of those are at or near the reset point....Some $100 billion in subprime loans are scheduled to reset between now and October.

And we have this thought:

“I don’t think they are panicked,” he said. “But now they are wishing, ‘Why didn’t I take a fixed rate three years ago when I had the chance and rates were low.’ ”

Well, first we need to look at whether this problem is going to get worse before it gets better. Sadly, the answer is almost certainly yes.

The unusually low interest rates of the last three years have been an enormous boon to almost every corner of the American economy....The recent rate move came as something of a surprise to Wall Street. It is the result, traders say, of heavy selling by foreign investors...

The first thing I notice is that the article talks about "unusually low rates of the last few years" and then shows a graph of the last few years. Well, that's not very helpful. What are we talking about here? What's the "usual" rate? What's behind curtain number one, Johnny?

The media have done this consistently, and fed this short-term mentality. It took me quite some time to dig out what the long-term trend actually looks like, because almost every news story just had the last few months or years.

I did that for my piece "The Mortgage Trap Begins Closing" that I posted here December 11, 2006. and "Honey, we're losing the house" where I said

As, one analyst put it, people seem to have turned their houses upside down like piggy banks, shaken all the money out, and spent it already, and now there's nothing left to use to pay the new bills. To top that off, the monthly mortgage payment magical 3 year grace period has expired, and the minimum payment they're demanding just doubled. How can that be?

Then of course, as now, Wall Street analysts were baffled and surprised by this. I'm not sure why that is. Long term trends? Here's what the savings rate looks like, long-term, for individuals:

The last time the personal savings rate was negative was in 1933. (Source EBRI Databook, US Department of Commerce.)
US Trade Deficit (From BEA, quoted at invisibleheart. "Does the Trade Deficit Destroy American Jobs, Russell Roberts, George Mason University, Nov 2006.)

These aren't perfectly on the mark, and I get complaints from economist that I'm not using these correctly, but I think the overall point is the same regardless - whether we look at individuals or corporations or the USA as a whole, we've been living way beyond our means and "charging it" but the bills for the party are coming due now.

But let's do some "root cause" analysis and look beyond the surface here. So we have that many actors on every level have been spending like there's no tomorrow, writing checks against an empty bank account. And we have that foreigners, who have a lot of dollar-denominated IOU's, are starting to bail out and get rid of them, even at a loss, because they're getting worried that the dollar will be devalued another 30% or so, and they don't want the value of their IOU's to fall 30%, thank you, when there are other options and other places in the world to invest in.


And that entire process seems to be fueled and encouraged by the media, the banks, the credit card companies, television, all encouraging people to ramp up their debt and buy more stuff.

Aside: Back to the "yellow boxes" on the complicated flowchart I put up yesterday (see below) The "yellow boxes" are where "stories" or "narrative" have direct impact in the feedback control cycle that manages our lives, but that's sufficient to completely alter perceptions (lower right) and external reality and how others relate to us and act toward us (upper right).

-- this whole cycle is driven by a myth and mental story, a mental model, that makes such behavior "OK" or even "GOOD". First, there is the story that "things are cyclical and this is just a downturn and it will turn up again soon because it always does." (That story doesn't play too well in Flint, Michigan, where the GM plants closed and don't seem to be coming back.)

Then there is the story that a huge amount of debt is fine. Everyone's doing it. That always sounded a little too good to be true, but it was pleasant to the ears.

Then there was a popular misconception by probably millions of buyers that couldn't do basic math and slept through all that life-skills-math nonsense in high-school. If Johnny's adjustable rate mortgage is at 5% and he pays $500 a month, and the rate goes up a little, just 5 %, what will his new payment be? $505? or $1000. Most people were willing to buy the story that $505 was the right answer. Wrong.

Then there was that nagging suspicion that something else was too good to be true. How could these ads be right? Buy a $400,000 home for $500 a month? Better RUSH! SALE ends Tuesday!

OK, so, what's my point? A lot of people got "caught up" in this land-office business and thought they could get something for nothing, and that the rules normal mortals lived by didn't apply to them, and that tomorrow was a long long way away, so far away it didn't matter. Except that it IS tomorrow now, and we all live in our own wake of our own past decisions, and Sunday morning those Saturday night decisions aren't looking very good any more, and what a headache, and how did the couch end up in the front yard anyway?

With my annoying "Five Why's" (after Toyota's practice), again, I'll ask, "Why?" Why were people so gullible yet again? Why don't we get smarter as time passes? Why isn't the country a "learning organization?"

Well, some of the country is learning. The part that figured out it could rush in, sell a trillion dollars worth of junk mortgages, and rush out again before the door closed is learning. They just got a lot of positive reinforcement.

But the poor people, heavily minorities, didn't learn.

Why?

Why didn't they learn from history? Why didn't they learn from their own past? Why didn't they pay attention in school? Why didn't they ask around in church and see if everyone else thought this was a good deal or not?

Why are the poor, who most desperately are in need of making as few mistakes as possible, not organized to learn from experience so they don't have to repeat it?

Or is it the other way? Those who don't learn from experience end up being poor and exploited?
Well, some of both, most likely. It's a spiral that feeds itself.

There is a known remedy for gullibility, and that's "consultation". Have some sort of social system in which wiser people are identified and consulted with before rushing into some sort of precipitous action that you'll end up regretting that will, literally, cost you the farm.

This is not a difficult concept, and it costs zero dollars to bring to pass, but it is one that seems hard to carry through on.

Why is that? (I'll keep asking, and keep on going upstream towards the "distal" cultural issues that are generating all this downstream trauma.)

Well, the USA seems to have a culture that is revolted by the idea of working together, or learning from one's elders, or consulting before action, or otherwise limiting personal "freedom" by being burdened with lessons from the past. We bail on our parents, we discard our history books, and we want to be "free", even if it means "free to crash and burn and be exploited." "the past has nothing to teach us!! Everything today is NEW!!!" Oh, really?

Or do we really want that, or did that idea get into our yellow boxes and internal story some other way? Where exactly did this idea come from, and when did we vote on it and agree to it, anyway?

Rejecting every constraint doesn't make us free to run with the wind or sail the skies -- it makes us into jellyfish or slugs that have no bones, and are easy to eat for lunch because they have no shells either. Rejecting discipline and wisdom makes us exploiter-bait. Rejecting all that annoying math and school textbook learning makes us exploitable and gullible.

But, most of all, rejecting each other's consultation makes us end up broke, homeless, and dead.

So, why do we do that then? Don't get a guilty look and say "something inside me didn't work." This isn't a local, personal thing. It's a global, social, cultural thing that's broken here.

If the simple idea of pooling what brains and knowledge we have, and consulting with each other before taking action is such a hard thing, we need to stop, flag this point, and call a meeting to understand exactly WHY that is. Something is broken here that should be working. It can be fixed, but first we need to understand what it is and where it is.

And the something is at a higher level than people, and that's what makes this hard to see and hard to fix, unless you have tools to do "systems thinking." And, of course, you need to believe that there are levels higher than people that matter. I'm convinced of that.

Whatever cultural forces have conspired to cause us to reject education, understanding, discipline, and consultation need to be fought off and rejected, because that is not the way to freedom at all -- it's the way to the homeless shelter. No, they'll be full and overflowing. It's the way to dissolution and death. Social disconnection leads to death. Rejecting the past means rejecting the future, and also leads to death. Life is too complex to try to learn it all on your own dime, at your own expense.

So, we need to ask, if my current story, if our current internal story makes "consultation" seem wrong or impossible, what's a better story and where can I get one? Where can we get one? Can we all get in with one ticket if we come in the same car?

This conversation makes me think a little of a Peanut's cartoon strip, where Lucy walks by Linus, who is playing the piano (Is that Linus?) Anyway, he says "My fingers hurt." and she says "maybe your fingernails are on too tight" and walks away. He sits and looks at his hands in surprise and finally says "I didn't even know they were adjustable!"

Well, yes Linus, we all have internal stories. Some are helpful and some are harmful, but all of them can be changed. Some stories make it hard to do the right thing, and some stories make it easy to do the right thing - they affect that axis. Some stories motivate us and some stories suck the energy and life right out of us -- they affect that axis too. Some stories reach back all the way to our perceptions, and twist our perceptions around so we don't see things truly, but we see a distorted reality, a selective reality, that supports the story. It's as if the story was alive, and wanted to live, and didn't want to fade away, so it twists what we look at and what we see so that it adds up to something that supports that myth and story.

Suddenly, those who've been reading this for a few days may go, "Oh. Another S-loop."

Yes, another S-loop. Stories get into our head and live off our psychic energy and survive by twisting around our perceptions to support themselves, and sometimes even by twisting our actions around to support themselves, or by twisting our actions so as to cause other people to do things that support our self-concept and justify it.

The yellow boxes in my diagram can reach out and change the green boxes. Internal stories can change the lower right corner, and distort perceptions so that we only see things that support our myth.

We can never be free of stories -- they are part of how we operate. But we can change the story, we can reprogram the computer. If we can't have a palace, we can at least have an internal story that supports rational action and prevents us from harming ourselves or doing totally stupid things over and over again.

Such stories are far stronger, of course, if they are shared stories, supported not only by ourselves, but by our friends and family and neighbors.

Hmm. This is sounding a lot like the role religion plays. Or science. Those are each ways to put a story in place that can help stabilize us and make us figure out how to work together and consult and learn together what we can't learn separately.

That was one saying of of the American revolution, that if we didn't "hang together" we'd all "hang separately."

Some stories are way better than other stories. Pick a good one, since you'll have to live with it.

Or die from it.

The summer is gone,
The ground's turning cold,
The stores one by one they're a-foldin'.
My children will go
As soon as they grow.
Well, there ain't nothing here now to hold them.

North Country Blues (1963)
Bob Dylan