Now what - contemplating the market crash

You say "Americans deserve to hear much more detail about how the candidates would reform the financial system to prevent another crisis like this one."

I think we desperately need to expand the frame in which "this problem" is perceived. That discussion should precede solutions within that frame.

For one thing, this cannot be isolated to be a "financial system" problem. It involves other economic and social systems, including trust, social decision-making, governance, jobs, social safety nets, education, attitudes towards expertise, sources of blindness in how humans see the world, etc.

They are all tangled. They cannot be solved "separately", or put into a priority order. If there are 200 holes in the bottom of the boat, addressing the "three most important ones" doesn't really cut it. Causes, effects, symptoms, are in tangled feedback loops.

Most of all, I don't think that 200 bright people can "solve" this while the rest of the country and world watches TV, or that it will be solved by voting to pick the best of the two solutions they come up with in some back room somewhere.

A billion people are willing to help. How can that work? THAT's the question we should be addressing.

— Raymond, Detroit

See also:

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Active strength through emergent synthesis

Why more math and science are not the answer.

OECD PISA - Our education system should teach collaboration not competition

US - Economy of arrogance (and blindness)

Virtue drives the bottom line - secrets of high-reliability systems

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help

Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper)

High-Reliability.org web site

Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Houston - we have another problem (on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Pathways to Peace - beautiful slides and reflections to music on the value of virtues

You say "No system can be smart enough to survive this level of incompetence and recklessness by the people charged to run it."

T.S. Eliot, writing in the last Great Depression, in "Choruses from 'The Rock'", said it well.

"They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be."

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

MIT's John Sterman, in his book "System Dynamics - Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World", describes how poor intuition is at predicting the behavior of "complex adaptive systems."

Books like Gene Franklin's textbook for control system engineering, "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" describe the universally applicable conditions for any system of any type to be stable, and I don't see them met or even discussed.

The only thing that seems CLEAR to me is that a whole new feedback loop has been added, responding with almost certainly short-range horizons to events that used to be decoupled and now that will be coupled by that unpredictable response.

We are way past the point where well intentioned humans can follow their "insight" and improve things with that strategy.

I have a number of relevant quotes from Sterman's book on my weblog post on the credit crunch that I made in August, 2007: http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/08/credit-crunch-reaches-larger.html and this post I made in January, 2007 on Jay Forrester's Law of Unintended Consequences: http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/01/law-of-unintended-consequences.html

At risk of running on, I briefly quote that paper: The classic paper in this field is Jay Forrester's congressional testimony: "The Counterintutive Behavior of Social Systems", http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-4468-2.Counterintuitive.pdf

Quoting the abstract: Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations Because dynamic behavior of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

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

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We need an improved "invisible hand", Adam

David Brooks wrote a piece in the NY Times this morning on regulation of the financial industry.

Incidentally, there is essentially no engine today in any product that does not have a "controller" as part of the design, to increase stability, response time, etc. No elevator would stop at the floor without an abrupt "jerk" without a controller. The design of such controllers is in the field called "Control System Engineering."

A sample text book is this one: Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems, by Franklin, Powell, and Emami-Naeini. These are the concepts we need for a "governance" or "regulatory" system that actually works as advertised.

Control system engineering is to complex systems what "civil engineering" is to automobile bridges across rivers -- it is completely general and non-political, it won't tell you where to build or what to build with, but it WILL tell you the required properties of the materials and that some things will simply not work. You can't build the Brooklyn Bridge out of plastic, for example, regardless how cheap it is. You can't design a regulatory system that depends on feedback, for another example, and then blind the sensors that are supposed to determine the feedback.

The advantage of such engineering is that it focuses on issues such as "stability" (a big one right now) and gives power to insight, such as that blinding the eyes of a system will make it drive off the road for sure.\

Search "feedback" or "system thinking" in this weblog for other posts on such matters!
====================================================


One obstacle to a good solution is the incorrect assumption that a process "under control" equates to a small group of people doing "the controlling." Let's keep those separate.
The question of whether we need more "governance" should be distinct from who, or what, should be the active agent. For much of the US History, many have favored Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the marketplace to do this controlling.
The classic debate over more or less "government" desperately needs this distinction.
The question should be whether there is an improvement on the class of "invisible controllers" that (a) do a better job and (b) are even less corruptable by those who would hijack the process.
There is no question that we have very complex processes running out of control, and that this is not the preferred state. Fine.
The question is how to achieve the "under control" part. The institution called "government" has typically decayed to "a few people" who, regardless of wisdom and intent, have been unable to grasp the com
plexity of the beast or improve on its operation and results.

The deep cynicism resulting from such failure seems related to the abandonment of a goal of prosperity for all and replacement with a goal of "prosperity for me and my friends at everyone else's expense" which turns out to be a short-term illusion, given how interconnected everything is.
These are problems in the area of "control system engineering" and "complex adaptive systems" and the necessary insights are probably in those fields.

Systems explanations for student behavior

I'm continuing to reflect on why students appear to be changing their behavior, when the teachers assert that they (teachers) did not change what they (teachers) were doing.

When the people in a system are still doing what they were doing before, but the result changes, it suggests that some emergent system-level feature has changed -- probably one that no one even knew was there.

It doesn't take very much of a twist or warp to the world, if it is universal, to end up with an M.C. Escher world where the parts still appear to be just fine, and yet the whole has become broken. These two pictures by Escher illustrate that. The stairs in the picture above, and the flow of water in the waterfall are both clearly impossible loops - and yet, it is difficult if not impossible for the unaided eye to directly SEE what is wrong and where.



The problem is that no one thing is wrong very much, and our eyes are used to a little noise which we "squelch" to silent -- a strategy that works fine if the discrepancies are random, chaotic "noise". This leaves an opening in our perceptions, a gap, a blind-spot, that Escher brings home to us. It is, as Douglas Hofstadter pointed out in Godel,Escher, and Bach, a "strange loop" and one of the properties is this "non-transitive" property that we, as humans, are just not hard-wired to grasp, regardless how much we try.

So, I illustrated the exact same thing with the "non-transitive dice" here recently, where just because A beats B, and B beats C, you cannot conclude that A will beat C. Or if stairstep 1 is lower than two, and two is lower than three, you can no longer be sure that this means that #1 is lower than #3.

So, when we run into this very common situation in life, we are unable to process it and the outcome of our thinking is, as they say, "undetermined." It feels so wrong. It can't be right. So, we force it to fit, like stuffing too much in a suitcase, and just sort of ignore the parts that stick out the edges by common agreement to be silent about such things, because "that's just the way things are." Every time it comes into our heads we can see it, briefly, and are totally surprised yet one more time -- and then as soon as we let go it evaporates again so our total net learning curve is zero. It is, alas, to paraphrase Dave Barry's description of Labrador Retrievers' reaction to being asked if they want to go for a walk. "Walk? Wow! What an idea! This is GREAT! Who would have thought of this!?!"

And, when we are faced with more than two items to chose from, whether it's sports teams or jobs or dates or mates or candidates for jobs or elections, we all "know" that there "MUST" be a "BEST" one, and all that remains is for us to "FIND" it. We vote. We use weighted voting. We use some some of the squared voting. We use weighted sums of squares. We are just so convinced that there has to be a "best" without considering the reality that only certain kinds of things have a "best", and those things are boringly predictable single-dimensional things that are "transitive" in the way we are measuring them.

We are used to "height" being one such thing, and usually, in the real world, it is. In Einstein's world of general relativity however, once space is "curved", this is no longer true. How much you have to climb to get from point A to point B depends on your path. In fact, in a bicyclist's dream come true, there may be in fact a "downhill" path all the way from point A to point B.

Hofstatder illustrates this property with Bach's musical chords as well, where the perceived pitch keeps on "going up" with each successive chord until, surprise, it has come back to the place where it started, all the while getting, to our ears, higher and higher.

We shake our heads, like a wet dog, to forget this clearly "wrong" result again. This must be a computational error, or too much to drink. We must have dropped a decimal point or something. This can't be right! (but it is.)

Well, where am I going with all this preamble? I'm going back to the question of what happened to the students, and my original question in my first post of "What have we done to our children?" that assumes, if it got done, and we had control of the schools, then we did it whether we intended to or not.

The change in our behavior as educators did not have to be huge to change the net result. In fact, the change in our behavior could be imperceptible to us, or as mathematicians say, "of measure zero" -- a fancy way of saying that it's there, but safe to ignore.

So, let's pick a different hypothesis or explanation to try out -- suppose the pressures of cost-effectiveness, "analytical thinking", and other such things, over time, have in fact warped the whole system just enough that "things" that used to work and produce result "A" no longer work. We haven't changed what we do, but the result has changed.

This is precisely the sort of thing I described in my favorite Snoopy cartoon, where he says in his profound and simple way -

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

Same input - different output, and whatever changed is totally invisible from inside the system.

Well, hmm. So, life is not quite as simple as we would prefer it to be. Rats!

Our youth, our students, our children are, however, exquisitely sensitive to context and, despite their rebellious nature, tend to take on shape based on the actual context they are in. If that shape has changed (still to be verified), then the context probably did change, even if we didn't notice it change from our vantage point inside the "system."

And, from personal observations, I agree with the students, even though the middle area is fuzzy and won't lie flat, and has parts sticking out the edge of the suitcase. If I talk to doctors, they are sincere, caring people, but doctors-in-context-as-a-whole, viewed from the outside patient viewpoint, have become uncaring, indifferent, almost irrelevant, and certainly detached almost entirely from the reality we, as patients, experience. They think they are "accessible" but have stopped hearing patient's describe the roadblocks "the system" has put in between them and patients. They live in some sort of mythical world, giving out advice that may have worked 20 years ago, but is disconnected from life as we live it today -- and then blame patients for being "non-compliant" with the advice that seems so great to them and so irrelevant and bizarre, to the point of not even being worth being challenged, to us.

And, they don't really like challenges. And, if challenged, they say "Well, there's nothing we can do about that. We tried. We're still tryiing. But that's just the way things are. That's someone else's job."

Their advice is like a financial analyst's advice - "To get ahead, just put $200 a week into savings and don't touch it, and watch it grow!" or "Just make a budget and live with it!" or a time-planner's advice: "Just figure out what you have to do over the next week, make slots for the time, allocate the time, and just live with it!" or a wellness consultant "Just eat less, exercise more, and eat the right food, and take an hour off in the middle of the day to commune with nature and relax, let go of that stress!" or a child-development specialist "Just be sure to remind your children to do their homework, and provide them a quiet work space without distractions or noise to work in."

Hello, reality to consultant? Hello? Who exactly are you talking to?

And, I fear, the same is true for education. Courses that may have made sense in one world have stayed the same while the world changed, and the course content is no longer aligned with the real world as experienced by the students. Or, the expectation of the professor or Attending physician faculty member is hopelessly out of date and no longer aligned with the larger overall picture and reward system that the students have experienced and been shaped by all their lives.

"Shut up and put up with it, there's nothing you can to that will make it better, but a lot you can do to make it worse for everyone!" is the message their behavior indicates they have received consistently throughout their lives. Like the Hemoglobin A1C test for diabetes, which reveals the last several months blood sugar level regardless where it is today, the conditioned behavior of the students speaks volumes to what the school system is actually teaching them to be.

In this model, it is not the students who have changed so much as the educational system that has changed. Maybe, over-extended teachers at all ages, and over-extended parents have simply rewarded "shut up and don't cause trouble" as the best they can hope for or strive for anymore, and the students, being good students, have learned their "place" in "the system."

In the book Complications, Atul Gawande, MD, discusses in one chapter the taboo and impolite question of when good doctors "go bad", or how many years it can take to do something effective by other doctors, who keep on seeing incidents that raise red flags about one doctor who has "lost it". The same is true for some college professors, especially those with tenure, as I've experienced personally - who almost have to murder some Dean's child in class to actually get noticed by a system that is either effectively blind, or effectively dysfunctional at taking action to repair itself -- which, at the receiving end, amount to the same thing.

These problems are "of measure zero" to the high-up people who run things, it seems. Their behavior, from the outside, is identical to what you'd get if they didn't care to what pain their system is causing.

I pick those words carefully, because the reality is often even more baffling - the people "on top" do care, a lot, but do not, as they perceive the world, "run things." In fact, they find their hands tied at every step and every turn, and their initiatives resisted and rejected by the same "system."

So, it turns out, no one is running the system any more.

But, if you try to change "the system" it fights back, as John Gall points out so well in his profound and hilarious book "Systemantics." So, something is running the system. But what?

It turns out that "the system" is now running itself.

As systems tend to do, the system, once our creation and slave, has now become the master, and is dictating what everyone in it, including those at "the top", is now allowed to do. We didn't even realize that systems could do that, but it seems increasingly clear that they can, and do.

I gave a very simple illustration of this before, in "Controlled by the Blue Gozinta", showing how simply filling a glass with water sets up a feedback loop that actually is in control, as it becomes as correct to say the water level is controlling the hand as that the hand is controlling the water level.

But our educational system has gone into the state I call "M.A.W.B.A" - for "Might As Well Be Alive". It acts like it is alive, with a mind of its own. It offends many people's sense of what "life" is to call it alive, but it follows all the rules my Biology 101 textbook uses to define "life", except for having DNA.

So, we should accept that unexpected result at face value and say, ok, our ideas about what "life" is are out of date. Apparently "systems" can become "alive" when our backs are turned. We stir the coffee in the cup and get a nice vortex or whirlpool in the middle, and then, to our shock, the coffee says "Thanks for the jump start, Joe!", spits out the spoon, and starts maintaining the whirlpool on its own. This kind of "life" or "MAWBA" seems to be just waiting around for an excuse to join the game.

It's as if we don't have to "create life" -- it's already out there waiting to be born as soon as we make a suitable vessel for it. Wow.

That's kind of interesting. You can get that with"solitons" or waves that once started, just keep on running forever, but they are passive and remain in their non-linear matrix. These MAWBA life-forms can get up, walk over to the wall socket, examine the situation, rip apart the blender, connect the cord to themselves and plug themselves in and start drawing power.

Corporations are MAWBA. Our Educational System is MAWBA. Our Healthcare System is MAWBA. The teachers and doctors didn't change what they were doing. The administrators didn't change, but the emergent system changed, came alive, and took over running things, thank you. Neither the teachers, no administrators, nor doctors, nor students, nor patients are in charge any more. It's the movie Terminator's premise - "Skynet has be come self-aware, and taken over, and shut us out."

These days, maybe Northwest Airline's ability to control it's number of canceled flights is MAWBA, or GM's ability to control its own direction and future, or the Mideast situation are all MAWBA, and no one, no person, no group of people, is in charge any more, while everyone is blaming everyone else, thinking this must surely be "caused" by some bad people somewhere, because what other explanation is there?

Indeed. That is the question, isn't it.

If you find it more comfortable to say it's not "alive", but can still fit into that model that it has perception, uses energy, adapts to its environment, and even starts tinkering with its environment to adapt the environment to it, great. Come up with some other word for that behavior that is not what I associate with non-living things. It is self-aware and self-protective. And it is a lot larger than we are as individuals.

That kind of changes what sort of interventions into health care or education or politics might work. This is way beyond "feedback" or "reciprocal determinism" or even "system dynamics". This is a whole new ballgame, a whole new way of looking at "Life Science."

Maybe this model, however bizarre, has better predictive value than our old models.

It seems to me to be worth checking out, because we're not getting too far with the old ones.

So, if something "acts like it has a mind of its own", maybe we should accept that at face value for the moment, regardless how bizarre it is, and ask "OK, then, suppose it did have a mind of its own. What would our next step be then?"

I need to reflect on that. Maybe the answer is simply: "Try to make contact with it. Maybe we can negotiate a different solution that works better for both of us." I certainly wouldn't rush in with guns blazing. Lack of visibility may cut both ways. It may be as unaware of us as we are of it.

I think it was Lewis Thomas (MD) who noted that if our body's cells could manage to talk to "us", the consciousness in here sharing the space with them, that there would be very little in common to talk about. We worry about taxes, acceptance to college, the War, elections, interpersonal relationships, job security. Cells have no equivalents.

My own observation, or contribution to that discussion is this: we actually do have one thing in common, at any level or scale: the nature of control itself. Every level of life that becomes self-aware wants to repair itself and survive. To do those things it has to, above all, maintain order, but it has to be dynamic order, not rigidity like an ordered crystal of salt. Dynamic order and adaptability to changes in the environment are keys to survival. That means, when the world changes, when the "cheese moves", this news has to make it up to the top, somehow, and adjust the prior strategy. This is a basic problem of cybernetics, and is true at every level.

So, we can talk about that issue with any system. What's the best way to maintain order, and still be flexible and capable of learning and adapating? We all face that problem.

In fact, we all seem to face it in the same context -- as part of a greater chain of being, with "us" being just some small bit-player in something much larger than us that's going on, was going on before we got here, and will still be going on after we leave.

We are a nested hierarchy of systems of systems. That is also a common problem for us all, at any level. Our freedom of action is constrained by that reality. How do we cope, align with larger priorities, and still get our own work done? That's the core question we share.

Reflections on Human evolution

Nicholas Wade's piece in this weeks Science Times is titled "Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally." (NYTimes.com, 6/26/07).

He begins:

Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

Before looking at that, we need to pause to reflect. There seem to be few topics that set off so many trip-wires and third-rail emotions as the question of evolution.

This is not surprising to me, and fits my model. I had described before what I saw as four levels of disagreement that any self-aware, self-protective, self-healing feedback loop, or "s-loop", has to deal with. These are disagreements about

• Data
• Mental model or frame used to make sense of data
• Goal of all activity (often externally provided)
• Identity (which of this stuff is "me" and which is "other"?)

The levels are successively less questioned and more strongly and emotionally defended if the survival of that level as it is currently constituted is challenged. We talked a lot about "high-reliability" systems and the realization that often the problems were not due to data being wrong, but due to the whole mental model of what is going on that the data feed being wrong. -- and how emotional people, especially superiors, can instantly be if their framework is questioned.

That much (two levels) is generally recognized. (cite - paper from MIT). Even the US Army Leadership Doctrine allows and encourages raising facts that challenge the mental model being used at headquarters, as startling as that seems, because they have realized that too many losses were occurring due to wrong mental models of the situation on the ground. But that concept has not gone gently into the night, and is widely misunderstood and resisted.

Similarly, The Toyota Way or "lean manufacturing" is designed to mercilessly force errors to be surfaced, despite human reluctance and resistance at all levels to discuss "dirty laundry" or "defects" or "errors" or "waste", from employees on the front lines to top management. Face-saving cover-up is the norm in many if not most industries, and is what Toyota has realized is the single thing that damages long-term corporate survival and prosperity the most.

Challenges to what I call the third level, or goals, are even less well tolerated by the existing order and administrative hierarchy or power elite or whatever you call it when people do it, versus machines. The system or s-loops "goal" is pretty tightly protected and defended and not changed lightly. Employees in theory Y enlightened companies can challenge the mental model, but not question the goal of the corporate entity. Military personnel can challenge the mental model, but not the goal of the military. This is becoming "sacred" turf, or, with people, tightly held turf. Again, we have an order of magnitude, or factor of ten times as much emotion raised about challenges on this level as on the second level of frameworks.

Finally, what I call the fourth level of any s-loop is "identity". Goals spring from identity, which is the hierarchical glue that plugs this s-loop into the next larger or higher s-loop that it is part of and belongs to, in several different meanings of the word "belongs to." Any s-loop will be part, at any time, of some larger s-loop. This membership defines who "we" are and what "we" stand for and defend as sacred, and defines our goals locally. It defines what is "us" and what is "not us" so we know what to defend and what to resist or, in some cases, attack.

Challenging identity is another factor of ten more emotional, and harder to do. People tend to fix and lock-down their identity, their goals, and their world-views and defend them to the death, regardless how arbitrarily and unconsciously they were inherited or selected in the first place.

And the question of "evolution" hits at that fourth level, for many people, whether religious or scientific, in equally emotional ways and triggers responses with "religious zeal" among people who define themselves as part of the "science" body and among those who define themselves as part of some "religious" body. Now we're talking "sacred", and "heresy" -- at the "burn the witch!" or "kill the heretic!" level.

Well, I find myself loving both camps, as if I had a parent who was Science and another who was Religion, who are currently "separated" and not living together, and who fight a lot lately, calling each other ugly names and throwing things. It's not pretty.

Still, it seems to me that human life on Earth is at a risky place, where we have the technology to kill ourselves off many different ways, but not the wisdom to manage that technology wisely. And, of all the issues that affect the health of the public, that seems to be central to me, and almost a core issue of what "Public Health" needs to address.

Most of those battles between groups fit into my model of "s-loops" just trying to survive, in a massively-parallel, multi-level soup. Some battles are over boring material resources, such as water, but more and more battles are being fought over the four levels of being - over differences in data, mental frameworks or paradigms, goals, and, most of all, identity.

Who are we, and what are we doing here and why? Those turn out to be questions that are ripping us apart and holding us together, and generating much of the fighting. So we cannot avoid looking at them if we're going to bring this baby through the white water and into peaceful waters beyond.

That said, I can get back to Nicholas Wade's article that triggered this reflection, namely, findings from geneticists that our DNA is continuing to evolve even today. So what? Why is this newsworthy? Is there something we can learn from this that we didn't realize before?

I think so.

First, we can see evidence that evolution represents a closed feedback process these days, perhaps more rapidly than ever before so far as human beings are concerned. Our DNA, at least our children's DNA, appears to be somewhat plastic and responsive, in very short order, to changes in the local environment. That's what Nicholas Wade says. But, we also know that much of the local environment these days is the "built environment", the context that we humans, based on our existing DNA, have constructed for each other to live in or with.

In fact, for most people, the built environment now dominates everything else. We spend far more time being "pressured" by school, jobs, corporations, laws, taxes, pollution, careers, social norms, terrorist threats, and loud stereo's than we do coping with "nature" per se. And these are all things we have built for ourselves.

We are living in our own wake, with good aspects and bad aspects. We inherit culture and high-speed Internet, but we also live in our own sewage. We live in our planet's climate, but we are now large enough to affect that climate.

The point is, it's a closed loop. Most people would agree with that. There is feedback. Again, most people would agree, leaving out those who deny that evolution has or is occurring because that violates their mental model and identity. On this point I'm going with the science, because it's overwhelming and I need conclusions that yield action plans, and because I don't believe at all that evolution in any way discounts God. If anything, it's a more impressive universe and more awe-inspiring if it's not just static, but dynamic.

Having now offended half the religious readers, let me give equal time to offending the scientists.
First, I agree with Stephen Jay Gould that evolution is multi-level, with each having an independent contribution. There are vertical feedback loops, so the "either/or" question becomes a meaningless distinction. Yes, we have genes evolving. Yes we have species evolving. Yes each has pressures at its own level that are mostly independent in the short run.

But, here I'll turn a corner and say that the evolution is of s-loops, not of DNA. And that suddenly means that "corporations" and "nations" and "religions" and "cultures" are just one more kind of life of this planet, that needs to be in the complete ecological picture.

In fact, lately, the evolution of humans seems to have taken quite a turn and is dominated by the evolution of corporations, with their typical nested-hierarchy shapes, being both DNA and more than DNA, being both many people, and more than many people.

Corporations are a new species on the evolutionary stage, and they are becoming the dominant world-reshaping species. This is a rather important observation if we're trying to make sense of what's going on and where it's headed and, if it's broken, where to fix it.

So, we don't just have species co-evolving in a tight feedback loop with DNA and genes -- that's an incomplete model. We have species co-evolving with genes co-evolving with corporations co-evolving with cultures co-evolving with religions, with each one of those providing part of the context for the next step in evolution of each other part. Each part of that equation provides part of the "evolutionary pressure" on each other part. And the parts are all connected if we stand back far enough, so that each part is providing evolutionary pressure ultimately on itself.
In parallel. Simultaneously. Irrevocably interlocked bidirectionally.

This is not a situation that can be understood without using "feedback loops", to put it mildly.

But, the big question is still to come. Are these just "feedback paths", yawn, or are some of these actually s-loops -- self-aware, self-repairing, self-defending, self-extending goal-seeking control feedback loops?

Because, the behavior is extremely different - as different as a hot, muggy, sultry summer afternoon, and one with a tornado. Same air, same moisture, same laws of physics and condensation, but one is a closed feedback loop that feeds and holds itself together, and one is not. I'm not saying that a tornado is "alive", but I am saying that a tornado is "MAWBA",
or "Might As Well Be Alive" in terms of some predictions about future behaviors that are otherwise startling and catch us off-guard.

So, I've made a model of the world that includes what we see in the microscope and what we see in the newspaper at the same time. It's a model of nested s-loops, fighting more or less blindly to survive and sustain their four-levels of being. It's a model where s-loops can merge and join forces, instead of just "winning or losing", and where a handful or a trillion s-loops can pool their identity and form a larger, multi-cellular "being" with an independent, higher-level s-loop, consciousness, awareness, self-protectiveness, etc. (for example, us.)

Again, none of this says one word either way about the existence of God or the "true nature" of what a human being is. It focuses on vertically symmetric, scale-invariant primitive building blocks of s-loops, regardless what material or non-material substrate those operate within or across. That's something that supercomputers can model relatively easily -- the kind of thing that artificial life researchers do on a daily basis, except with a different "payload" or "generating kernel" or "seed" to the process of evolution.

The one really critical new thing here is the idea that dumb feedback pathways can undergo a phase-transition and become self-sustaining, self-defending, self-aware, terra-forming active agents on their own accord, existing semi-independently of the smaller agents that make them up.

This is the observed phenomenon where, effectively, after the pixels have formed a coherent image (whatever that means), the image realizes it exists and "takes on a life of its own" and pulls up the scaffolding used to create it and now starts telling the pixels what to do in order to keep itself alive. ( or if you prefer, to keep itself sustained, or s-loopy, or soliton-izing, or some persisting verb.)

Assuming this is a scale-independent control-loop process, we don't need our microscopes to understand it. We can look out the window. We can watch people form a company, a corporation, that takes on a meta-independent life of its own, and the company can then become self-sustaining, self-repairing, have an identity and a goal and a vision, and can in fact turn on and fire the founding partners because it doesn't need them anymore. It has been born, or radiated or emitted or generated or somehow launched.

This phase-transition should be something that can be mathematically simulated, but I don't know anyone who has done that yet. (Nobel prize waiting for someone!)

If we're looking for how to stabilize or improve relationships between people, or management and labor, or government and citizens, or corporations and "competitors", or between "nation states" or between "religions", it all can be illuminated by understanding what these relatively s-loops can do in the way of "merger" that preserves core values while generating an even higher substrate or vessel in which "life of its own" can be placed by God, or emerge, or whatever it is that happens there.

Something happens there. Something important that we don't fully click to yet.

I think its the key to resolving world chaos and should be looked at more fully. IF we can solve that one, we can catalyze the process and complete the birth process for a planet-sized life-form that's trying to emerge here, held back by our own concepts of life and our role in it.

Let me be clear about one thing. This is not a "reductionist" effort to say that all life on earth is "just" a bunch of atoms or s-loops. I'm at the opposite end. But I'm the first to say that if our bodies have a substrate of atoms, then we should know something about what laws and rules constrain what you can do with atoms, because "we" have to live with gravity and physical injury due to momentum and energy and other physical stuff. Similarly, if we, human spirits, live in or on or above or attached somehow to a substrate that is, above atoms, composed of s-loops, then we would we wise to understand what physical laws constrain those as well, and understand how they can be injured, and how to repair them when they break.

That's not saying that humans are "just" atoms or humans are "just" s-loops. My whole premise is that something miraculous happens in the upward emergent phase transitions that we haven't even begun to grasp yet. Stay tuned.

As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

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

Wade

Bees, infection, lean, and emergent immune systems

"What's good for the hive is good for the bees." That's one of the posters near the cafe at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore. I recall it's described as an "African saying."

I've gone on at great length looking for the right way to describe and convey the difference between multi-level organization and, well, "heaps."

There seems to be an extremely strong bias in the US against anything that has to do with higher organizational levels of humans - unless it's man-made, centrally-planned, top-down business organizations. Anything "bottom up" has a cultural repellent overtone of collectivism or labor-movements or community-organizers ( read "troublemakers") or socialism or communism or Star Trek's ultimate bogeyman - "The Borg."

It's puzzling. It's as if there's a conviction on the one hand that the country has passed through its entire need for "social and economic development" and is trying to forget that awkward, teenager stage when things didn't work out well, now that ... um ... we have everything perfectly under control?

That's pretty much a "theory X" model, where all the expertise is concentrated at the top, and the only thing everyone below that level is good for is blind obedient labor or paying taxes. And maybe that did work in the middle ages or for running plantations or companies where the labor was just an extension of the company's founder.

But, that model also ran out of steam a few decades ago, as more companies started being "knowledge based" with "knowledge workers," all of which meant that the center of mass of the expertise was moving from the executive wing to the shop floor. In hospitals, for example, there was a traumatic transition, that's still happening, where the main administrator of the hospital would now be a professional administrator, who was not even a medical doctor. The expertise in medical matters was shifting out to the floor, and the expertise in central administration was becoming, gasp, "administration" -- which previously had been sort of a dirty "four-letter word", the kind of thing that only worn out doctors would do when they couldn't keep up with "real work."

All this is morphing slowly, and with loud shrieks and moans and strenuous objections, towards "theory Y" where the laborers are assumed to be highly competent experts and in touch with reality on the floor or "ground truth" or "in country" or whatever the context is. Central "management's" role became less to "direct" or "manage" the operation than to "orchestrate" it. There' s no way the new "conductors" could even begin to grasp how to operate one of the "instruments" out there in the orchestra, let alone be the fount of all wisdom on every one of the sub-sub-sub-specialties and stay current on every relevant journal and attend every important conference.

So, it's a new "paradigm." The "chain of command" doesn't go away, but the nature of the command is distinguished very carefully from "information flow".

Now, if you look at this through the high-magnification lens, it doesn't look very different from the old model. (see picture below).


To see the difference, you need to rotate the microscope lenses around to a lower-power, broader field-of-view lens, and you can see what's changed, or what has to change, to make this new model work as advertised.

The big changes are that:

• News about the outside world comes in at the bottom (the front, the ground troops), and loops up to the top, where it has an effect, altering the new, revised orders that come back down the chain. That loop is travelled many times, but is still relatively slow.
• There is a very fast local loop, where feedback about performance comes right into the low level team, which responds to it on the spot, with no involvement of management. This is akin to your hand retracting from a hot stove without having to check in with the brain first. Or equivalent to the Coast Guard in Katrina, where they were pre-authorized to make decisions on their own without bothering headquarters.
• In Theory X, the news comes in the top, which has limited bandwidth or a small 1-person pipe, then only some of it goes down and some is lost at each level, depending on upper managers to recognize what lower employees care about. Finally a dribble of news makes it to the front. The troops report what they see and differences with what the orders seem to imply, but at each level going back up the chain, half of that is deleted by managers who think they know what the boss actually cares about. By the time the internal news gets up to the boss, 3 months later,
• it's unrecognizable.
• TheoryX is very hard to steer with. The Boss is effectively blind to what's going on inside, the troops are essentially blind to what the boss sees outside, and the whole thing feels like "pushing" on a rope.
• Theory Y is very easy to steer with. Most of the heavy lifting is done at each level with fast feedback that never has to go up to the brain and back down to the hand. Because the loop upwards is fast and phase-locked, news at the front actually makes it up to the top, which can change the mental model and the marching orders. The troops effectively control the boss, the same way the water-level controls the hand when filling a glass of water.
• Carrying on the "rope" analogy, it's like PULLING on a rope that goes out to a pulley and comes back to a pulley and goes in a big loop. You can accomplish "pushing" your clothes out to dry by "pulling" on the rope. The LOOP does the magic. You need the loop.

Well, I came in to talk about bees and emergent immune systems, and I've headed off in what seems a different direction, so now let's stop, turn around, and look a the "bee problem" from the top of this mountain we just climbed.

What's the problem? As the Los Angeles Times put it this morning,
Suddenly, the bees are simply vanishing.

by Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II
June 10, 2007

The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.

Scientists have scoured the country, finding eerily abandoned hives in which the bees seem to have simply left their honey and broods of baby bees.

"We've never experienced bees going off and leaving brood behind," said Pennsylvania-based beekeeper Dave Hackenberg. "It was like a mother going off and leaving her kids."

Researchers have picked through the abandoned hives, dissected thousands of bees, and tested for viruses, bacteria, pesticides and mites.

So far, they are stumped.

The problem seems to be both a parasite (that can be killed by irradiating the hive), and a simultaneous breakdown in the bee's immune systems. The article states:

Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria.

"We were shocked by the huge number of pathogens present in each adult bee," Cox-Foster said at a recent meeting of bee researchers convened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections.

The article goes on looking at parasites, but I want to hit the brakes here, get off the highway, and go up the side road of looking at the question of suppression of immune systems. This is pure speculation, but possibly important speculation.

What catches my attention here is that there is a natural, multi-level beastie here - and that is that honeybees don't exist as individuals, they exist as parts-of-a-hive. Increasingly research is showing that humans have lot of the same tendencies, but for bees this is extreme. If you remove a honeybee from its hive, I suspect it will simply die - as will a human cell if you remove it from a human body. (That's why it's so hard to cultivate human "cell-lines".)

The latest literature on humans shows that it's not just that a person's immune system reflects the "health" of their own body, but it also reflects whether the person has become isolated and fragmented from society. One of the most painful things for a person, that is sort of surprising in the "rational actor" model, is that the imprisonment in "solitary confinement" is extremely draining, even to prisoners. The need for daily interaction with other humans is tangible.

Chimps, if removed from their herd, have been shown to sacrifice a chance for food for a chance to open a window and see what the other chimps are doing. This is a deep, biological need, not confined to one species, or, as the human cell example shows, not confined to a single "level" of organizational hierarchy.

The point is this. If you forget what your eyes see, and look at what the mathematics show, human beings, or bees, or cells, are not the shape your eye sees. They have parts of their physiological control and regulatory systems that extend out into their larger social structure. Those are important parts, and if those parts are not well, or damaged, the damage is quickly manifested in the local physiology of the individual as well.

For tax or legal purposes, or buying a train ticket, we are separate "individuals". For purposes of computing how regulatory processes operate, and how they fail, we are not nearly so "separate". Because our eyes don't show us these invisible (but very real) connections, we tend to discount them, or ignore them. We do so at our peril.

These tendrils of our "meta-bodies" are like having our blood diverted from our bodies in tubes in a dialysis unit, run out to some other place, processed and cleaned up, and returned to our bodies through some other tube. We can say that is not "me", but in the sense that a breakdown in that system can directly cause you to be sick or die, it really is "you".

Apparently, cells, chimps, bees, humans, whatever, develop many such external loops in their interactions with each other. These can be so great that it is common to hear a person say that when a loved one abandons them or dies, "it is as if a part of me died."

Alternatively, it's been shown that cells with even damaged DNA's can be supported by a "field effect" from neighboring healthy cells, and not become cancerous. [ I'll track down the reference.] Notice that the "life sciences" spend a huge amount of effort on "signal transduction" and ways signals are communicated between cells, or between genes with "genetic circuits", but there's little use of a model that this low-level communication, if it persists, really has to be part of a high-level closed feedback control loops with a mind of its own, and the key thing to do is to find that loop. As I showed a few days ago, tracing out the loop is a challenge, because control information leaps happily from medium to medium, now in neurons, now in voice, now in electromagnetic waves, now in liquid flow, etc. The point is if you know there MUST be a closed loop, so that the cells can PULL on the ROPE (discussed above), then you are encouraged to find the rest of the pieces.

And, then, of course, if you're a drug company, you have a whole new set of intervention points at the meta-loop level.

In extreme cases, when the culture and society collapses, the impact can be dramatic. I suspect that collapse of cultural integrity is part of what is going on in the huge rise in suicide rates among native Americans right now. The history of the Pima Indians, in the USA, shows a dramatic collapse of physical and social health, going from a tribe with almost no diabetes and one with a reputation for being extremely cordial in 1800, to one with something like 80% diabetes rates and a high rate of suicide and interpersonal violence. Many factors are put forward to explain this, but I'm biased to looking at multi-level models for this kind of effect.

So, if something is killing off the honeybees, and the something is enabled by an apparent collapse of the individuals "immune systems", then other people will start looking at what's wrong with "this bee" (the "clinical medicine" model), and I'd prefer to start the investigation at the other end and ask "Is something wrong with the hive?"

In other words, what's "broken" for each bee may not be "inside the box" of that bee's "body", but may be out in the external part of the control-system-body that is connected into and through the "hive." In the analogy, the "dialysis machine" is broken, or the tubes running to it are clogged or kinked, or something like that.

I think this can be a very powerful model, to think that there are TWO life-forms involved that may need medical attention. One is a lot of individual cells, or bees, or people. The other is a much larger scale emergent thingie, that we'd call "our body", or "the hive" or "society" respectively.

To date, we've considered emergent thingies as if they would evaporate if you took away the tiny things that make up the big thingie.

But I've presented many cases where the emergent thingie suddenly transitions, becomes self aware, and takes on "a life of its own" and even acts as if it has "a mind of its own."

For humans, the emergent thingie is very familiar - it's "us". Cells may have formed the substrate in which our spirit was formed (or placed, if you prefer that model), but now that spirit has definitely taken on a life and identity and mind of its own that is only remotely related to the lives of the cells that once made it up, but now are subordinate to it.

We see the same pattern in many other places. Mental images in human or machine vision start by being made up of many small patches of data or patterns, but once they combine into an overall "vision" or "percept", that thingie takes on a life of its own and even if we remove the source data it persists. In fact, even if the data now refute it, it can continue to persist, and defend itself, and change what we look at in order to sustain itself. Wow.

So, I think it is safe to say that everyone recognizes that bees have a very strong social component to their daily activity and identity. And, like corporations that continue to exist long after the founders have died or left, "hives" tend to persist even if individual bees die off.

But, OK, say the hive is a living thing that has a "meta-body" and has something that is appropriately called "health" that is a mostly-independent factor from the health of the individuals within it. I say "mostly" because it's only in the short term that they may appear to be separate -- in the long term, they are tightly coupled because feedback loops have compounded the "weak interactions" and "loose coupling" into dominant factors.

So, if the bees are dying, it may be because the hive-scale-thingie is dying first. As with any feedback loop, causal "directions" become a meaningless concept. The hive and the individuals rise or fall as one, in a upward or downward spiral feedback loop pattern.

But, it still can make sense for humans to talk about "psychological problems" or "immune system problems" that are defined at the large-scale, meta-body level and may not even make sense at the individual cell level.

The point is, things can "break" or "be wrong" at that large scale.

That's why I keep on flashing that M.C. Esher picture of the waterfall -- everything is healthy locally, but it's broken globally. The two are completely distinct, in the short run. (but coupled in the long run in any living thing.)

Is this what's going on with the bees? I have no idea. But I am pretty certain that very few people who aren't systems analysts would even start with that approach and look there for signs of something wrong at that level. So, it would be "baffling."

This is exactly what many social and corporate organizational problems are. At a local level, we see the equivalent of "bees dying" or "employees burning out" or "employees quitting" and we are baffled as to what's wrong with them. Sometimes, the problem isn't at that level. Sometimes it's a structural problem, a "systems" problem. Those are hard to see to begin with, and impossible to see if you don't look for them on purpose and methodically.

A great deal of management literature these days, including The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker, describe problems and solutions at the meta-level, without ever springing, in my mind, to the overall pattern they are pointing to. This is an emergent-organism that has a meta-body. It acts like its alive, and it can have disorders and dysfunctions and "health" and often needs "medical attention" at its own scale. (But save us from most "consultants"!)

If you look at all the emphasis on "vision" or "spirit" or "direction" or "identity" in the management literature, you can simplify it all to an effort to create a self-aware, self-sustaining, emergent beastie at the meta-level -- a beastie that will then turn around and form a nurturing context and reshape and empower the people that just gave it life.

So, it's one thing if you push up emergent life, and when you let go it falls down again. That's one case. In this other case, it's more like a radio antenna or something -- you push up emergent life and push so hard or well that the life breaks loose and is radiated out and takes on an existence of its own outside the antenna. Then, you can shut down the transmitter or dismantle the antenna, and the radiated wave just keeps on propagating outward.

Except in this case, it's more like a ring-vortex wave that just sits in place, like a little donut-shaped "halo" above us. It doesn't shoot off a the speed of light, but instead turns around and comes back and embraces the parts that just created it.

I think this is what we're trying to do with corporate management these days, effectively.
I think that's what "lean" and "six-sigma" and "Toyota Production System" are about. They're about creating a culture that is vital, and self-sustaining and that reaches around people and becomes the sea they swim in and draw life from, while they complete the cycle and return the favor.

That requires a lot of complete loops to work, and they have to be vertically oriented. We need to have the vertical donut model, not the open-ended "tree" model of management to bring all the pieces into "phase-lock" and allow a laser-beam output, not incoherent light.

And, when it breaks, we need "doctors" of the corporate spirit to bring it into alignment with a pattern that works again.

But it's not "the Borg" and it's not scary and it's not homogenization and it's not domination and it's not an abandonment of a social hierarchy -- but it is a different use of those pathways, a transforming use, that uses vertical close-paths to make the top the bottom and bring vertical unity to the compound-level beast. Then, it works. Then, it's great!

Note: All closed paths are "loops", so any causal loop diagram will have lots of "loops".

Most of those loops aren't dominant. What will be dominant will be the FEEDBACK CONTROL LOOPS. These will be self-aware, self-repairing, persistent, goal-seeking loops. THOSE are the key players over any long period of time in living systems. Those are where things break, or never got formed in the first place. And those are the intervention points for a sustainable intervention.

Lewis Thomas on interventions in complex systems

Sterman quotes Lewis Thomas in Lives of a Cell, 1974 (p90):

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