OK, seriously, WHY didn't we see it coming?

"OK, enough! This tree has got to go!"

My comment in response to Paul Krugman's NY Times column today, "Lest We Forget".
========================================

Your question is superb - How did those at the top not see this coming, or take it seriously, despite many stifled voices below pointing at it in alarm?

Yes, if financial things broke on this shoal, fix the financial things.

But, at the same time, this shoal has got to go, or it will just demolish the repair effort in a never-ending cycle of "How did that happen? Fix and forget."

This exact problem is well known and well documented by everyone, across industries, government agencies, auto companies, universities, etc. This process is ALSO broken, and needs to be addressed, by as many billion dollars as spent repairing the damage it caused.

Social decision making processes are no more abstract than financial markets, but get no respect, being in a higher leverage, further upstream, less visible place in the chain of events.

High-reliability human systems have been studied extensively, from Chernobyl to The Bay of Pigs to Challenger to aircraft cockpit teams to hospital surgical teams to the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The answer always comes down to the same thing -- dissenting views need to be heard, and dissenters need what Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson calls "Psychological Safety" or they will wilt and become ineffective. This is how humans always behave and unless steps are taken it always breaks along this fault line.

The right question then should be, who is going to take charge of seeing that those steps are taken and that level of social literacy achieved?

I can't emphasize enough how much more important this is than more math and science, in the absence of this. As T.S. Eliot said, we repeatedly get burned "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, but the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be."

Much of my weblog is about what we really need to do to avoid such errors in judgment. I can only hope the right person wakes up and reads it and the links to sources such as MIT's papers or John Sterman's work on how poorly we can see systems that involve feedback.

"Why we have so much trouble seeing" (and what to do about it.)
http://newbricks.blogspot.com...

(photo by myself - "Fixed at last!" )

Clergy take on US Mortgage Mess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Precisely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

and

If men do not build
How shall they live?

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

photo credit: I35W bridge collapse photo from Poppyseed Bandits

PISA - OECD Programme for International Student Assessment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not.
Summary so far:

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer is over there, I think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We never talk anymore

Actually, it's not that we never talk anymore, it's that we never ever learned how to talk in the first place.

Like the old tale of the blind men stumbling into an elephant and arguing that it is "like a rope" or "like a tree" or "like a huge leaf", the whole planet is stumbling into new territory without a way to compare notes and rise above voting whether the elephant is "a tree" or not, based on a 51% cutoff of votes.

There is, indeed, a "unity" higher than the "diversity" of views, that is not reached by everyone giving in to the majority view.

The New York Times had an op-ed piece on global warming, with 120 or so comments. Nicholas Kristoff had a piece, Nov 13, 2007, "Avoiding Climate Change: Why Americans Prevaricate and Delay on Taking Action." I read all the comments carefully, then posted this reply:

I think Abraham Lincoln once said that if he had ten minutes to chop down a tree he'd spend the first five sharpening the axe.

For all our high-tech at assembling machine parts and getting them to work together, we are in the dark ages at assembling each other's views of knowledge and coming up with a Big Picture we can all trust.

Sequentially speaking our own views is fascinating, but underpowered, and isn't leading to an informed consensus that has transparency and improves with time. Instead we're still back at trying to find the 51% of the votes to suppress the other 49% of us.

Lots of people want to "educate" me, but fewer want to listen to what I'm trying to say in return.

I agree we need research, but before we research some scientific thing, let's get serious work at how to compare notes, get past hysteria, and figure out which way is actually up -- in general, not just about one issue like climate change.

Sure, it's important. So is poverty. So is pollution. So are governance and human values. So are all sorts of public health issues. So are tyranny and exploitation.

We need better ways to pool notes and educate each other that we can trust, that work in 6 months not 3 generations to bring everyone up to speed on what's going on and why, or what we don't know. Something with enough credibility and transparency that even skeptics are willing to come and participate.

That seems to me what's broken or missing here. Without it, it seems we'll just go on forever disagreeing and shouting and never coming up with solutions to anything that are sustainable.

Our process for getting together and combining views of the elephant is broken, or never existed, but, either way, we need to work on that before we simply go on trying to use a broken process to argue in ever shriller and louder voices that our own views and facts have some validity too.

The complex problems will not reduce themselves to "trees" or "leaves" because those are what we understand easily. We need to figure out how to understand "elephant", which means all of us are wrong, or more precisely, right-but-incomplete.

Maybe social networking technology or Wiki's can help. Like a huge space frame used to reassemble fragments of exploded aircraft parts, we need some way to put all these small parts into a huge 3-D space where they can be compared to other parts and let the larger picture emerge.

That's the kind of thing that scientific peer-review is supposed to do, but the issues these days involve huge social issues, feedback, and interdependencies of the type that Science, sadly, hasn't really gotten to yet. Many of these issues do not lend themselves to being measured by numbers (or, as I've discussed, by "scalars" or single numbers that are rankable.)

Electing people who consolidate 51% of the views and squash the other 49% in order to "make progress" doesn't look to me like a viable solution. It doesn't matter that everyone "agree" the elephant is a "tree", if it's wrong.

It's the unity ABOVE diversity we need, not stronger or more strident voices for trees or leaves or ropes. We need to figure out a civilized way to respect each other and consult with each other and learn surprising things from each other without having to "win" the discussion.

And, it's a multi-level world. There are needs at different scales, not just different places. It's not OK if public health tries to solve needs of individuals and neglects needs of corporations, shocking as that seems. It's not ok to solve needs of corporations at the expense of individuals or nations. It's not sufficient to solve people and corporations at the expense of the nation or the planet's biosphere. It's not an "OR" equation ... it's an "AND" equation.

And it's not OK to solve the problems of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, or the problems of the US at the expense of everyone else -- not for moral reasons, however valid, but because in the end the morality is trying to tell us that we only have one lifeboat here, and all our problems are tangled together. We have to fix all the holes in the lifeboat, not just those at our end, or it will still sink. Either the planet has a functioning biosphere or it doesn't, whatever it is that depends on or doesn't. At some point the damage we're doing matters, and it would be really good to know for sure where that point is, or was.

The complexity is more than you or I or any human can grapple with, as individuals. It is not more than we can deal with as the multi-level planetary sized organized thingie that we are. Large groups of people can deal with massive amounts of detail complexity, but what we're dying on here is the other kind of complexity, interactional complexity. It's not just "more of the same", more details than we can track ... it's a more complex shape and interaction called "elephant", not just more trees than we can count.

Large groups can synthesize emergent understanding of that kind of complexity, the same way termites, individually with barely a neuron to work with, can build nests with advanced air-conditioning features built in. But we need to realize that's the problem we're up against so we focus more social energy on it.

Wade