U.S. Prison System a Costly Failure: report

The ability to reveal feedback loops and distant causes is not an academic exercise. It has very real implications for social policies based on what people "see" happening. An article by Reuters this morning on a new study of the U.S. Prison system shows the divide, of people who clearly see that harsh punishment is working, to people who clearly see that it's a disaster.

There are many other social policies, and social actions, such as the War in Iraq, that similarly divide people into "camps", which polarize and decide that the "other" groups are clearly idiots and out of touch with reality, or motivated by evil forces, or dupes of evil leaders, or something -- which leads to the conclusion that the "other" group needs to be "stopped" or "attacked" so that "we" can "win."

In a great many of these situations, the problems are less those of "bad people" and more those of feedback systems that take on a life of their own and cause events to transpire despite the best efforts of those caught up in the system to stop them.

John Gall, in his absolutely marvelous book on Systemantics, uses humor to make it easier to delve into these "system problems" comfortably and safely. The book is at first read just roll-on-the-floor-laughing funny, but after some reflection, it is profound and deserves rereading at least once a year.

(see also "Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject" )

I used to buy copies for all my staff. ("Systemantics - The underground Text of Systems Lore; How Systems Really Work, and How they Fail", (c) 1975, 77, 86, 88,90, ...) Gall is a doctor, now emeritus last time I checked, and was at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, where he observed the remarkable difficulties in getting computer systems, and for that matter most everything, to work in a sensible fashion.

Let me quote John Gall's book, then look at the morning's news on prisons in that frame of mind.

Gall says (and this is in 1975, mind you):

All around us we see a world of paradox: deep, ironic, and intractable. A world in which .. the richest nations slip into demoralizing economic recession; the strongest nations go to war against the smallest and weakest and are unable to win; a world in which revolution against tyrannical systems themselves become tyrannies....

Why is this? How does it come about that things turn out so differently from what common sense would expect?

... Reformers blame everything on "the system" and propose new systems that would -- they assert -- guarantee a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point - that their own System would work very well if only it were universally adopted.

The point of view espoused in this essay is more radical and at the same time more pessimistic. Stated as succinctly as possible: the fundamental problem does not lie in any particular System, but rather in Systems As Such.

No one can afford not to understand the basic principles of How Systems Work. Ignorance of those basic laws is bound to lead to unrealistic expectations of the type that have plagued dreamers, schemers, and so called men of affairs from earliest times.

All over the world, in great metropolitan centers as well as in the remotest rural backwaters in sophisticated electrons laboratories and in dingy clerical offices, people everywhere are struggling with a Problem:

THING AREN'T WORKING VERY WELL.
...
This observation ha gradually come to be recognized as an on going fact of life, an inseparable component of the Human Condition. We give it here in full:

• THINGS ARE INDEED NOT WORKING VERY WELL,
• IN FACT THEY NEVER DID...
• REALITY IS MORE COMPLEX THAT IT SEEMS....
• THE OLD SYSTEM IS NOW THE NEW PROBLEM....

A short list of some of his other axioms are on Wikipedia here, but those lose the flavor of the book, which is a must-read item.

I could not agree more with Gall. The effects of feedback are just not obvious to untrained humans, and hard to see for those with extensive training, according to Professor John Sterman at MIT, in his 1000 page textbook "Business Dynamics." Not only does feedback make all kinds of problems that appear to be the "fault" of other "bad people" we love to blame, but first it distorts our perceptions, and then it alters our beliefs and convictions in order to support the first mistake.

The impact is amazingly strong, and the illusion that things are "clearly" and "obviously" the fault of some other person is powerful enough to lead entire societies to actual warfare.

Here's the report on the US Prison system that I promised, with a few key phrases bolded that relate to what Gall is talking about.

U.S. Prison System a CostlyFailure: report

Randall Mikkelsen

Nov 21, 2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of people in U.S. prisons has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul.

... the U.S. prison population of 2.2 million -- nearly one-fourth of the world's total.

It recommends shorter sentences and parole terms, alternative punishments, more help for released inmates and decriminalizing recreational drugs. ...

But the recommendations run counter to decades of broad U.S. public and political support for getting tough on criminals through longer, harsher prison terms and to the Bush administration's anti-drug and strict-sentencing policies...

"Our contemporary laws and justice system practices exacerbate the crime problem, unnecessarily damage the lives of millions of people (and) waste tens of billions of dollars each year," it said.

The report was produced by the JFA Institute, a Washington criminal-justice research group, and its authors included eight criminologists from major U.S. public universities. It was funded by the Rosenbaum Foundation and by financier and political activist George Soros' Open Society Institute.

The Justice Department dismissed the recommendations and cited findings that about 25 percent of the violent-crime drop in the 1990s can be attributed to increases in imprisonment....

More than 1.5 million people are now in U.S. state and federal prisons, up from 196,429 in 1970, the report said. Another 750,000 people are in local jails. The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest, followed by Russia, according to 2006 figures compiled by Kings College in London.

Although the U.S. crime rate began declining in the 1990s it is still about the same as in 1973, the JFA report said. But the prison population has s soared because sentences have gotten longer and people who violate parole or probation, even with minor lapses, are more likely to be imprisoned.

"The system is almost feeding on itself now. It takes years and years and years to get out of this system and we do not see any positive impact on the crime rates," JFA President James Austin, a co-author of the report, told a news conference.

The report said the prison population is projected to grow by another 192,000 in five years, at a cost of $27.5 billion to build and operate additional prisons.

At current rates, one-third of all black males, one-sixth of Latino males, and one in 17 white males will go to prison during their lives. Women represent the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, the report said.

"The massive incarceration of young males from mostly poor- and working-class neighborhoods, and the taking of women from their families and jobs, has crippled their potential for forming healthy families and achieving economic gains," it said.

We have here all the elements John Gall mentions. We have a system that seems to have a life of its own, and is tending to expand to fill the known universe, despite no change in the crime rates in 34 years. We have a country that proclaims itself the model for "freedom" with the highest imprisonment rate in the world, higher than Russia, China, or any of the "Evil Empire" -- a fact that is well document but seems to keep coming as a surprise to many people.

We have a system ostensibly designed to resolve the problems of urban crime that seems to be sustaining the problem of urban crime by destroying black families and the ability of blacks to find employment.

And, we have adamant people, most of whom I'm sure are well intentioned, who see different "parts of the elephant" from which they have polarized into camps that are convinced the other camps are not only wrong, but must be driven by misguided or evil motives.

And, as John Gall points out, we have almost everyone convinced that the world would in fact work marvelously well if only everyone else would see the wisdom of accepting the solution and System that the first group is proposing, which frames the problem as one of trying to "win" the debate, to elect "candidates" who will "do the right thing" and finally "fix the problem."

And, we have the very few, like John Gall and systems thinkers, who realize this is all a huge misunderstanding and are wringing their hands trying to find out how to explain the issues so that people can finally see what is going wrong and where.

Again, following Gall's spirit of advice, we need to focus not on any one particular issue and get bent out of shape over that, regardless how obvious our righteousness is, and step back and focus on why it is we are having all this trouble reaching an actual consensus on the issue.

Hint - the answer is not "bad people" or "dumb people." The answer is that we need to learn how to make "systems" become visible so that we can see where it is going wrong. Things are breaking in places where we didn't even realize there were places, so we don't look there.

And blame is so easy. But generally wrong.

We should start with the assumption that most people, MOST people, are relatively sane and well intentioned, so

the question we need to stop acting as if it's solved is"Why can't we reach a consensus on this?"

The same battle is going on between sects or branches of major religions, and between religions and between religions and science. We settle for the easy conclusion that the "other camps" are clearly populated by demented fools or bad people, but that's not it at all.

The "why" has to do with systems effects, with feedback, that distorts causality, distorts time and space, distorts our perceptions, and then distorts the social markers we use to latch down those perceptions into beliefs and convictions we can act on, which then changes the people we are comfortable interacting with so we end up talking mostly to people who agree with us, further increasing our mistaken certainty.

Humans are extraordinarily good at discounting "facts" that don't agree with their beliefs, and waving around triumphantly "facts" that do agree with their beliefs, so the net effect is to inform their visual system to help out and start making the "wrong facts" completely invisible, which it helpfully does, and to make the "right facts" vivid, which it does. Then we "see" the world in "obvious" colors and can't comprehend how any sane person could disagree with us. We are not good at "hypothesis testing" and looking for evidence that our cherished beliefs are in need of an update in some areas. That's uncomfortable anyway. It's more fun to exult in how stupid "they" are and how "right" we are.

It's easy to use the "OR" model and say the problem is that EITHER they are right OR we are right. It's hard to use the "AND" model and say "Maybe we're BOTH right... and both incomplete" and search for the unity above diversity, the "elephant" instead of the "tree" or "leaf" solution. But that's where we are now, and it means nothing important is getting resolved.

This is a very expensive error. It is ripping apart our society, making our governments dysfunctional, leading to intractable wars and economic depressions, none of which are necessary.


The first step in civilization is the minimal amount of humility to accept that, despite all the evidence, it is barely possible that we, ourselves, might be wrong on something that we are sure is right. The second step is to figure out how to compare notes and "learn" from each other without jumping up and down in gloating glee when we prove to be "right" and someone else proves to be "wrong" on some fact -- as that just shuts down the whole process again.

And we need enough faith in each other to believe that long ago, before they got so mired in self-fulfilling error, most of the other people in the room were sane and well-intentioned and, under that idiotic front they have now, is a person you could actually talk to and relate to.

If we could get that far, it might be enough, with a lot of public discussion of how systems effects work, to start defusing and disentangling the social bottlenecks that are strangling us today.

Instead of trying to shout each other down and win by 51%, we need to say "I don't see anything that supports your point of view, but maybe I missed it. Help me understand. What is it that you see that I don't that might explain why we conclude such different things are going on?"

That's "civility". We seem to have lost it somewhere and need to turn the car around and go get it back again.

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject

"At the very least it is hoped that this little book may serve as a warning to those who read it, thus helping to counter the headlong rush into Systemism that characterizes our age...

SYSTEMISM n. 1. The state of mindless belief in Systems; the belief that Systems can be made to function to achieve desired goals. 2. The state of being immersed in Systems; the state of being a Systems-person."

(John Gall, "Systemantics - How Systems Really Work and How they Fail.)

Gall, continues

Systems-functions are not the result of human intransigence. We take it as given that people are generally doing the very best they know how. Our point, repeatedly stressed in this text, is that Systems operate according to Laws of Nature, and that Laws of Nature are not suspended to accommodate our human shortcomings. There is no alternative but to learning How Systems Work... Whoever does not study the Laws of Systemantics and learn them that way is destined to learn them the hard way...

S. Freud, in his great work on the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, directed attention to the lapses, failures, and mishaps resulting from forces operating within the individual. We, on the other hand, are interested in those lapses, failures, and mishaps that are attributable to the (mal)functioning of the Systems surrounding the individual, within which the individual is immersed, and with which he or she must interact and attempt to cope in everyday life.

Specifically, we are interested, not in the process of forgetting to mail a letter, but in the Post Office Box that is too full to accept the letter.

...

And like those lapses followed up by Freud, these lapses have a way of eluding us, of disappearing from our consciousness once the painful event is over. Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject.

...

When Memory is thus deliberately frustrated in its basic task of protecting us from too much awareness, we see what we had hitherto failed to notice: that malfunction is the rule and flawless operation the exception.

...

The advent of the Computer Revolution merely provides new opportunities for errors at levels of complexity and grandiosity not previously attainable.

...

The world may largely consist of Fuzzy Systems, but fuzzy thinking is definitely not the way to Cope with them, let alone to Prevail.

Comment - John Gall's book is, in my mind, one of the most delightful and yet profound books on "Systems" ever written. I have made a point to reread it at least once every year since 1975, and to buy copies for all my staff and friends at the slightest excuse.

Based, presumably, on his experiences as a physician at the University of Michigan, be captures with humor the best attitude any of us can hope for to take and use to frame the indelicate problem of "systems" in our lives, or, God forbid, systems we are part of and partly responsible for.

A very brief sampling of his summary rules is here. Wikipedia has many more, but I heartily recommend the trip to Amazon to get the latest updated version of his wit and wisdom.

Some of his Rules:

REALITY IS MORE COMPLEX THAN IT SEEMS.

Under precisely controlled experimental conditions,a test animal will behave as it damn well pleases.

THINGS AREN'T WORKING VERY WELL (and never did).

SYSTEMS IN GENERAL WORK POORLY OR NOT AT ALL.

(The behavior is often an unexpected way of failing.)

NEW SYSTEMS MEAN NEW PROBLEMS.

SYSTEMS TEND TO EXPAND TO FILL THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.

THE SYSTEM ALWAYS FIGHTS BACK.

THE OLD SYSTEM IS NOW THE NEW PROBLEM.

A LARGE SYSTEM, PRODUCED BY EXPANDING THE DIMENSIONS OF A SMALLER SYSTEM,
DOES NOT BEHAVE LIKE THE SMALLER SYSTEM.

TO THOSE WITHIN A SYSTEM, THE OUTSIDE REALITY TENDS TO PALE AND DISAPPEAR.

THE CHART IS NOT THE PATIENT.

Unfortunately, this slogan with its humanistic implications, turned out to be misleading. The nurses were neither attending the patients nor making notations in the charts. They were in the hospital auditorium, taking a course in Interdisciplinary Function. (The art of correlating one's own professional activities more and more with those of other professionals, while actually doing less and less. )

"In cold fact, a SYSTEM is building ships, and the SYSTEM is the shipbuilder."

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING.

THE SYSTEM ITSELF DOES NOT DO WHAT IT SAYS IT IS DOING.

and, "Closely related to Orwellian Newspeak and Doublethink, The confusion of Input and Output."

A giant program to Conquer Cancer is begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered, but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled "You and the War Against Cancer" have been distributed. These publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input. The cancerous multiplication of paperwork will not be regarded as a malignancy.

[previously published 9/5/06 in my prior weblog ; photo is from my own Ann Arbor photos. ].

Systems explanations for student behavior

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Pyramid Schemes

The reading today is from the gospel of John Gall, "Systemantics - The underground text of systems lore - How systems really work and how they fail." page 79

Principle: THE CRUCIAL VARIABLES ARE DISCOVERED BY ACCIDENT

On the edge of the desert, a few miles south of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, stands a ruined tower of masonry some two hundred feet high, surrounded by great mounds of rubble. It is the remains of a gigantic Pyramid. It' ruined state has variously been attributed to time, weather, earthquake or vandalism, despite the obvious fact that none of thee factors has been able to affect the other Great Pyramids to the same degree.

Only in our own time has the correct solution to this enigma been advanced. In conformity with basic Systems Principles ... the answer was provided by an outsider, a physicist unaware that there was nay problem,who, after a vacation in Egypt, realized that the Pyramid of Snofru had fallen down. ... It is clear that the thing was almost complete when it fell.

... Unknown to Snofru, [his] achievement hung by a thread. It was at the limit of stability for such a structure. Snofru, in expanding the scale, unwittingly exceeded the engineering limits. It fell down.

Example 2. The pyramid of Cheops.

Cheops, son of Snofru, vowed not to make the same mistake. With great care he constructed his pyramid of finely dressed limestone blocks, carefully arranged to distribute the stresses. His pyramid did not fall down, nor did those of his immediate successors, which were built in the same way. But the Egyptian State, subjected to unbearable stresses by the building of those monsters of pride, collapsed into anarchy. Egypt fell down.

Thus ends the reading for today.
Let us pray.


further reading -
Failure is our most taboo subject