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.

Causal Loop Diagrams, stories, and macrobes

One standard tool of Systems Dynamics is the Causal Loop Diagram. This tool is explained at great length in MIT Professor John Sterman's text "Business Dynamics", but a short explanation is given by Daniel Kim in "Guidelines for Drawing Causal Loop Diagrams."
(John Sterman had a paper in the March, 2006 issue of AJPH on "Learning From Evidence in a Complex World", so he's finally been given "judicial notice" by Public Health. Always a good start.)

Kim begins:

The old adage "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every-thing begins to look like a nail" can also apply to language. If our language is linear and static, we will tend to view and interact with our world as if it were linear and static. Taking a complex, dynamic, and circular world and linearizing it into a set of snapshots may make things seem simpler, but we may totally misread the very reality we were seeking to understand. ...

Articulating Reality
Causal loop diagrams provide a language for articulating our understanding of the dynamic, interconnected nature of our world. We can think of them as sentences which are constructed by linking together key variables and indicating the causal relationships between them. By stringing together several loops, we can create a coherent story about a particular problem or issue. [emphasis added]

I haven't been able to get away for a few weeks for intensive training in Vensim or Causal loop diagrams, but they are certainly referred to in the professional literature as being a strong basis around which to bring many different interest groups together and reach a better common undertanding than would be possible without even turning on the simulator.

Still, it appears to me, a relative newbie, that Causal Loop diagrams still suffer from the concept that feedback comes in only two flavors - "positive" and "negative", not the full multidimensional spectrum I described in recent posts for "self-aware, goal-seeking, feedback control loops." Thus, on web sites such as Pegasus Communications, we see the classic "two" kinds of loops, those labeled with an "R" for "REINFORCING" and those labeled with a "B" for "BALANCING" (or "negative" feedback reducing difference from some fixed goal state.) See also Mindtools' description of CLD's with somewhat clearer diagrams.

Here, I fear, the power of the ability to turn on the computer and have it crunch through ranges of estimated parameters short-circuits the process I would recommend -- namely, putting the CLD up on the wall, standing back a few paces, and looking amid all the N-factorial combinations of N "loops" for a few "self-aware, self-protective, self-repairing, goal-seeking, feedback-mediated control loops."

At the risk of hitting a lot of hot-buttons, let me say that these, in my mind, constitute a kind of proto-life, which is to say that they are active agents that "might as well be alive" because they satisfy the usual definitions of "life", which is to say that they:

• Consume energy
• are self-repairing
• adapt to their environments
• are self-aware
• seek something akin to homeostasis when disturbed
• resist being shut down or shut off
• are capable of learning and becoming smarter

BUT, because the entities I'm describing are creatures of the "control" domain, what flows in their equivalent of "veins" or "neurons" is control information and in particular real-time, real-world phase-lock signals. And, as I've emphasized, control information can easily jump from one medium to another, so it's tricky to track it down and "see" it the first time, although once you "see" it, like most visual patterns, you can keep on seeing it.

So, once again, I bring in the hand and water faucet picture, and the person-driving car picture, to illustrate the number of different stages that a single "control loop" can pass through and draw together into synchronous action.

Aside: The fact that the action is synchronized is all the difference in the world, as that is the difference between a laser-beam and incoherent light, where one cuts steel and the other is a little bright to look at. Most of our real-world measurements, unless we are into Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), discard "phase" information and absolute time as "irrelevant." VLBI can work even if the telescopes in different countries are not connected physically, if a very accurate record is kept of each signal and the records synthetically reconnected in virtual space inside a computer. But it does require recording not just "amplitude" or "power" but also the phase component of the signal at each antenna -- information we normally discard.

The big Y-shaped array of "dishes" that Jodie Foster was using to listen to the stars with in the movie "Contact" was a VLBI, where the spacing between the dishes, which are on railroad tracks, could be altered to focus on different wavelengths of incoming signals.

Another example with some smaller feedback loops that compete for our attention is the "story telling feedback loop" picture I put up yesterday, again repeated below. Don't try to dig into the details. Just notice that there is a big loop that covers most of the diagram, surrounding the light blue bar -- and that is the main, persistent, "I am a person" kind of loop. Then there is also a smaller loop with a shorter lifetime managing incoming visual input at the lower right, and two competing permanent-fixture loops at the left -- One driven by higher levels reaching downward and trying to raise this person's goals; the other driven by the person's frustration limit and protection against overheating basically, which tries to lower the goals again until they are achievable.


It requires reflection, and explicitly asking the question, to realize which loops are self-aware and self-repairing if damaged.

Consciousness certainly keeps shutting down every night, but it recovers the next morning, usually. The visual system has many small loops that leap into action when triggered, then go back to sleep. If we lost them we'd be essentially blind in a sea of unfiltered noise.

Aside: I'm not sure about the loop I drew in the upper right, where the person's actions are echoed back to them, with various lagtimes, by different parts of the environment. Maybe that's just the classic, passive, "environment" that's envisioned by epidemiology -- with the same intelligence and adaptiveness as a canyon's walls. Or, maybe the world develops its own set of ruts and habits around reacting to you, as an irritant is surrounded by pearl inside an oyster, and those prove to be so useful that they are endowed with self-aware, self-sustaining, independent status to keep an eye on you and provide very fast feedback, as if you'd touched a stove, when you try to harm the world. That's a sort of meta-sociological question touching on guardian processes, for some other day.

Cutting to the chase: Hypothesis: Because self-aware, self-repairing agents survive noise and damage that will disrupt other, dumb, passive, accidental "loops", they will tend to end up dominating the landscape -- even if they don't reproduce or form support alliances. But, they will tend to form support alliances too.

Similar hypothesis I put forward a month or so ago: Because organizations tend to find and fix small-scale, non-complex problems, if we assume problems arise due to noise at every level in some equal amount, then the large-scale, "complex" ones will end up dominating the landscape, because those are the ones that keep getting put off and not addressed or fixed.

Synthesis of those two: In any long-lived multi-level complex adaptive system, large-scale, complex, active, self-aware, self-repairing control loops will end up dominating the landscape and being the primary shaping force.

And, sad corollary: Until we build scientific tools that can glance at a picture like M.C. Escher's Waterfall, and "see" at a glance "where" it is "broken", we will continue to be plagued by these large scale active agents.

We are, in fact,most likely swimming in a sea of semi-alive "macrobes" -- a concept probably as distressing as Pasteur's "germ theory" that had a sea of "microbes" swimming inside us. They would certainly be as "alive" and as annoying as viruses, and if they were not well, we would feel it, being, as it were, inside the "whale".

Of course, before going into anaphylactic shock at the idea of macrobes, I should point out that you already are familiar with some of them, as a big "yawn." Those would include persistent, self-aware, self-repairing, energy consuming, possibly self-extending macro-agents known as "families", "corporations", "cultures", "religions", and "nation-states." If the Gaia theory is correct, it would also include the Earth as a whole. If religions are even partly correct about some big issues, it continues at scales much larger than the Earth. However, the larger such an agent would be, the more slowly changing it would be, and at some point we could locally treat it as "fixed" or a "constant" for planning daily activities.

So, if sociologists, and even untrained civilians recognize that corporations and countries exist, what's the big deal here? What contribution to our collective wisdom am I suggesting this framework brings to the table?

Again, the most important point I'm making has three parts:

Hey everyone strugling with methodologies for feedback and multilevel systems in Public Health! Control System Engineering already solved that! Read the Literature!

and

Hey everyone in Control System Engineering! You have some potential new clients over here in Public Health!

Finally this one: Children! Stop fighting!

Public HealtH? stop picking on corporations -- the healthy ones hold your planet together right now. And the diseased ones need your insight and techniques to be healed -- once you master multi-level organism healing techniques. And, Hey, CEO's? :Please stop kicking Public Health in the shins -- they're trying to keep your workforce alive and healthy and productive, and besides they're closer than anyone to understanding The Toyota Way in terms of a health multilevel organism. Religion please stop picking on Science, and vice versa!

And, everyone, there's a big qualitative difference between a "distal factor" and the big toe on your other foot, so before you bite down .... oh, never mind. You'll find out soon enough!

By this model, there really only is one multi-level life form occupying this planet, and while it is the job of clinical medicine to heal people at the 1-body level, it is the larger distinct job of "Public Health" to deal with disharmony at any level -- between cells and cells, people and people, cultures and cultures, nations and nations, corporations vs. corporations, departments vs. departments, silo versus silo within hospitals, etc.

Because all that will persist is actually connected through all those loose-couplings (amplified by compounding feedback loops over long times), in a "control" or "regulatory system" sense, it's all only ONE body. We share parts of it, or levels of it. But it's hard to have your own foot have gangrene and not be affected by it, sooner or later.

The biggest problem right now is that the healers of society cannot easily see the feedback loop connections and evaluate the strength of each link and of phase-locked groups of links. That's the missing toolset. And that already exists, but indexed in a different literature where public health seldom treads. Now, with the new competency (2006) for MPH students from the ASPH, the focus on "systems thinking" will lead us there. The March 2006 AJPH is a start, but our work is cut out for us.

It puts a kind of different light and torque on things if we assume there is only one Body here, with many pieces and parts, that we're trying to heal and make right. It won't do to fix most of the body but leave a tooth or limb infected -- that'll turn around and bite "us".

If every level and pair of levels had different rules, this would be a huge problem, probably intractable. BUT, if every level and pair of levels has the SAME set of rules in "control space", then instead of many levels being harder to "solve", suddenly many levels becomes more hints and easier to fix. We have one equation and one unknown and 50 clues, not 50 equations with 50 unknowns and no clue.

That's WAY BETTER. Just align the fragmentary knowledge of the control structures of each level on a mental transparency, then put them on top of each other at the same scale and orientation, and look through the whole set, and all the clues will line up and reveal the full picture that applies at every level, even though we only have a little bit of it right now on each of those levels.

The prospect is compelling. It's a win-win-win solution, and we might just be able to get every field to give up 1% of its budget to work on this single problem that is relevant to working out more details in that field, for every field. It could be politically acceptable. It might fly.