Racism, prejudice, and unity in diversity worldwide

working together
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"Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy."

October 22, 2007
New York Times

Editorial (Excerpts)

Ain’t That America

Think of America’s greatest historical shames. Most have involved the singling out of groups of people for abuse. Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy.

We are heading down this road again. The country needs to have a working immigration policy, one that corresponds to economic realities and is based on good sense and fairness. But it doesn’t. It has federal inertia and a rising immigrant tide, and a national mood of frustration and anxiety that is slipping, as it has so many times before, into hatred and fear. Hostility for illegal immigrants falls disproportionately on an entire population of people, documented or not, who speak Spanish and are working-class or poor. By blinding the country to solutions, it has harmed us all.

The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It’s in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It’s on talk radio and blogs. It’s on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions. And it can be heard nearly every night on CNN, in the nativist drumming of Lou Dobbs, for whom immigration is an obsessive cause.

In New York, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed allowing illegal immigrants to earn driver’s licenses. It is a good, practical idea, designed to replace anonymous drivers with registered competent ones. In show after show, Mr. Dobbs has trained his biggest guns on Mr. Spitzer, branding him with puerile epithets like “spoiled, rich-kid brat” and depicting his policy as some sort of sanctuary program for the 9/11 hijackers. Someday there may be a calm debate, in Albany and nationally, about immigrant drivers. But with Mr. Dobbs at the megaphone, for now there is only histrionics and outrage.

[ what might be done? ...]

C. Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.

And so here we are at C. It’s a policy that can’t work; it’s too small-bore, too petty, too narrow. And all the while it’s not working, it can only lead to the festering of hate. Americans are a practical and generous people, with a tolerant streak a mile wide. But there is a combustible strain of nativism in this country, and it takes only a handful of match tossers to ignite it.

The new demagogues are united in their zeal to uproot the illegal population. They do not discriminate between criminals and the much larger group of ambitious strivers. They champion misguided policies, like a mythically airtight border fence and a reckless campaign of home invasions. And they summon the worst of America’s past by treating a hidden group of vulnerable people as an enemy to be hated and vanquished, not as part of a problem to be managed.

Comment -

In economic hard times, it is all too common to focus on those getting the jobs that are left, not on those who set what policies in place that led to us having so few jobs in the first place. It's closer and easier to stereotype and rally around.

Historically, this has often led to hatred against precisely the latest group of people we just attracted and imported, or even "Shanghai-ed" and virtually enslaved, to do dirty work at low pay that no one else wanted to do. Many groups have held this spot - Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Irish, Chinese railroad workers in the mid 1800's, Italians (Sacco and Vanzetti), and currently it seems to be "Hispanic-surnamed" that have become the focus of hatred and blame for economic hard times and pain and frustration and job losses that they had nothing to do with creating.

It seems it's not enough that they are subjected to working conditions in migrant labor or meat-packing that are nightmares, (Like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle) but then we have to get angry at them for having taken on such work in the first place and done it for us and in our name.

I think the actual causal loop that slowly deepens is this: first some random group of powerless people is exploited, then we can't live with ourselves and the fact of our being exploiters of decent human beings, so we solve that by "dehumanizing" the group we're currently exploiting which lessens the pain and justifies the sub-minimum wage, which makes them easier to exploit if not actually "deserving" of being exploited to "get even" with them for some never-named crime.

It is a feedback loop where our own guilt and actions lead to beliefs which lead to actions in a downward spiral - driven by a mistaken attempt of our own minds to reduce the conflict between our actions and our self-image as being "good decent people" who would never harm innocent people.

A generation later we snap out of this hypnotic trance, and can't figure out why we thought that particular group of people were "bad" when it now is obvious they aren't ... it's this OTHER group of people who are now "obviously bad."

So a few cases of "bad people" are magnified and echoed by TV and media until we think these represent the norm, and that all "those people" are "that way" - whatever it is this time. It seems to take a generation or longer to undo the damage caused by these successive waves of hatred-as-national-policy - a sort of "genocide-lite".

But so long as attention focuses on some target of choice, it distracts us from getting back upstream to the root-cause problem, and fixing it. We should be asking "Why are there so few jobs left?" and one that is so common we don't even ask it "Why do I and my wife have to work three or four jobs when my grandparents could make do and get by on just one?"

Put another way - "Why is my life going downhill when the TV says things are getting better? Who can I blame for this? It must be someone's fault!"

Well, it's not the fault of other people who are in the same boat as you, for starters.

There are two larger forces at work here. First, a basic law of economics or pressure of any kind - in an open world, "real wages" will tend to even out around the globe. It it is as easy to order a widget to be made in Thailand as next door, and they charge much less abroad, money will flow to Thailand, raising their average wage and standard of living, and lowering ours. That's huge and dominates what's going on around us and has been going on for the past 50 years.

Globalization and arrangements like NAFTA may speed it up, but it will happen regardless, one way or another. The pressure just finds some way to leak out and equalize.

So one fact of life we can count on is that Asian standards of living will go up, and our own standards of living in the USA will go down, regardless what policies we follow, unless we figure out how to make the "pie keep growing." Lately, this shows up as wages and bank accounts grow by 2 percent a year, and the global purchasing value of the dollar falls by 8 percent a year - we earn slightly more, viewed locally, but it and our pension savings are all worth a lot less so we can afford to buy fewer things for even more money.

The only escape clause is if we can make the "pie keep growing." We'll get back to that.

A second fact of life is that the very rich are more or less addicted to the "pie growing" life and tend to make sure that their total income continues growing.

In the US then this produces a whipsaw effect, as the rich have to extract even more and more wealth from the poor in order to keep their own income rising in a falling world. So not only is there less and less real wealth to go around, but most of us get a smaller and smaller share of it to keep. Again, it is not likely that any human force will change that trend.

A third and scary trend is that the very rich see the USA in decline and are moving their bases of operations off the sinking ship, and moving their headquarters offshore to someplace like Dubai, as Halliburton did recently. Since much of the world has rising standards of living, there are some pretty nice places out there now, with way more open space and better and cheaper health care than the US can provide.

The effect of that is equivalent to the rich pulling their kids out of public schools - which then lose the students, the income, and the influential parents caring what happens to the schools, and leads to yet another downward spiral of schools getting worse and more rich parents pulling their kids out and sending them to private schools.

All three of these changes are "structural" not "cyclic" - which means the past is not a good guide to the future, and these changes will just keep on going, not reverse and return to some mythic equilibrium if we just wait long enough.

In short, the dismal picture is that, unless the pie can be made to grow, the average person in the USA will lose on all three fronts - falling in health, education, and welfare, let alone their paycheck and job quality. We can't ever cure this by shutting some group out with immigration policy, because these changes aren't due to something that immigrants do or did.

In fact, it is the immigrant populations that tend to keep revitalizing the nation and providing the new growth that finds the one way out - new growth of innovative new approaches and industries.

As I've discussed in numerous other posts, the real hope is in "synergy" or the unlimited upward power of collaboration. It is precisely in the niche-space created between our own culture and other cultures, interacting creatively, that new life and new growth and new hope are born and flow into this world.

Here's the problem. For that to happen, for creative power to exceed the normal power of decline and decay, we need to have the largest "angle" possible between our own culture and each other culture. If you think of an angle as the point of a piece of pie, the amount of pie goes up as the angle at the point goes up. More angle = more pie.

If we interact well with another culture, we want the largest angle (most pie) we can get, which means we want them to be as different from us as we can stand and still interact.

We need, in other words, "unity in diversity". If they are identical to us, the angle is about zero and the slice of pie will barely matter.

So, the only policy that will work in the scenario I just described is one where we are very open and specialize in finding and dealing creatively and cooperatively with as many diverse other cultures as we can, treasuring their difference from us as our joint asset, which it is.

The worst possible policy in that model would be to (a) shut our borders and cut down interactions with others, and (b) avoid dealing with people who are different, or try to make everyone the same as us.

Parochialism, inter-group hatred, conformity, and higher walls of isolation are the opposite of what we need to be doing as a national policy.

True wealth decays away, regardless, everywhere. It is a living thing. Some strategies regenerate new wealth faster than the decay rate, and those groups will grow. Building a wall around the US and cutting off the living interactions that generate new growth will not, and cannot possibly "sustain" our wealth -- those policies will simply guarantee that no new growth will occur and hasten our decline.

The statistics are plain to see. Other countries have passed the US and are pulling further and further ahead in health of their populations, in skill and knowledge, in industry of all kinds, etc.
The last thing we need now is to cut off our interaction and ability to learn from them.

One measure of health of a population is simply average height, which reflects how healthy, overall, our childhood was for us. Healthier people tend to be taller. This year the USA finally lost the place of tallest country, and the average Dutch males is now taller than the average US male by almost an inch. "Size doesn't matter" but the implications do.

We need to take down the barriers to embracing global unity in diversity, not put up new ones of hatred and fear, if we are going to start growing again economically.

I should comment that I don't support these ideas because the Baha'i Faith tells me to - I support the Baha'i faith because it has been preaching this "unity with diversity" message for over 150 years and I'm finally understanding why that is so important and how all the feedback loops and emergent system effects work together.

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.

Washington post on Immigrants and Nobel Prize

Immigrants and Laureates
America's two other winners of Nobel prizes show how important it is that the U.S.get immigration policy right.

By Carl Schramm and Robert Litan (Emphasis added)
Friday, October 12, 2007; 5:05 PM

Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize is getting almost all the attention, but America's two other new Nobel laureates also have interesting stories. Geneticists Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work in gene targeting. And while their honor highlights the quality of American research, it also shows how our scientific community is enriched by highly skilled immigrants.

Capecchi, who endured a heart-wrenching early childhood in wartime Italy, immigrated with his mother to the United States after World War II, who survived the Dachau concentration camp. Today, he leads research teams at the University of Utah. Smithies, a native of Britain, came to the United States in the 1950s to work at the University of Wisconsin and has spent the last 19 years at the University of North Carolina. Both are now U.S. citizens.

Foreign-born researchers are common in the U.S. academic and scientific communities. In fact, more than a third of American Nobel laureates in the sciences over the last 15 years were born outside the U.S. These scientists are conducting research with extraordinary promise for improving lives, as well as great potential to produce commercialized therapies and technologies that drive U.S. innovation and economic growth.

The U.S. should welcome these highly skilled researchers and innovators. Unfortunately, recent trends in immigration policy are making it more difficult for foreign-born scientists and engineers to put their skills to work in this country -- and that could have profoundly negative implications for the U.S. economy.

...

But the difficulties are getting worse. The U.S. has responded to an increased demand for entry -- driven by the fact that it is a global leader in science, technology and innovation -- by capping the number of visas available to immigrants from any one country. As a result, the wait time for visa processing for countries with the largest populations, such as India and China, is close to six years. Anecdotal evidence suggests that increasing numbers of skilled workers from India and China have begun to return home, where the economies are booming.

Furthermore, tightened immigration screening in the U.S. following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 has lengthened processing delays. Of course, national security must always be our top priority. But policymakers must come to grips with the potential damage to the U.S. economy and scientific community if many of the world's brightest people decide it is too difficult to work in the United States and take their skills elsewhere.

...

Carl Schramm is president and chief executive and Robert Litan is vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation.

========

Comment: Assuming the major purpose of the immigration policy restrictions is to improve "security", I have to wonder whether that is (a) the secure future of the nation as a player on the global stage, or (b) the security of North American Prejudice and Stereotypes.

I recall news a few years ago about limitations on foreigners to a conference in the US on the subject of cryptography. The administration claimed to be concerned that "secrets would leak out" to foreigners. The conference organizers replied that the people who had the innovative techniques were the foreigners, and the point of the conference was to bring those "secrets" into our hands.

It seems that building walls to block the flow of innovation does work -- just not in the intended direction! The desire to be "more competitive" has the impact of making us "less competitive."

The challenge is to make the evidence of the actual outcome of policies so vivid that it can overcome the old mental stereotype in which "this should have worked!"

Certainly the teaching of Public Health when dealing with "complex systems' is that any policy should come with a built-in process that:

• is prepared to see surprising, contrary, and paradoxical results
• measures and evaluates the actual result
• undoes the policy if it is not working, or possibly
• reverses the policy if the outcomes were the exact opposite of what was desired.

The crucial thing in dealing with complex systems is to let mental models adjust to reality, not try to make reality fit the mental model. Some learning and some un-learning may be required.

Un-learning is particularly difficult for some people. They can learn something fine one way, but then they can't adapt when the situation changes and a new way is required. This is actually a clinical mental problem called "perseveration" and is often measured by psychologists with something called the Wisconsin Card Sorting test.

I think some wag defined "obsession" as the tendency, when something is producing the wrong results, to do even more of it hoping that will work. This can be a form of denial when a cherished belief or stereotype is challenged or threatened with being overturned.

I recall the "Sven and Ollie" joke Garrison Keillor told on Prairie Home Companion. Sven walks in and Ollie's ears are both bandaged.
"What happened?!" he asks.
"Oh", says Ollie, "I was ironing when the phone rang and I put the iron up to my ear instead of the phone."
"I see. But what happened to your other ear?"
" Ahh. After I got burned, I tried to call 911."

It is true that there are other competing and valid concerns with immigration policy. Flooding the country with new people of any type, in the absence of a system for accommodating them can be a disaster.

Still, simple statistics tell us that with more people, the top of the bell curve should be higher. China, with 1.6 billion people, will tend to have a top 10% that is higher than the top 10% in the US, with 300 million people.

Again, the question shouldn't be whether to add more people, but why we have, so far, been unable to learn how to use people intelligently so that more people is better.

I fear sometimes that, with "two economies" (one corporate and one human being), that humans are viewed as dead weight, not as contributing assets. It's amazing to me every time a company, under pressure to perform, makes stockholders happy by firing a fifth of its staff. If all those people were present and not contributing, shouldn't the CEO get sacked?

This gets back to "obsession" and the wry comment that "The whippings will continue until morale improves!"

• Fragmented humans tend to add up to dead weight, where more is worse.
• Unified humans tend to add up to greater power, where more is better.
• The problem is not with the number of people - it's in lacking "unity in diversity".

We should be able to add people to a group, and get more output. (blue line, above, labeled "Hope". What we tend to actually get is the red line, labeled "actual", which is where dread "committees" are born.

There is a way to get astounding good results out of people, where more is better. Use the search box above to look up "positive deviance".


That's our problem. Figure out how to make "unity in diversity" work, and this will fix most of the other problems, or provide you the mechanism with the brainpower to figure out how to fix them.

(Also see my other post - "Houston, we have another problem". )

W.

Walter Derzko's Smart Economy - innovation, entrepreneurship

Walter Derzko has a weblog Smart Economy which is worth checking out. I put a permanent link in to it and stole his photo from his profile to put at the left here.

His weblog is subtitled:

A Forum for discussing emerging smart discoveries and emerging technologies with built-in intelligence or embedded smarts. The Smart Future is already here, just the last page hasn't been written yet! Every advance brings benefits as well as intrusions. Have your say !! Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

And he describes himself this way:

I'm a futurist and business development consultant interested in emerging smart technologies, scenario planning, and opportunity recognition and lateral thinking

And a current activity:

[C]ollecting materials for a new certificate program that I will be teaching on Entrepreneurship and Innovation this Fall at the University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies...

He seems a very high-energy, 3 espresso person, with a Boing-Boing scan of the horizon for new things that might be interesting.

...

.Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare" - old Japanese proverb

......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." - H. Mumford Jones

"Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought." A. Einstein

"Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are showstoppers..." Walter Derzko

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

His Welcome page starts this way

Welcome to this discussion Forum on the Smart Economy-where you can discuss the impacts of new emerging smart technologies-technologies that have built-in intelligence or smarts. I'll be posting examples of new and emerging smart technologies at least once a day.

The Smart Economy is quietly booming !

People have tried to label the post-industrial economy in many ways: the Knowledge economy, the information economy, the Internet economy, the bio economy, etc. One denominator that they all have in common is that smart objects play an increasingly influential role- hence what I call the “Smart Economy”

My Comments

There's no question that many "things" that used to be "dumb" are becoming "smart", in the sense that they are developing a little more robust awareness of their own surroundings and showing adaptive response to that in real-time.

That is the same kind of behavior I've been describing for "feedback control loops", that I'm increasingly thinking are a good candidate for the building block of Life, even more so than DNA, because the "song" is the same even if the loop is implemented in silicon or water-levels in a glass or any other medium.

Well, so here's a thought along those lines. If self-aware, goal-seeking feedback control loops are taken as the basic primitive unit of "life" -- the atom from which everything else that's alive is built -- then we should be noticing that the world around us is being flooded with new protoLife at an accelerating rate.

These loops, as I've described them, will have a natural tendency to be "self-organizing" and "self-assembling", in order to work more stably and survive (always a goal) and to thrive. Also, sooner or later I suspect that, like teenagers and Science, intelligence discovers that it's not as intelligent as it thought once, and even that it can't even tell what it's doing wrong without outside independent perspective. (We're trapped by the problem Godel noted -- there is no way we can assess our own blind spots.)

And so, we have to find "friends" to hang out with and spot for each other and compare notes.

In other words, both what Derzko calls "smarts" and what I'm terming "proto-life" are naturally self-organizing but moreover tend to reach out and try to organize on the next higher level as well, seeking out peers to work together with.

So, OK, I have a background in Computer Science as well as Information Technology (IT) (two very different fields by the way) and this issue is interesting to both. First, from Computer Science's point of view - this whole thing is a huge connectionist computational device that is working out some problem and carrying out some process. Aspects of that can be simulated and we can rush ahead and predict some possible alternative outcomes and what determines which of those outcomes will occur. That may suggest social action in some way.

Second, like it or not, this whole thing we're assembling, or finding ourselves in the middle of the assembly plant for, is importantly a hybrid beastie -- part DNA, part Silicon, and a lot of "control loops."

It's also hybrid across scales -- part genes trying to make new genes, part people trying to make new people, part organizations trying to Terra-form a world for them to thrive in, part nations trying to Terra-form the planet to suit their own growth needs.

And it's also hybrid across species -- our "human" bodies, when we look inside them, are actually, well, kind of micro-societies of a lot of different organisms. If we killed off everything except the human body, we'd probably die too. We need all these intestinal bacteria to protect us and to digest food properly.

And, most of the time, all these hybrids get along fine. There are probably millions or billions of kinds of bacteria, and only 100 or so don't get along well with us, and most of that is because they are themselves making mistakes or getting infected by viruses.

Academic fields and people keep trying to divide the beast apart into different pieces as if the pieces existed independently of each other, which they don't. In the end, you can't separate personal health from population health, and as our antibiotics run out of steam and TB and AIDS and other pathogens return, we'll all pay for the billions of people who we've neglected to care for, who we perceive as "them" and "not us".

You can't separate corporate health from personal and community health and they should be allies, not mortal enemies, in any rational, stable, sustainable solution. Yet we see Public Health often attacking corporations as if they were the devil incarnate, and corporations acting as if "people were the problem" and if only there were no people, business would boom. Well, looking around southeast Michigan as the Big-Three auto industry fades and lays off more and more people, I don't see personal health getting suddenly much better, as if a huge burden had been removed from the people, now that GM and Ford are "letting up." I see things getting worse.

And, you can no longer separate the use of computers and "smart" components from the growth of all of that beast. I keep laughing at all these books on Toyota and The Toyota Way, that emphasize people, people, people. Yes, it's true, and I have been the first to go on too long about it, we shouldn't dream of "systems so perfect that no one needs to be good." But, on the other hand, we shouldn't try to "be good" and think that will remove the need for systems to manage the details a planetary-scale organism. We need both.

Toyota does have an amazing culture. Yes. They also have amazing robots. Let's not forget that little thing. For interpersonal communication, and overcoming secrecy and failure-hiding, having a visual system with bright colors and an "andon cord" is GREAT -- way better than nothing. But, if you shut off all the computers, Toyota would shut down too.

In fact, yesterday, in my second last slide, I show a "double helix" of human / DNA based life, and IT/computer based proto-life, growing up like Morning Glories around the guiding trellis of the hierarchy of organizational control levels.

There's only one planet here, guys. There's only one human race. We're all in the same lifeboat, us, corporations, people, our genes, our nations -- and it gets worse, not better, if we kill each other off or try to pretend each other doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

Once again, I'll reemphasize these key points:

1) If we don't solve everything, we haven't solved anything.

2) That's not as hard as it looks, extrapolating upwards, because those are the wrong variables to use to deal with everything, and we need to come down from above to find the intrinsic, easy variables and easy equations to manage with and plan around. There's a second easy place to work at the top end. (see the diagrams in Scale and Scope Creep)

3) Regardless, if we use symmetrical constructs that are scale-invariant, the whole "everything" collapses into a few vertical constructs - the ones Ken Wilber calls "halons". We can reduce even an infinite series of terms that have a constant relationship to the neighboring term into the final sum, without having to look at every one or do an infinite amount of work.

Example for the brave : we can determine the sum 1+1/2+1/4+1/8 +1/16 .... without having to add them all up, once we see the pattern. Well, someone can. That has to use ideas from "limits" and "Taylor series", and "infinite series" stuff. ( if you care the sum = 2, and any series shaped like 1 + r +r*r + r*r*r etc. converges on a sum = 1/(1-r) , and in our case r = (1/2) so the sum is 1 over (1/2) which, yes I'll do it for you, "2".

The point is that certain kinds of infinite series collapse nicely, mathematically, into a single value or a single relationship. Symmetrical ones tremendously reduce the complexity of the problem, or, in computer science terms, the "order of the algorithm", often changing an impossibly hard problem to an easy problem. (for them.) That's why I'm always going on so excitedly when I find some way to find a symmetry in the problem.

Second digression. Symmetry is incredibly powerful. Science asserts that the laws of physics are symmetrical, that is, don't change, regardless what time you start your clock, or whether your lab is facing north or west, or whether your lab is here or in another galaxy. There are symmetries over time, angle, and position. Big deal you might say. The big deal is that from that alone you (well, very smart "they") can conclude that therefore, energy, angular momentum, and momentum must be conserved quantities. Again, you may say "big deal" but knowing that is most of physics. So, if I'm arguing that there is also a symmetry over "scale", that would probably mean there's another constant waiting for someone to do equivalent math. If that's your thing, go for it. I think all the equations you need are in Mechanics by Landau and Lifshitz, Pergammon press, 1960, chapter 2, on "Conservation Laws". If you don't understand what a "Lagrangian" is, don't go there. It would almost seem as if the evolution of complexity and integration at ever larger scales would have something akin to "momentum" and would be a thing that would continue at a given rate unless an outside force acted on it to accelerate it (faster, slower, or change in direction.) I'm too rusty to do the math myself. I'm sure there's someone who could glance at this and go, "oh, yeah" and write down the answer.


So, I'd add to Derzko's notes on all the pieces becoming smarter, that this is "turtles all the way" upwards as well as downwards. Not only are the pieces becoming smarter, but all the aggregate beings (like corporations and nations) are becoming smarter too.

The pivotal question that determines whether we will all die here shortly, is whether they are becoming wiser.

Because they sure are becoming stronger and ever more capable of devising ingenious new methods to kill each other. Even our bombs are becoming "smart". Smart is not good enough.

Smart without "wise" is worse, not better.

And, to a very large extend, "wise" means that we have expanded our horizons, in time, distance, and scale, and can see the "big picture." We stop "sub-optimizing" and chasing false flashes of prosperity or success that only look that way locally, and, seen from a better perspective, are large-scale disasters and lose-lose strategies.

It would be great if the smartness happens fast enough that we stop destroying the lifeboat Earth and expand our horizons enough to see that the toe we're about to bite is attached to a foot that is attached to a leg that is attached to a body that is ... oopsie ... our own body. This isn't some kum-ba-ya, let's all sing and be brothers soft stuff -- this is very real connections on a deterministic level.

We're all "one" whether we like it or not, even with those idiots in Marketing. Even with Lawyers. Even with people of different skin color. Even with corporations and corporate executives, or labor and labor organizers. Even with capitalists and communists and socialists and Christians and Muslims. Even with machines. It's a very small world, and dense with feedback loops. Everything is impacting everything else. We need a theory of everything that cuts through all that and gives us some stable guidance amid the change.

The "loose couplings" between us, amplified by feedback loops, turn out to be "tight couplings" after all, when we trace them out.

But, big can be easier. We can't predict water molecule motion well, even with quantum mechanics, but we can predict "water" well enough to build plumbing. Up is down.

So, it's time to really think about "Theories of everything" that include more than subatomic particles and string theory and quarks or whatever is in that pot these days.

"Everything" is what you see when you look out the window. We know more than nothing about it. We need to get together, pool our notes, and see what they add up to. We need to get to know who "we" are, and realize that the bond is even tighter than "brothers." We actually are each other.

We can like it or hate it, work with it or against it, but I think the math holds up under scrutiny.

We're going to have to accept that even sufficient money does not give us the "freedom" to not have to learn how to get along with other people, cultures, and nations.

It would really help if we'd stop shooting holes in each other's ends of the lifeboat, as if their sinking would "help" us. Yeah, we'd be "higher" than them at last ... for a few seconds.

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

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

Wade

Toyota, Lean Thinking, Pull, and the role of Religion

Toyota is the envy of much of the world, particularly the area near the "Big-three" auto manufacturers in Detroit, Michigan, USA.

Two very popular studies of Toyota's "secret" is the book Lean Thinking, by James Womack and Daniel Jones, and The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production
by the same authors. The Lean Institute says:

In this landmark study of the automobile industry, Jim Womack, Dan Jones, and Daniel Roos explain lean production to the world for the first time, and discuss its profound implications for society. It is based on the largest and most thorough study ever undertaken in any industry: the MIT five-million-dollar, five-year, fourteen-country International Motor Vehicle Program’s study of the worldwide auto industry.

Philip Caldwell, Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company (1980-1985) had this to say about "Machine"

Truly remarkable.... The most comprehensive, instructive, mind-stretching and provacative analysis of any major industry I have ever known. Why pay others huge consulting fees? Just read this book.

The cover of "lean thinking" cmments:

Instead of constantly reinventing business models, lean thinkers go back to basics by asking what the customer really perceives as value.

It goes on to talk about terms such as value stream, flow, cycle, perfection, and pull.

It is the concept "pull" that I want to focus on in this post.

Womack says this (Chapter 4, page 67 of the 2003 revised edition)

Pull in simplest terms mans that no one upstream should produce a good or service until the customer downstream asks for it, but actually following this rule in practice is a bit more complicated. The best way to understand the logic and challenge of pull thinking is to start with a real customer expressing a demand for a product and to work backwards through all the steps required to bring the desired product to the customer.

Now, the authors have way more industrial experience than I do, with a mere MBA and most of an MPH, and a single "lean workshop" under my belt -- but I have my model to bring to bear on this question and raise some new ways to view pull. So I will be undaunted and proceed to offer some suggestions and reinterpretations of the same data for the reader's consideration.

First, in light of a multi-level approach to everything, we should realize that "customer" is not only plural in a horizontal sense (many drivers of vehicles), but in a vertical sense (the dealers, the supply chain, the auto industry, society, etc.)

Second, in light of feedback's description of everything in terms of closed process loops, not open-ended chains, we should complete the loop from the customer back to the company and look at how many times that loop will be travelled. (This is the "multiplier" of any "small" improvement we can make in the loop process.)

Third, in light of the multiple-scale, multiple-lens approach, we should move back ten paces and zoom the lens down so we see far more of the picture in space and time, and realize that customers often are repeat customers, or even lifetime customers. In that sense, not only does the satisfaction of this car matter, but it matters many times over in terms of the next cars this person, and their friends and family will buy the rest of their lives, and their children, etc.

Also, as we view Toyota over time, we have to note that the Toyota miracle, and the Honda miracle, started small, at about zero, competing with a firmly entrenched US Auto industry. The approach used by Toyota was slow, patient, long-term focus combined with a focus on the needs of everyday people, poor people, people the workers could relate to, in a country demolished by World War II.

And, in context, we should realize that "product engineer" in Japan has the same cachet and social status as "aerospace engineer" or "rocket scientist" in the USA.

So, the context here is that the workers respected and cared about the customers, and the customers cared about and respected the workers.

Now, finally, we can look at "pull", not as a production scheduling technique with optimal mathematical qualities, but as a human caring mechanism that had the potential to shape, or drive the Toyota engine -- with money being second. The "work" had a role, in the minds of the workers, of connecting them to the customers, which was a desired state.

This is where the light of religion, we can speculate that two more effects come to play. One is illustrated by the motto of Boy's Town in the US:

He ain't heavy father, he's my brother!

The second is a story I've told before, probably made up but it touches a truth:

In the middle ages, a quality control specialist came to work on a production problem in a church being built. Some stonemasons were doing work that was not high quality and needed to be redone, and others were doing excellent work consistently. The specialist asked one of the poorer workers what he was doing, and the reply came "I'm building this wall." Then he asked one of the best workers what he was doing, and the reply came "I'm building a cathedral!"

What these stories suggest is that there is a driving force, and a shaping force, that dramatically alters the functioning of people - and it is related, surprise, to purpose and meaning of "the same" action. The quality and sustainability of a worker's efforts depends on what it is they believe they are doing, and what larger picture it fits into.

If this effect has a significant effect, it probably means that "the customer" isn't actually viewed as "a customer" by the worker, but is viewed instead as "a person." "If I do my job well, and everyone does their jobs well, then old Mr. Lee will be able to afford a car and visit his children and his ancestor's graveside!"

This kind of bouyancy can make heavy objects lighter, and "impossible tasks" suddenly possible. I'll relate this later to much research on the impact of such "psychology" on worker output, innovation, creativity, willingness to change or share, etc. It is more like lifting "heavy" objects in the water than in the air -- they have the same mass but much less weight. Being filled with this kind of "spirit" really does make a difference in hard-nose measured output.

Interesting. And kind of what religion has been urging us to do for centuries.

This view, or focus, or framework shifts what aspects of the "lean" technique are most important, and which aspects are just artifacts. It changes how the process looks and how it should be managed.

So, it should be evaluated to see if it holds up to a formal study.

I recall also one last item of interest. When the head of Toyota was first approached by Americans who wanted to learn about their production techniques, there was great concern by some that Toyota would lose its edge. He thought about this and finally said, basically "Let them come. The Americans will never be able to do this. They don't have the necessary spirit in dealing with each other."

We recall that W. Edwards Deming of Quality Control also had no luck getting his message heard by Americans, and finally went, by invitation, to Japan and gave all of Japan a 20 year lead on the US on such techniques. They weren't "secret" but they were "not hearable" by American management.

This factor needs to be considered as well, and the source of "resistance" to such ideas identified and rooted out, if this technique is to bloom and thrive here.