I forgot what I can do

The comic pages are filled with people trying to figure out a whole new world of layoffs and depression. In Arlo and Janis this week, Arlo finds himself half his normal height and tries to remember being stronger and bigger once.

Depression has many types. Some is sad, some looks like fatigue, or inability to cope, or inability to get started on things, or inability to care much any more about your goals or your self or your dreams. In some types, you seem to feel just fine, but the world seems to have gone wrong.

Regardless, the view from inside a depressed frame of mind, looking out, is totally different than the view from outside, looking in. We become blind to our strengths. We shut out possibilities that are open to us and don't even try.

I've killed a lot of virtual trees posting on various kinds of perspective-based blindness, other ways that views differ that don't involve this strange thing "depression." What is weird about depression is that your view differs from your own view.

Maybe women, with hormonal cycles, are more used to "mood" swings where the very same life goes from one end of the spectrum to the other, and back, on a monthly basis, but this can be a new experience for men, and easy to misinterpret as the world changing, instead of oneself.

All observations of the world are a tangled mixture of observing oneself and the world, and this is important on a personal basis, not just a scientific basis.

"We" are really composite creatures in many ones, one of which is that the two halves of our brain handle different tasks, but are supposed to coordinate with each other and "act as one", which sometimes doesn't work, with the most surprising results.

The extreme case I saw in a course I took one in "Cognitive Neuropsychological Assessment" was a patient who had half his brain temporarily chemically drugged and shut off to locate which side of his brain was managing his speech. Doctors do this sometimes before surgery for severe epilepsy that can't be cured otherwise. If you shut off the side with the speech center, the patient is happily talking away and then abruptly the lights go out. Yep, that's it alright.

But in this video they shut down the other side, so the patient kept talking, but at about half speed, and somewhat slurred. That lasted about 5 minutes, then the drug wore off and the patient returned to normal. Shortly after that, the patient asked when the test was going to begin.

They had missed the fact that half their brain had been shut down. The doctors asked "Didn't you notice anything?" and the patient replied "Not really. Well, I did feel a little tired. "

I am reminded of this every time my daughter wants to drive somewhere at 2 AM and tells me not to worry so, because she's "just a little tired" and she'll be fine.

We are wired so that we can't see what we can't see. I guess the shock was too much, so our brain carefully fills in the gaps in our perceptions with realistic looking cardboard cutouts of reality, or the equivalent. Just like we don't notice that our eyes have a space, about the size of our outstretched hand, that is totally blind. They fill that in for us so we aren't bugged by it. It takes work to find it.

My dad was a stage magician and I used to do a few shows myself, and as a magician you use this blindness to do things, in plain sight, that people won't see. It's a remarkable kind of Ninja invisibility. Kids have very little of it and are very hard audiences, because they actually look at what's going on.

Adults think they are watching and paying attention, but in reality their minds are really overbooked and "multiplexing" or doing 200 things at once, so as soon as the picture around them looks stable, most of their brain goes asleep to that world and goes off, unnoticed, to work on some other anxiety or fantasize about sex or wonder if they remembered to shut off the gas before they left.

This trance-like state is perfect for magicians because, so long as you don't do anything startling, the audience only thinks it is watching you, and, like in the old Mission Impossible TV show, their internal cameras are just watching a life-size snapshot of the bank vault, not the actual bank vault. This effect is amplified tremendously in stage magic by the fact that people, like birds, learned to keep an eye out behind them by staying vaguely aware of whether the flock was happily finding bugs or whatever it is birds find, or startled and suddenly rising up as a group. We have this peripheral vision.

So, any given bird can stop trying to watch for predators and focus its little birdie brain on finding food so long as it lets the other birds around it pick up the load of surveillance, and so long as it sets a hair-trigger that, if the other birds start to fly, it should just go with them on faith.

For live audiences again, this is very powerful, and instead of watching what you are doing, people go into a trance state and simply keep an awareness of whether the people around them are reacting to something or not. If there's no change outside, they can go ahead and ignore the professor and continue dreaming about sex, or whatever. If the mood shifts, they have to snap back to "reality" and listen again, or, more likely, ask the person next to them what just happened. While they're busy fantasizing, their mind is watching the old snapshot, not the live video-feed, and doesn't realize it. It's very seamless, like in that Sandra Bullock movie "Speed", where they faked the video to fool the bad guy while they were actually getting off the bus.

Well, this is not always a good thing that our brains can fake us out so effortlessly. Especially when it starts happening when we are trying to be awake and alert.

I recently found out that our bodies do this too. I hadn't known that. Somewhere in the hazy past I acquired a weight bench and from time to time I had tried to "get in shape", but it never really seemed to "take". I had this bar that my son laughs at with a total weight of 20 pounds, and it always seemed "heavy" to me. Sigh. (He works out of course.)

Finally, a month or so ago, I actually read a book I'd had for a decade on weight training, and realized that this "warm up" thing the body does isn't just getting warm, but actually changes everything. I finally found out that if I did 20 reps of 20 pounds and waited a minute, I could add 5 pounds and then do 20 more lifts of 25 pounds. And if I waited a minute, I could to 20 more of 30 pounds, etc. All the way up to 75 pounds, (hey, don't laugh!) and then work my way back down to 20 pounds, which at that point felt like it was made of plastic or aluminum and I almost hurt myself because it was so easy to lift.

So, this same weight that intimidated me that was so hard to do could be trivial to do, if I had just "warmed up" correctly. Wow. That was news to me. It still surprises me.

It makes me wonder how much else in life that seems almost impossible to do is actually something I could do, if I just warmed up again, whatever that means.

In some ways this "depression" thingie seems to be an advanced version of that same kind of blindness, where almost everything seems "hard" to "impossible", even though, if you could punch through and get started and warmed up, it is actually easy.

Unfortunately, depression likes company, and so the entire audience can become depressed, or, more likely, an entire community, like Detroit, can become collectively clinically depressed. Then this side vision and audience awareness I talked about simply confirms to each person that life is too hard to cope with, so they don't need to actually test it for themselves, and can focus on their own local anxiety about something. It "latches" down, so that, once everyone sort of makes an unspoken decision to be depressed, that fact closes back on itself and forces even those who were optimistic to be depressed.

Then, 20 pounds becomes too much to lift. Life is hard, looks hard, feels hard, even in some cases where it isn't. Outside observers are surprised, then puzzled, then mistakenly write off this depression as "bad people" or "bad attitude", when it is actually a deeper problem with collective perception and feedback and the way humans are wired to observe the world but not observe themselves observing it.

There are outside forces, unfair choices, and other things going on, yes, but it is still important that, in this mix, the way we see the world becomes part of the problem, not part of the solution. We develop self-fulfilling perceptions that things aren't possible, stop trying, reject chances to do them, and our mental or psychological or physical muscles then deteriorate until that becomes true, which we triumphantly announce is what we said from the start.

What to do?

It is a challenge for drugs and therapy to lift an individual out of this state, when the world around them is helping, but there are amazing drugs that can break the spell, and then aren't needed any more.

It is a hundred times the task to do that when the person is surrounded with wet-blankets that drag them back down, quench sparks of enthusiasm or hope, and force them back into the social normal state of collective depression.

This group effect is huge. It affects any group of any race or culture or educational level. The national Institute of Medicine has finally figured out that it is almost impossible to change the behavior of an individual doctor if you don't, at the same time, change the behavior and expectations of their whole small group, or "microsystem", or the doctor will just revert to old ways as soon as you leave.

So it's not just Arlo that can forget what he could be or do, entire groups of people and cultures can get down and forget together what they used to be able to do, and could still do, if they weren't so convinced that they couldn't do it and couldn't rally a serious effort to try.

This doesn't go away by itself. Some cultures, like the Pima indians around Phoenix in Arizona, had their culture shaken by the arrival of the white man's culture, went into depression, and have never recovered. They've gone from the peak-performing, most-advanced, most peaceful native American nation to the far other end, now with the highest depression, suicide, diabetes, obesity, and homicide rates. They fell down and couldn't get back up.

All of us fall down, and sometimes an entire culture or nation falls down, and we need to get very systematic and methodical about the process we use to get back up again when that happens.

It doesn't look possible, so it's like trying to lift a huge limp cat, that seems to keep leaking out of your grasp.

But it is possible. The first thing to realize is that it is a "multi-level" problem, not an "individual" problem, and that it is all tied up in the way people perceive things together and then rearrange their lives to support that perception.

The same forces that hold things together when we're "up" can be the socially cohesive and self-fulfilling forces that hold things down when we're "down."

In the short run, if you can hang out with different people, it can change your life. I'm wondering if this effect is strong enough that hanging out in virtual reality, in something like "Second Life", can change this collective perception framework enough that an individual's own perceptions can get out from under the pile of bodies and rise back to it's own healthy state.

In New York, some urban churches are providing a different world of a different life that can make this transition happen. Organized religion with intensive interactions and fellowship can break this cycle of depression, and in some areas may be the only available option.

Whether it's Detroit or the suburbs of Paris or hospital board-rooms, people are way more captive to the group around them than they realize. But we are all able to downplay almost any factor or person and pay attention to others, so we get to choose, in some senses, who the group "around us" is. If we identify with some world-wide religion, that can become "us". If we are members of a professional society, that can become "us". The Army could become "us". The gang at 121-st street could become "us".

What is important is that the "us" you pick matters. A lot. That may be the only room your "free-will" has to operate, and after that everything else follows.

With world-wide phone service, we can even cherry-pick an "us" of ten people, one per country, around the globe, and interact with that "us" so much every day that it comes to dominate our perceptions of who "we" are, and therefore frames and liberates and answers who "I" am.

But we can't do it "alone." Humans are built to be flock animals, and the effects of that are far too great to ignore. If we pick whatever is on TV or in movies or music as what we surround ourselves with, that becomes our "flock" and those beliefs and attitudes invisibly change what it is even possible for us to see in the world around us - blinding us to some things while magnifying others.

Hint for better living -- try shutting off the TV entirely for a month and see what changes.

Why? Consider what TV does. You are a flock animal. You are very sensitive, in ways you cannot imagine, to what the rest of the flock or herd is doing. If you spend time watching TV, or, worse, watching a big-screen life-size TV, the people on the TV are treated by your brain as being your flock, because, frankly, this part of the brain is not very smart. Fantasy goes in the same place as reality, it doesn't care.

So watching TV gives you a sensation of belonging to a group of people who, at best, completely ignore your existence. You are like the youngest child of a dozen, not chased out of the room, but not paid any attention to whatsoever. Every minute you "watch" TV, you are reinforcing that social "fact" to yourself that you don't matter to these people, they act as if you're not in the room. It's another day's reinforcement of passive helpless hopelessness.

That's not even considering the content of what's on. This is just considering the fact that what's on doesn't reflect your existence, and goes on whether you yell or stand up or sit down or walk out of the room. It's a constant message that you don't exist, and if you did exist, you don't matter. We don't need that message. It is not helping.

Worse than that, it is a downward trapping spiral, another danger we are not built to recognize. The more you watch TV, the less you interact in the world. The less you interact, the more depressed you get. The more depressed you get, the more you stay home and watch TV. For people trapped in this loop or addition, this isn't "entertainment" - it's slow suffocation and the pathway to death from lack of social oxygen.

Maybe the advertisers or networks find that entertaining, but I don't. The proper word would be "entrainment" not "entertainment." ( tr.v. en·trained, en·train·ing, en·trains

1. To pull or draw along after itself. )

This is not directly visible, like the conversation going on in the "other channel" in an audience of a magic show, but it is very real. While the conscious you is busy watching some "action" show with "excitement", the flock-you is watching a different channel, simulcast, that says that absolutely nothing is going on and that you do not matter, they have shunned you, they have turned their backs on you, they are not even noticing you, you are nothing, and they'd be happier if you'd leave or just die or something and free up the chair. The more you care about the people on channel A, the more painful is the silence on channel B. You watch more and more looking and hoping for a human touch, but it never comes.

It's a fascinating analogy to the Ancient Romans, who were killing themselves off with the newly discovered lead pipes they were using to pipe water directly into their homes, that seems like such a good idea at the time. The water was obvious, the lead poisoning was silent and insidious. The delivery mechanism that no one thought much about was toxic.

If you think of people as individuals, there is almost no room for this effect in the model. If you realize as researchers now are doing, that humans have very advanced forms of non-verbal social communication with each other, and are flock or herd animals at heart, then you can see where this impact can occur.

I wonder if we had some kind of electronic wave from space that made all televisions fail to operate for a month what would change. I bet, a lot more than we realize.

Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!

A well-known TV commercial once had an old woman who fell in her room and manages to call someone with the phrase "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!", or something like that.

In a larger sense, the question of resilience, or the ability to "get up" again after taking a disappointment or defeat is a core competency. Life is full of impacts and things breaking, and to hang in there, we have to rebuild at least as fast as things break. Individuals, companies, cultures, or nations that can't get back up again face a bleak and truncated future.

But, we live in a multi-level world, where trillions of cells come together in our bodies, and our bodies are small parts of much larger cultures and nations. And, these levels are not separate worlds, even though they seem it some times -- they interact a lot. It is hard in a thriving culture to stay down; it is hard in a depressed culture to get back up. We are social beings.

So, when many individuals fall down and don't get back up, we have to look past individual causes and look at social causes that are contributing to or even dominating events.

One cultural and individual factor is ego or self-esteem. My friends at MIT described the opening talk as freshmen, when they were informed that a third of them would not make it through 4 years - not because they weren't bright, because you had to be to be in that room. It was because they couldn't adapt to no longer being number one.

Students who had been big fish in small ponds their whole lives, number one, suddenly found themselves surrounded by other people who were also number one's, and some of those were clearly smarter. So their egos and self-esteem collapsed, and they stopped trying, and failed courses they could easily have passed, because they couldn't be number one.

They fell down and didn't get up.

This happens to entire cultures. The Pima Indians, around Phoenix Arizona in the US were number one for hundreds of years. They had extensive and elaborate methods of farming and irrigation and were widely respected. They were the friendliest Native American tribe, by many accounts, peace loving. Then the white man's culture came, and along with it radio and the outside world. There were many factors involved, but, basically, the Pima nation collapsed. They went from the lowest rate of violence and suicide to the highest, with huge problems with drinking, drugs, obesity, diabetes, homicide and suicide.

They fell and couldn't get up.

It was very hard on Japan to lose World War II, and their economy was devastated. They really had nothing left. They rebuilt their nation from that into a world leader, with the world's most admired company, Toyota. Yesterday the first photos came back from the Japanese satellite they just launched to the moon. They got up.

China similarly was devastated, over a longer period, and couldn't cope with the fact that the foreigner's weapons and armies were better than theirs. Finally, through a brutal process, they got back up and said "We can do this." And they did.

Right now, the USA seems to me to be near the same kind of watershed point. Other nations are running circles around our best industries. Other nations have healthier populations. The Netherlands passed us as having the tallest males. Top health care in India, Singapore, Thailand, Dubai, etc. is at least as good as the best care in the USA, and ten times cheaper.

We're kind of at the same point as the MIT freshmen. Welcome to the wider world. Now the question is, do we go the way of the Pima, or go the way of Japan?

On a smaller scale, the Michigan state scene is looking bleak in places, now 50th in terms of 50 states for employment. The "Big three" auto companies no longer rule the world. It's not clear which way that will go now.

In that vein, I read about the latest study of blacks in the US by the Pew Trust, in today's Washington Post. Something like a third of black children of middle class families have fallen back into poverty over the last 20 years. There is no doubt they fight an uphill battle that is often unfair, but many of them may have simply given up the fight. This was the subject of "blogging heads" in the New York Times today. Yes, jobs have left, but people aren't moving on and seeking other jobs -- they're just giving up.

This is bad news. Public Health doesn't subscribe to the "bad people" theory of events, and looks instead for structural or system reasons why large numbers of people start or stop doing something, or all get sick, or all get obese, or all get depressed.

Whatever is going on with blacks is very likely to be continued by middle class whites soon, and we need to figure out what to do, before we all become Pimas.

While people experience depression at an individual level, there is also depression and inability to cope at cultural and social levels. The "cheese has moved."

We need to investigate how the cultures that "get up again" do that. Or like the MIT freshmen, we'll simply drop out entirely.

The "War on Terror" masks one basic fact. The US was attacked and lost a few buildings and 3000 lives. In any war, a single bomber produces that much damage. London took that much damage in a day and didn't blink during World War II.

Yet, the US has gone into some sort of anaphylactic shock, where a relatively tiny bee sting has caused a trillion dollars in collapse, thousands of times beyond the wildest dreams of those who attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's like we fell and pulled down the neighboring buildings on top off us, instead of getting back up.

I am concerned that a larger scale depression and frustration and sense of denial is at work here, and think we need to examine how we are coping with no longer being number one in the universe. Closing factors hit, but don't explain why blacks aren't getting back up. Terrorist attacks don't explain why the US isn't getting back up.

Something else is going on here. If we want to get Michigan, and the US back on their feet, we need to figure out what that is and address the root-causes of not getting back up, not the excuses for falling.

New York City Schools get graded

Today the New York City School systems are getting done to them what all our schools been doing to students - ranking them and assigning grades -- and they don't like it one bit.

I've posted before on how some things, like the "magic dice", have no "best" and cannot be put into some kind of rank-order.

The New York Times today has an article "Schools brace to be graded" that runs into this problem head-on and is producing a great deal of social conflict.

The point is an important one and I want to mention it again. I keep on seeing cases where people, absolutely sure that there must be some way to do this, valiantly try new and more complicated ways to "get it right" and rank something.

It is a dangerous concept and we need to grow up and get over it. It is a damaging concept. The whole idea is one of the pillars of intense competition between people, cultures, and nations and one of the ultimate causes of outright warfare - to be "best", to be "number one" - our people are killing themselves or going into deep depression over a quest that can never possibly be achieved because the idea is meaningless.

First they try one measure, which everyone knows is incomplete. Then they try a variety of different measures, which are also incomplete. Then, that's complex and confusing to have some high and some low scores, and they know nothing about "unity in diversity", so they try everything they can to "combine" all that information into a uniform single number or letter.

So, first they'll compute an average, then maybe a "weighted average", then something like the square root of the sum of the squares, then even more complex calculations that raise up so much dust that no one can figure out what they did, like the New York Schools, probably trying to be more "accurate" or possibly hoping that no one can challenge what they can't understand or explain.

But I challenge it, on fundamental grounds, that have nothing to do with how it was "computed" at all. It doesn't matter how it was computed - something as multidimensional and complex as a person or a school cannot be meaningfully reduced to a single number, period. The whole concept is flawed.

There is a direct analog in physics, which we can be confident is simpler than society and life as a whole. Scientists have a concept called "rank", but it is the nature of the beast that some set of measurements can be reduced to, and that is as far as you can reduce it.

So, yes, a few things can be reduced to "scalars", which are single numbers, like "temperature", that don't depend on context or what the observer is doing at the time.

Most physical things, however are more complex than that. The next more complex thing than a scalar is a "vector", which you may vaguely recall from school - a directed arrow kind of thingie, like "velocity". Velocity is different from speed, in that speed can be reduced to a number, like 85 miles per hour, but velocity includes a direction as well, such as "85 miles per hour heading due North." And, of course, physical things have those pesky "units" or "dimensions" that are somehow attached, so that talking about a number without units doesn't get the answer right.

So, most easy classical mechanics requires these "vectors" to write down the equations at all and solve them. You really can't even begin to solve the problems using just scalars, period.

That, however, is just the beginning of complexity. Scalars are the first of a long series of types of things called "tensors", and an be described with a single number. Vectors are the the next one up, described with "arrows", and cannot be reduced to single numbers, period.

Another example would be the torque you want to apply to something. You can't say you want a torque of "2", and skip the direction part. Clockwise or counter-clockwise? It matters a lot!!

The complex part cannot be left off just to make your math "simpler" or because you never felt like doing the work required to learn how to do the math correctly. It will not "come to you" -- you have to go to it.

Then there are things physicists deal with daily that cannot be reduced to vectors, even. An example is the "electromagnetic field". This field requires the next higher level tensor,. a second-dimensional one, to capture it correctly, which needs a matrix of numbers and rules for how it changes depending on where you stand and how you're looking at it.

If you use that math, it is actually relatively "easy" to describe in equations, and you get the "Maxwell equations", and can correctly figure out what's going on. If you don't use that math, you can't get answers that match reality and should stop trying.

Things get more complex than that fairly quickly. To describe gravity requires a mix of tensors up to a 4-dimensional thingie called the Riemann space-time curvature tensor.

Once you stop kicking and screaming in protest and accept that you have to use complex tensors, not scalars, and figure out how to do that, the equations suddenly get much easier, actually. It's like why scientists use metric not feet and pounds -- not because it's more sophisticated, but because it's easier.

Alfred Einstein stated that "All physical equations are tensor equations." That's it. You can't get away from this, if you believe Einstein.

And, the equation for space-time, in that formalism works out to this:

R= zero

Cool. Once you start putting mass and planets in there, it gets messy fast, but in a way you can manage with just careful bookkeeping. If you use tensors, you can write simple equations, and solve the problems. If you don't use tensors, and try to use scalars, forget it.

So, that's our social dilemma here. The description of people, schools, sports-teams, presidential candidates, etc. all require a level of math that we wish wasn't true, so we just go on pretending that we can say something meaningful without going to all that effort.

And, we end up assigning "grades" to students, then trying to aggregate different "grades" into single overall "grades" (grade point averages), and then trying to make meaningful decisions based on those single composite numbers, like rank students or schools -- and discover that we get absurd results.

Then, we punish those with "low scores" and apply pressure for them to "shape up" or "teach to the test", and have a mess on our hands.

The core problem here is that the physical objects we are trying to study - school systems -- are not intrinsic "scalars" but are probably at least level 3 or higher "tensors".

Actually physicists and mathematicians squabble over exactly what kind of complexity is required and whether it should be "tensors" or something else -- but they all would agree instantly that you can't reduce the world to a set of equations using just "scalars", like grades.

The first question we should have asked is "What is the smallest rank tensor we can use to meaningfully capture the complexity of this thingie?" and it would immediately be clear that scalar numbers ("grades") are too simplistic.

We don't like that answer, so we just go on doing the wrong thing, then we wonder why we have so much conflict, and why some well-loved schools end up getting low grades. Then we set social policy, public policy, and feedback based on those "grades".

Evaluate, yes. Try to reduce to single scores using the axe of some magical computation? NO!
New York City Schools

Feeling the power of the Lord

There is an external supply of organizational power and coping "energy" available to us, every day, that is way more than we come into the day with. I think too many people today are trying to drive on their starter engines, and running down their batteries, aside from not having much power for hills.

A standard "gasoline powered" car has two entirely different engine systems. One uses gasoline to store energy and has pistons and spark-plugs and can produce more power than 100 horses, sometimes much more. It can move the car 400 miles or more, and then needs to be "refilled" (at $3 a gallon).




The other engine system uses a "battery" to store energy, has a small electric motor, and can produce enough power to "turn over" the big engine and power the spark plugs and run the fuel pump long enough that the BIG engine "starts", at least on warm days when we didn't leave the interior lights on all night.

Then, a side job of the big engine, as it is running, is to recharge the small engine's battery for "next time."

Even jet planes that can cross the ocean generally use some guy with a small engine to come up and plug in to start up their huge turbine engines, that you can hear revving up to speed on electricity and then finally "catching" with a roar as the jet fuel takes over the job.

It actually is possible, at least on a car with manual transmission, to "drive on the starter engine", although it is really hard on that engine. If you're stuck on the railroad tracks in such a car, and you have time, you could put the car in first gear and just turn the key and the starter engine would move the car 30 feet or so before it would run out of power. Don't try it because it will probably require you get a new starter engine, and getting out of the car and running is usually faster and much safer, although it requires getting a new car.

Here's the problem, though. As a metaphor, today, people seem to have forgotten that there is a BIG engine in their cars, and everyone is trying to "drive on the starter engine" all day. Science, unhelpfully, teaches that you don't need a BIG engine to explain why a car can move. (It doesn't address whether such motion explains everything in society, and kind of punts on that question for now, until there is way more computing power)

But, we do see people running out of energy half way through their day. Call it "depression" or "Yuppie flu" or "chronic fatigue syndrome", and "treat" it with ever larger amounts of prescription drugs and caffeine, but it seems to be getting worse, nationally, at an alarming rate. It takes more an more people to "run" an organization, or nation, which produces less and less, even if it runs the people to exhaustion and discards them and gets a constant stream of new people as a business model.

That's what you get if you drive on the starter engine, or try to run you life on your own brain and body and mind. Some motion, then it runs out, and it's really hard on the car.

The alternative is captured in the slogan to the orphanage Boys Town, namely,

He's not heavy father, he's my brother!

There is an alternative power supply here, provided free, fully wireless, available to anyone who subscribes to it. There is a BIG engine you can tap into. That engine does not get tired before the end of the day. Even listening to the song of the same name boosts your energy.

The metaphysical religion model says, in my words, that the purpose of our own energy and free will is to be good starter engines, and every day get ourselves realigned with God and "plug into" the power of God's love to motivate, guide, and empower our actions all day.

The result, if done correctly, is to end up the day tired in some ways, but flush with overflowing success and filled with more energy than at the start of the day.

We're leaves of the tree, and our energy needs to be used to twist and turn ourselves in prayer until we capture the external sunlight fully, which will cause things to happen, energy to appear as if it came "out of the light", recharging us and powering the tree, as well as the flow systems the tree has to make us bigger and healthier and stronger.

If we notice we are running low on energy, the wrong thing to do is to curl into a tight roll and try to "conserve" what we have. That will never work.

Yet those who wait for the LORD Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.
(NAS Bible, Isaiah 40:31).

The tragedy of our day is that science is so busy trying to prove that God doesn't exist that it has few resources left over that can be turned to looking at why some people manage to get plugged into this power source and spend their days inspired, and how the rest of us can tap into that.

I think their problem is that they are looking for "the power within" and, well, it's not inside the box, it's outside the box. And, it's not there all the time, but requires a rather nuanced alignment and entrainment action on the part of our "receiver" so we pick up the energy beam and respond to it in a phase-lock loop. It's kind of like the submarine communication systems that starts with a low-power broad beam laser looking for a satellite, and when it finds it suddenly focuses the laser on an intense pulse mode exactly at the target so none is lose to the sides.

If you take it into the lab, there is no wire, no loop, no energy being transferred, nothing to see here. The problem is the "taking it into the lab" step. But if you go out and look at some people in action, inspired by the Spirit, you can only gasp in awe.

What we need help with is the alignment step, this "prayer" thing and "submission" thing doesn't always work very well, and we "fall off" the wagon.

I replaced the starter engine of my car today
Uploaded by Michiel2005 on Flickr.
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The benefits of depression - on a social scale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Depression and social factors

The USA seems to be the world leader in both incidence and prevalence of major depression, and if anything, the rate is increasing.

In an Op-ED piece in today's New York Times, "Our Great Depression", Andrew Solomon argues that "We need a network of depression centers, much like the cancer centers established in the 1970s." He says:

DEPRESSION is the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. It costs more in treatment and lost productivity than anything but heart disease. Suicide is the 11th most common cause of death in the United States, claiming 30,000 lives each year...

Following this model, the National Institute of Mental Health should coordinate and subsidize a national network of depression centers, ideally based at research universities with good hospitals and departments devoted to the subject.

The University of Michigan, host to the country’s first national depression center, which opened its doors last month, has been a pioneer in this regard. More than 135 experts on depression and bipolar disorder will collaborate there, about half of them psychiatrists. The center has a large clinical treatment program and a genetic database that will house samples from tens of thousands of depressed and bipolar patients. It is sponsoring social and biological research and pressing for policy initiatives related to mental illness.

And finally adds "(Full disclosure: my father is the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that manufactures antidepressants.)" His facts may be correct, but he is not an unbiased observer. And, the U of Michigan depression center certainly supports Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as much it supports pharmaceutical "solutions," so it is not just a thinly-disguised retail outlet for the largest company in Ann Arbor, Pfizer.

Still, while it is clear that "psychosocial factors" such as depression, isolation, and social support have a dramatic predictive value on the outcomes of "medical" disorders, such as cardiovascular disease, it is less clear to what extent depression is itself largely predicted by, or in some causal loop with these other social factors.

(See "Depression, Isolation, Social Support, and Cardiovascular Disease in Older Adults" by Heather M. Arthur, Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, Vob 21, No. 55, pp S2-S7 for some links into the literature on the former subject.)

A different viewpoint can be found in literature off the continent, that is less supported by the pharmaceutical industry. Here's an example from the National Medical Journal of India
2006 Jul-Aug;19(4):218-20.

The cultures of depression.

Jacob, KS

Department of Psychiatry, Christian Medical College, Vellore 632002, Tamil Nadu, India. ksjacob@cmcvellore.ac.in

Diverse frameworks, models and 'cultures' of depression have been postulated and promoted by psychiatrists, the pharmaceutical industry, general practitioners, primary care psychiatrists and the general population.

Psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry endorse the medical model while general practitioners and the public subscribe to social and psychological frameworks. [emphasis added]

These models are partial truths and should be viewed as complementary rather than competitive, some more valid in a specific context than others. The issues that need to be resolved include: (i) reexamination of the validity of the psychiatric diagnosis of depression in the primary care context; (ii) a review of the adequacy of a single label of depression to describe the diverse human context of distress; (iii) acknowledging the problems of using a symptom checklist in diagnosing depression; (iv) recognizing the need for psychosocial diagnostic formulations which clearly state the context, personality factors, acute and chronic stress and coping; (iv) highlighting the fact that antidepressant medication should be reserved for severe forms of distress; (v) re-emphasizing the need to manage stress and alter coping strategies in the treatment of people with such presentations; (vi) de-emphasizing medicalization of all forms of personal and social distress; (vii) focusing on other underlying causes of human misery including poverty, unmet needs and lack of rights. Clinically, there is a need to look beyond symptoms and explore personality, life events, situational difficulties and coping strategies in order to comprehensively evaluate the role of vulnerability, personality factors and stress in the causation of depression.

Possibly, however, we have simply run into the largest single reason to be considering systems thinking - namely, the occurrence of feedback in models of causation.

Standard statistical techniques are fine at dealing with open-loop causality, where A "causes" B, or B causes A, and there is a clearly defined start and end point. The General Linear Model covers that reasonably nicely.

But, as soon as you close that loop, so that A causes B which in turn causes A, that model breaks down. This behavior (a feedback loop) is very common in engineering, and no big deal, but it remains not only perplexing, but almost heretical in the epidemiological community. Even the mention of "psychosocial factors" for medical disorders causes tempers to flare and voices to be raised. The battles go on between arguments such as "bullets cause death" versus "guns cause death" versus "angry people who just happen to have guns at hand cause death" versus "bad economic and political situations cause massive unemployement and unhappiness and anger, which ultimately express themselves in gunshots which cause death."

Still, it seems a reasonable hypothesis to me that social factors, such as isolation and loneliness and lack of social support, result in depression; and, then that depression results in further actions or non-actions that increase isolation and lack of support; and, etc. in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.

This is "hard to study" in the sense that people don't have desktop software that lets them compute such things as a "p-value" to distinguish whether they are being too credible, or not credible enough when looking at this possible causal loop to explain observational data.

The lack of such software is, of course, precisely the type of gap that the R21 research request for proposals I mentioned in earlier posts is designed to address. (I'm available to work on such a project if there are others also interested in a joint proposal.)

Why does this matter? It matters because it can completely change the interventions required to address the problem. If depression is largely an internal phenomenon, caused by genetics and bad wiring in the brain, that leads to one type of intervention - drugs and CBT. If depression is largely a social phenomenon, related to the well-documented collapse in social interaction documented by Putnam and the group at Duke, then personal intervention will simply deal with symptoms, and result in an ever growing prevalence of drug-dependent victims of social dysfunction - precisely the observation we find about the USA today.

In the latter case, what we need to address is why people are losing the ability to make friends, to keep friends, and to be a friend -- because it is that low-level breakdown that is emerging on a national scale as an epidemic of "depression."

=============
The Duke study is "Social Isolation in America: Changes in core discussion networks over two decades" by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew E. Brashears, American Sociological Reviews , (2006), vol 71, June (p 353-375)

Putnam's famous book is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam (New York , Simon and Schuster, 2000).
As that site says,

In a groundbreaking book based on vast new data, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures-- and how we may reconnect.

Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities. Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues. Putnam shows how changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women's roles and other factors have contributed to this decline.

( originally published 11/16/06 on cscwteam.blogspot.com)

Solitude

If each step carries you further away,
you will never arrive at home.




[ originally posted 10/4/06 on cscwteam.blogspot.com ]

Who will lead Michigan out of economic wilderness?

"If not our big prestigious universities, who will step forward to lead Michigan's complacent people and hapless politicians out of the economic wilderness?" asks Tom Walsh in today's Free Press. [emphasis added]

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

TOM WALSH
Who should shake state out of rut?
October 16, 2007
BY TOM WALSH
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Michigan has no excuse for not being a thriving leader in the knowledge-based, environmentally conscious global economy of the future.... But we're lazy. Complacent. We have a sense of entitlement and no sense of urgency.

Watching the levees break
...
"Our" Hurricane "Katrina has been out on the horizon for a generation, and we just watched it come," said Rick Snyder, CEO of venture capital firm Ardesta in Ann Arbor, and former president of computer maker Gateway Inc.

Culture, Snyder said, "is our biggest problem." Michigan's tremendous industrial success through much of the 20th Century left many of its people with a sense of complacency and entitlement, an assumption that good jobs and wealth always would be available. And even though the impact of automation and global competition has been evident for several decades now, Michigan's response has been tepid, he said.

Snyder said the state's political leaders, as is clear from the recent budget battle and tax hikes, have shown virtually no leadership to help pull Michigan out of its no-growth economic stagnation of the past seven years.

Therefore, Snyder said, it's important that the state's major universities show economic leadership by boosting their community involvement.

Are Michigan's major universities ready... to take bold, sometimes controversial positions on issues in those many areas where business and economics meet public policy?

If not our big prestigious universities, who will step forward to lead Michigan's complacent people and hapless politicians out of the economic wilderness?

Contact TOM WALSH at 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com.

How does that help me? - Average American

"They complained in the East,
They are paying too high.
They say that your ore ain't worth digging.
That it's much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing...

"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

( photo credit: spoon )

So, The New York Times had a story "Couple learn the high price of credit" by John Leland about a typical family in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and a graph of the personal savings rate of the average American. Like most of the other economic indicators, the back broke in about 1982 and it's just been plummeting ever since. The big news is that 2 years ago the rate crossed zero, and now we have a graph where the "average savings rate" of Americans is negative. I asked in economics once what that meant, and the professor said it was "dissavings." I asked again, what if the family has no savings left? Then what does it represent? He stared at me blankly, as if this concept was absurd, and went on.

The last time the personal savings rate was negative was in 1933. (Source EBRI Databook, US Department of Commerce.) The blue line on the chart is the personal savings rate, as a percentage of disposable income. The chart goes from 1930 to 2007. It is clear that whatever is going on is structural, a consistent pattern over 75 years, not just some blip that will turn around next year.



The dismal point this graph makes is that the economic pain, and the mental, medical, and social problems that this pain brings, is not going to go away anytime soon and, in fact, will probably get worse over the forseeable future.

For a serious structural trend, we'd expect to see this not just in personal data, but in national level data. What's that look like?

A similar story is in "Measuring the Moment - Innovation, National Security, and Economic Competitiveness" (Nov 2006).

US Trade Deficit (From BEA, quoted at invisibleheart. "Does the Trade Deficit Destroy American Jobs, Russell Roberts, George Mason University, Nov 2006.)



The left scale goes from +100 million per year to -900 million per year and the time from 1960 to 2005. Again, the whole picture changed about 1982, and the overall trend is accelerating downward into debt as a whole nation.

As a whole nation, we're buying way more than we can afford to pay for, and it's not getting better - in fact, it seems to be getting worse.


This raises an hypothesis that doesn't seem to be discussed much in public health - that the reason the US health care bill is skyrocketing is not only because the charges per unit of care are going up, but because we are, frankly, as a nation, getting sicker.

That is a crucial distinction, because it means that the major problem we have is not really getting more insurance to pay for damage repair, or lowering the cost per repair job.

The real problem facing public health, as we trek upstream to see where this problem is coming from, is "Why are the American people getting sicker and how can we prevent that and reverse that trend, on a personal, local, state, regional, and national level, simultaneously?" Blaming doctors or hospitals or drug companies won't fix this. Pitting individuals against corporations won't fix this. Blaming China or Japan won't fix this. It's deeper.

Part of the problem, in my model, is that so many people in corporations think that the problem is one of dividing the pie between "consumers" and "corporations", or between managment and labor, or between the rich and the poor. I don't think that's the problem at all, although it certainly is a source of conflict.

The problem is that the pie is shrinking, in any real measure. The wind has gone out of the sails of the American dream. We've lost a positive direction and now are on the decline curve instead. Squabbling over who gets the remaining food in the cupboard won't address the larger question, which I want to look at.

The key question is where does the pie come from in the first place. What creates wealth, and why isn't it working any more?

I'd say the universe (or Universe) clearly supports a wonderful overall design, whether accidental or intentional, for the hierarchy of life to evolve in ever more ways, at least on large scales and long timeframes -- but something seems to be interfering with out ability to ride that tide right now, on every level.

Surrounded by opportunity, we are failing to thrive. Surrounded by water, we are dying of thirst. With more computing power on our desktop than the entire planet had 50 years ago, we are unable to solve even basic problems of getting along and making things work. So, maybe, more technology is not the answer. We don't use 1% of what we have now.

I'm not sure where "the tracks" are, but I am pretty sure that our train has left them.

We have a "failure to thrive" problem here, a global depression that has gripped us on multiple levels simultaneously, causing despair and self-destructive behaviors on all scales.
By all our models and insights, what we're doing "should" work, but it clearly doesn't. That suggests that one of our basic, cherished assumptions is wrong.

And, it's not only wrong, but it's blinded us to a reality that is all around us, but we're incapable of perceiving it -- the myth is so strong that it squelches out all contrary evidence. The myth, after all, in my model, is itself alive and seeking to survive, and doing a good job of it.

Which myth? Which assumption?

Well, my model suggests that our concept of "individuality" is seriously wrong. We do not exist independently of the world around us, but are actually dependent on the world around us to survive and, in fact, we are an inseparable part of the world around us.

This is one of those ideas that varies by what size the observer is.

Darwin and others observed that individuals battled and the fittest survived, and perceived that as a global truth and a model for how humans, corporations, and nations should treat each other, basically saying "It's us or them, Jake, and there ain't room on this planet for both of us!"

However, that's poor observing, because the competition is really only local. On a larger scale, the wolf species and the deer species get along just fine. The wolves kill off the weakest deer, which, net, strengthens the deer herd. On the scale of many years and the size of species, deer and wolves cooperate and get along and help form a stable ecosystem.

That's the part of the model that seems to have gotten lost, as we try to make both corporate America and international America a one-horse show, take no prisoners. I think most CEO"s spend more time building alliances than they do attacking enemies, and many of them would rather get along and play golf than compete fiercely in a winner-take-all contest.

It may be hard to grasp at the corporate level, but the survival of corporations depends on the survival of the people who make them up. And, judging from the charts and graphs above, the people are getting very near running out of steam here.

It's not Al Qaida that's destroying us, it's our concept that the only way to structure life is as a competition, between nations, between cultures, between corporations, and between corporations and the people who make them up, unaffectionately known as "labor."

Because of the interlocking feedback loops and distant effects, there are indeed two choices - there's "win-win" and "lose-lose." Corporations, individuals, and public health can figure out how to co-exist and thrive together, which is a thought starting to emerge at the Ross School of Management, or they can go on fighting with the results shown above., and the population dying of obesity, diabetes, asthma, stress, and rampant infections.

Competition is not an "invariant". A single counter example can prove that, and here it is: The cells in our body do not spend all day with each one trying to be the "king cell" that rules all the others. They manage to cooperate, and thrive.

It's a good model. We should consider it. It's a model that does scale up, and then no one has to lose -- except the purveyors of the old myth that someone has to lose.

"Economic competitiveness" is the wrong term touse. "Ability to thrive while allowing others to thrive as well" or "jointly thriving" are better terms. Failure to thrive is a problem of the spirit, of our interest in and willingness to work together to ride the available tide of innovation, growth, and life that is all around us.

I'm unabashedly a Baha'i, and the Baha'i's believe in "spiritual solutions to economic problems"
which that link can explain better. This means, in my mind, more that the answer is in greater willingness to stop fighting and cooperate than in simply praying that things should get better while continuing our daily habits that make them worse.

A strong dose of humility can get thrown in as well, which doesn't mean walking around glum, but does mean not thinking we know it all without at least checking around first for contrary evidence, for any sign that maybe our model is wrong. As Karl Weick has pointed out in secular high-reliability organization literature, that kind of "mindfulness" doesn't come easy, but brings great rewards when it can be achieved.

Here's a tiny look at how drenched we are in this concept. People laugh at guys who would drive around for hours rather than stop and ask for directions -- although if it's a pilot and not asking directions results in using the wrong runway, this is no longer funny. Today, many families, like the one described by the Times article, are in deep debt and at risk of losing their house. Yet, if I were to suggest to them that maybe two familes could live in one house and share the mortgage costs, they'd think I was crazy.

Why is that, exactly? People would rather get lost than ask for directions? People would rather lose their home than share it with others, who, apparently, they think they would surely hate?
I'm glad I don't like ice cream because, if I liked it, I might eat it, and I hate it?

This idea that each family should have their own home and car has co-evolved with the idea that the purpose of money is so we don't have to learn how to get along with each other.

Now that the money has gone away, maybe we should revisit the idea of getting along with each other, instead of losing our homes. THAT's what I mean a "spiritual" solution - one that simply requires a change in heart, and suddenly, a new door opens where there was just disaster before.

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

If we reframe an intractible "technical" problem as a "spiritual" problem, it can reveal a hidden solution.

Here's an example. I worked in a lab once where we had special glass vials we needed to do our tests. The supplier was back-ordered over 3 months and we ran out and were stopped cold. So, this was clearly a "technical problem." Then I found out that there were crates of these vials 40 feet away in the next lab down the hallway. But, we weren't allowed to use those, because that researcher had a long-standing gripe with out lab's boss over some incident 10 years prior, and they weren't on talking terms.

The point is, solving the underlying spiritual problem of lack of reconciliation of these two researchers was an alternative way to get our lab functioning again.

This is not an isolated case. In fact, when you think about it, there are many "techical" and "economic" problems in our own lives that would go away if we addressed some interpersonal spiritual issues that are in the way. I hate to think of what fraction of corporate and national resources are spent trying to make it possible for us to avoid facing our broken personal relationships and dysfunctional organizations.

What brought this to mind this morning was an article in the New York Times on new $400 antennas that increase your cell phone's reception.

Coaxing More Bars Out of That Cellphone
New York Times
March 1, 2007

Garbled conversations and dropped calls are the bane of cellphone users — not to mention the dead zones where calls cannot go through to begin with. But some recent products are designed to overcome these annoyances, improve cellular reception, and, in some cases, even extend coverage....

So, probably, if everyone spent an additional $400, we could get better reception. That would be the "technical solution."

Take a minute before rushing on and consider what a "spiritual solution" would be. Hint - it would involve cooperation instead of fragmentation between people, with each person trying to reinvent the wheel on their own.

Here's another clue. Glance at my prior post
One laptop per child - grid computing for the poor.

The New York Times covered this yesterday (november 30,2006) in an article "For $150, Third world laptop stirs a Big Debate" by John Markoff. Compare to "Microsoft would put Poor Online by Cellphone", also by John Markoff, Jan 30, 2006.

According to Markoff's article yesterday "Five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — have made tentative commitments to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production in Taiwan expected to begin by mid-2007." Much of the rest of the article deals with pricing, technology, and competing views about the impact of this computer on education.

That misses the most important aspect of this, in my mind, which Markoff mentions near the end of the piece:

One factor setting the project apart from earlier efforts to create inexpensive computers for education is the inclusion of a wireless network capability in each machine.

The project leaders say they will employ a variety of methods for connecting to the Internet, depending on local conditions. In some countries, like Libya, satellite downlinks will be used. In others, like Nigeria, the existing cellular data network will provide connections, and in some places specially designed long-range Wi-Fi antennas will extend the wireless Internet to rural areas.

When students take their computers home after school, each machine will stay connected wirelessly to its neighbors in a self-assembling “mesh” at ranges up to a third of a mile. In the process each computer can potentially become an Internet repeater, allowing the Internet to flow out into communities that have not previously had access to it.

The distinction between "computers" and "cell phones" has become almost irrelevant these days, so what does this suggest.

It suggests that a different way of connecting cell-phones to the national grid would be to have them able to self-assemble a communications grid, in real-time, borrowing a little spare capacity from any other phone or computer in the neighborhood.

In other words, I don't really need my phone to be in line-of-sight to a cell-phone tower if the phones cooperate and silently set up their own relay chain behind the scenes. My phone can talk to my upstairs neighbor, which talks to the phone 2 floors above that, all the way to the top of the building, where someone's phone can talk to another distant building's phones which in turn are in line of sight of the cell-phone tower on the other side of the mountain. Voila, I have a path for my call.

We don't need new $400 antennas for each cell phone - we only need the existing cell phones to talk to each other.

Aside from finding a clear path, the phones could also automatically deliver much more power. This is the sort of thing that radio astronomers use, to connect 20 different radio antenna "dishes" across the world into a single virtual antenna that can be "virtually" pointed directly at the target, delivering thousands of times the effective power because it all goes the right direction instead of off into space.

The downside is that different phones and phone systems and even people would have to be willing to let "their" phone participate as part of a larger social grid. The upside is that this would work even in some Katrina type disaster, and auto-assemble a pathway from the existing phones to a cell-tower or satellite that could relay calls out of the disaster area.

The changes are essentially all in software and procedures. Probably this could be done with existing phones today, if we, collectively, decided that's what we wanted to do.

Without a single new cell-phone tower, or a single dollar being spent for new hardware or phones, everyone in the country could get 100 times better service.

There are no "technical" reasons we couldn't do that.
There are only "spiritual" reasons we put up with that make us dysfunctional.

This kind of problem is very widespread, especially in the USA today, where cooperation and collaboration seem to have gone the way of the phonograph in many places. We're all working overtime, way more hours than any other country, trying to make the payments on purely technical solutions that we mistakenly think we need to solve our issues.

Quoting my earlier post, looking at the chaos caused by lack of communications following Katrina in New Orleans,

By W. David Stephenson International Conference on Complex Systems June 26, 2006

So we know that emergent behavior is possible even under the trying circumstances of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

... Equally important but less understood by decision makers, unlike landline phones or the broadcast media, these devices are themselves increasing networked, self-organizing, and self-healing. In many cases, such as mesh networks that were originally developed for the military in battlefield conditions and now are being used by civilians, the networks don't require any kind of external networking: simply turn them on and the network self organizes.

I am convinced that such a networked homeland security strategy is feasible today, using existing technology and requiring much less time to create and deploy than some of the costly, dedicated emergency communications systems government is creating. Equally important, by facilitating those three qualities needed in a crisis: flexibility, robustness, and self-organizing, it could transform the general public from hopeless victims, waiting for aid that may never come, into self-reliant components of the overall response. To paraphrase Dr. King, which will it be, chaos, or community? [emphasis added]

On a larger scale, communications is just one problem we saw in New Orleans. Tens of thousands of cars left the city with one passenger, while a hundred thousand people were stranded without transportation. Food and water were hoarded not shared.

One explicit principle of the Baha'i faith is where this line of thinking ends up, and it's a lesson
that Michigan and the USA need to pay attention to. The economic downturns can be viewed
as "technical" problems, yes, but that hides the much closer, much cheaper solutions, that don't
require new technology.

PRINCIPLES OF THE BAHÁ'Í FAITH

#10 -
A spiritual solution to the economic problem.



I'm reminded of the monkey traps used in some countries. A cocoanut has a hole cut into the side, just large enough for a monkey's paw to fit into it. Then the cocoanut is chained to the ground, and some delicious nuts put inside it. Then we wait. The monkey comes along, smells the nuts, reaches in, grabs a handful, and then can't get it's overstuffed hand back out the hole. At that point people can just walk over and drop a net on the monkey, who will refuse to let go of the nuts that are "so close."

Americans have this fixation on having to fix everything with individual solutions - everyone has to have their own car, their own house, their own everything -- and even the phones or computer lines, if not being used, can't be shared with others for a whole variety of invented "legal" reasons.

There's a lesson here. In our case, it's not some guy with a net coming after us, it's the entire economy going south on us, loss of jobs, etc. Within each company, there's a collapse of innovation, all to protect this competitive concept and a myth of rugged individualism, that probably was never true. Like our SUV's that dress like they're going off-road, but never do, we have these attitudes that dress like we don't need anyone else to survive, but we do.

If we admitted that, and went from there, most of the rest of these problems could be solved. It's like everyone is trying to be the most fanatastic word or note in the universe, and forgetting that great books and great music need lots of different words and notes to work.

We need each other. We don't need more technology to make up for our lack of friends. We need to help each other learn how to make friends again. It seems to be a lost art for at least one in five people in the USA today. We should fix that, then see how much "depression" is left.