When are all of us smarter than some of us?

This mornings New York Times article "A compass that can clash with modern life" discusses the problems Islam is having relating the words of the Prophet Muhammad, written or spoken, to modern life.

Since Islam doesn't have a single, official clergy, anyone can take it upon himself to start issuing "fatwas" or statements or rulings connecting the two. Some of the results are embarrassing and need to be retracted. Sometimes the results is to split the faith into competing sects, rallied around different interpretations of some passage. We see this in Iraq and it is and expensive and deadly problem.

Is there some better way? Does " modern science" offer any insights that could be helpful? Do we, collectively, know anything relevant today, that we didn't know 500 years ago, or 50 years ago, or last week? Or are we spending our society's bank account trying to get to the moon while our own roof still is leaking and our own people are still in need?

One way to approach "this problem" is first to figure out what kind of problem it is. How many other people have "this" problem? And did any of them figure out how to solve "it" yet? Or, if not, could we join forces, pool notes, and work on our common problem together?

As I understand it, the Exam of Life is "open book", "open notes", and it's OK to consult with each other when we don't know the answer. Unfortunately, this is almost exactly the opposite of what is taught in most school systems today, so we're not very good at this.

Well, if we view this as a problem of trying to maintain constancy despite change, it is a familiar problem to any religion, any nation, any organization, and, well, hmm, just about anything that's alive. In fact, this is the core problem of survival of the pattern of "identity" over time, despite decay, changes in the outside world, and developmental growth. This is the "homeostasis" or "allostasis" or "feedback control loop" problem I've been talking about.

So, this is a pretty important problem to solve. Despite that, very few "scientific" resources have been focused on it, explicitly, as a problem.

The same problem is true of any legal system, or for that matter, any "regulatory" system -- to what standard or goal or identity do we return when the outside world has changed, or time has passed and we've "grown up" ?

Another faced of this issue is that we, all Living things, need something like "love" that is "always the same, but always new." Always exactly the same is boring, and gets old very fast, and doesn't seem like a solution. The constancy evolving life needs isn't "constant" but is more "a loop invariant" in terms I used previously.

I think I had used technical mathematics from the theory of General Relativity to support the case that there is machinery to compute what happens when things are "context dependent" and, worse, where they both cause and are caused by context. Maybe one other person followed that, so I need a better example.

An easier example is simply "perspective". If I see you now, and you are facing me, I may see your two eyes. If you turn to the side, suddenly I see only one eye. Or none. Have you suddenly changed and lost your eyes? No - we all know that it's "the same" person, just a different "viewpoint" - and every viewpoint is, like a shadow, a very limited slice of a three dimensional scene -- from one viewpoint, by one observer with biases and preconceptions and limited vocabulary, at one point in time, expressed and conveyed in words that mean different things to different people at different times.

So, we essentially all have "fragments" of wisdom. And, like the three blind men in the Sufi tale, we have felt different parts of the elephant and have very different ideas of what shape the elephant must be - a tree? A rope? A huge leaf? A spear?

The question of assembling fragments into a larger image is, by no coincidence, the subject of my patent in "Image Processing," which I pursued because this is such a core problem to our survival. (United States Patent 5,613,013 - "Glass Patterns in Image Alignment and Analysis.") It is fair to say that I have spent 20 years or so working on this problem, from the perspective of science, from the perspective of business and organization theory, from the perspective of Computer Science algorithms, from the perspective of Public Health, and, lately, from the perspective of "goal-driven, self-aware, self-repairing feedback control loops."

In other words, while I see these other perspectives as helpful, it really seems to me that the self-aware control loop is the best "primitive" element that is common to all manner of organization of effort and people and cells and health care organizations, and solitons, and composite Life in general.

This is why I'm bouncing from foot to foot with frustrated excitement to try to convey to anyone who will listen that,

• We can map almost every major biological, social and business and religious organization into this framework, and
• People known as "control system engineers" already understand that problem and how to measure, analyze, design, and repair such things - but THEY still are looking at building better jet fighters or cruise-control systems for cars - not "social engineering" or worse "Planetary Completion Engineering."

To quote a line from the movie Ghostbusters "Oh, we have to get these two together."

• This is where Science and Religion come together and join forces instead of clashing. This is, in my mind, where they see the differences between them not as "me" and "enemy" but as, "Oh, look, I'm male and you're ... uh ... female and, ... uh... there are other things we could be doing besides trying to kill each other off." We each bring something of great value to the table, that we've each spent a thousand years, at least, trying to preserve and protect and nurture against all enemies without and within. For what? Why did we do all that? Why have a billion people died protecting this precious cargo - one clearly worth dying for?

Is there a way to make this long story short? Looking ahead at where I come out on this.

• Everyone's right and no one's right.
• In complex adaptive systems the answer is usually "AND" not "OR".
• If you want to align images, an area in which I seem to be a documented expert, it really does help if you hit the fragments with a two step approach.

Here's how I aligned microscopy images at Parke-Davis to get both a wide field of view, to see entire blood vessel cross sections, and high resolution of details, using only a single microscpe with a digital camera. I go over this as non-technically as I can, because it's more than an analogy, it's an "algorithm" or a process that can be used in other areas of life. So, bear with me, this is relevant. Extremely relevant, I think.

• First, get a broad overview picture with a low-power lens, a survey picture.
• Second, take a set of high-resolution images, recalling if you can roughly where you were in the broad overview map when you took each one, and recording that. Some of these detailed pictures may be rotated or offset from where we thought the microscope stage was, since it's not very accurate at this resolution -- so take positions as "fuzzy" or approximate data.
• Third, blow up the size of the low-resolution image until it covers the desk at the same scale as the detailed images, but blurry and short on detail.
• Fourth, put each of the small images roughly where it should go, if you remember, and roughly with the North side towards the north if you can. (I used the "Fourier transform" matching to get the best position automatically.)
• Fifth, allowing some flexibility around that estimated position, (attach it to that place with rubber bands, not with steel bolts), search each pair of neighboring images for parts that overlap really, really well. As you find the best place, using something like the easy method in my patent or something harder, lock that pair together into one larger piece of the puzzle.
• Sixth, keep on working on the next best fit, until all the pieces are aligned or irrelevant (like, the center of a blood vessel with nothing in it.)

And, Voila - a beautiful full-size, high-field of view, high-resolution image that can be analyzed by the next process or person in the chain.

That works in practice. I did a lot of those for our investigation of drugs at Parke-Davis in routine daily research.

There are two amazingly powerful and wonderful keys that unlock the process and change it from almost impossible to almost trivial.

1) there is something called the "crumpled paper theorem" that says, basically, if you take two pictures of the same thing, and crumple one up into a ball and throw it on top of the other one anywhere, you can be guaranteed that at least one point in the bottom image will be directly below the corresponding point in the crumpled image. (Actually, it work for stretching as well, or any "affine transformation.")

2) There are things called "Glass patterns" that are formed when two images are on top of each other on transparent media, so you can see through them both, that are sort of like "Moire patterns." These are "higher order" patterns, that are there, but aren't, but are -- very much like the simple moire pattern I showed a few days ago. With overlapping images that are within about 6 degrees of aligned with each other's angle, you'll see large "circles", even if the images are noisy. You'll see them even if there are no edges or "fiduciary points" to align with, like nice obvious corners. You'll see them in sand dunes, or water waves, or grass, or trees, or stars or laser-speckles off a surface, or just random noise. They're always "there" in higher-order vision land. Once you know that, they're easy to find. Then you can complete the "registration" process and get the images perfectly aligned by just watching the big circles instead of the actual images as you slide them around. (or, in my patent, I just find three points that match in each image, connect them with mathematical rubberbands, and "pull" the images into alignment with those.)

OK, enough on the images already. So there is a "massively parallel" method of aligning fragments correctly so we can automate the assembly of the jigsaw puzzle, even if the individual fragments are somewhat rotated and stretched and different scales. It uses two key facts of life to reduce an impossibly difficult algorithm into a very fast algorithm.

Now, back to social organizations. Suppose we assume that everyone at a meeting, or in an organization, or in a society or religion has some wisdom, some fragment of truth, and can see one side of some tiny local part of the world, but really really well. And we would like to "assemble" all these fragments into a larger picture so that we end up with both a huge field of view and huge depth of detail at the same time.

Here I look at the quotation from Jesus in Mathew that I listed a few days ago, that is common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Basically, first of all love God, and second, love your neighbor as yourself. There is, in my mind, more than an analogy here to the image processing solution of -- first get the big picture, even if blurry, approximately right and get your North end pointing North, then, deal with aligning with your nearest neighbors on all sides -- and voila.

I'm not sure what exactly the "voila" picture will be, but I'd love to see it before I die. I think it will be Beautiful beyond our ability to express it.

Except, in the case of living stuff, Life, cells, people, organizations, societies, legal systems, etc., the "pictures" we need to "align" are these basic "self-aware, self-repairing feedback control loops" that I need a shorter name for. Maybe "sloops". Sounds nautical.

There are two dimensions along which these need to be aligned. One is "vertical" along social structure lines of the hierarchy of life. Cells need to align their health with their local tissues which need to align with organs which need to align with the body, which needs to be aligned with the department or work team, which needs to be aligned with the corporation which needs to be aligned with the national good. There are zillions of non-aligned ways to assemble these multi-scale fragments, but probably very few fully-aligned ways, so maybe the "right" way, or rotated and scaled variants of the "right" way, will become obvious. ( I think Toyota's Lean production system is getting close, although that doesn't explicitly consider impact on each employee's physiological health.)

The other dimension is horizontally. This question of "merger and acquisition" on all scales is a harder one, that doesn't happen with"billiard balls" or mechanical models of the world. Almost by definition, two "objects" when put near each other don't attract, rotate like little magnets, and pull each other together. I suspect LIFE is different, and there is a "click" or a "notch" or a resonance or a "snap to grid" option, where two different life-forms suddenly can form such a tight bond that they then operate as one.

There are many examples at the corporate and biological levels, the most startling being "slime mold" where "individuals" flow together, become "one" large thingie to move to a new place, then "dissolve" back into individuals again. How cool is that!

The mathematics of two loops merging into one is undoubtedly tricky. There's been a lot of work done on what happens when two "vortices" collide - and a vortex is getting close to a self-sustaining, energy absorbing control loop. (Think "tornado" or "hurricane".)

There's also some great on-line videos of what happens when two ring-vortices collide. Did you know that whales and dolphins blow "bubble rings" which are like "blowing smoke rings"? And they seem to do it on purpose, just for fun. Here's a link to some amazing on-line dolphin and whale and human videos.

OK, close the loop, Wade. I started with problems with Islamic fatwa's and ended with dophins blowing bubble rings. The theme here is that most of our social problems seem to involve us trying to get a lot of small feedback loops "aligned" or "merged" in a win-win fashion so as to preserve the precious cargo each of them carries in the merger. I suggested that the mathematics involved is the same as that I solved for aligning digital camera images, but instead of pixels, basically, we have these small feedback loops that are central to each "living" thingie at any scale or level -- from cells to nations.

And I suggested that the visual tools for analyzing such interactions are already available in control system engineering, and we should expect the results to be at least as complex as what happens when two "bubble rings" collide and merge. (as in this video.) Except that, bubble rings aren't fully homeostatic, and don't each repair the damage done by the collision and discover they are now linked like links in a chain, or both occupying one larger feedback loop and identity now, or whatever set of operations we find such things tend do do when simulated.

Then I suggested that this massive-parallel solution technique needs a top-down context component and a bottom-up interaction-with-neighbor component to work efficiently. I noted such components in the Toyota Way and in the Abrahamic religions.

All of which continues my brazen advocacy for putting more eyes and research effort and dollars into understanding how this self-assembly process in society could be facilitated, catalyzed, and made 100 times easier.

We've become unbalanced with too much "specialization" and not enough "reintegration" in our social cycles, both in religions and in legal systems and in corporate structure and in health care systems and hospitals.

This "integration" and reaching across silos without destroying the values carried by each silo is, in my mind, THE key social problem right now.

And it's a bootstrap problem, in fact. If scientists or theologians could get better at working with each other ON this problem, then they would make more progress on reaching the solution. Given that some sociologists and behavioral scientists are reading this, I better include them too. The very same equation is at the core of everything from short-term business meetings or town planning meetings that are effective to large scale political and governance processes that are effective, to military operations that draw on the wisdom of every pair of eyes out there.

How do we make a bigger ONE from many? How do we have unity with diversity? How do we comply with both "In God we trust" and "e pluribus unum"?

That's a problem that's common to us. It's common squared, because it also impacts our abilityto even discuss this problem, which needs to co-evolve as wel work on the problem.
It's larger than "interfaith", it's both faith and science and commerce and public health working together on the very same equation, the very same problem.

Well, off to class. I know this should be 12 posts with pictures. Later.

Wade

Multilevel Architectures - Bane or Boom?

Marsden Bloise once described life as having a "curiously laminated quality."

Life on earth does have levels, and they have important mathematical consequences.

In fact, the multi-level model is one we find reasonably familiar and can live with. We structure our corporations and government to have layers and levels, with people one "one level" reporting to people on "a higher level."

Not only are there levels, there are gaps between the layers. It is almost like a quantum mechanical model, where there are legal levels and forbidden zones.

In the world of large-scale enterprise computing, there are officially levels (see the OSI model), where there is a hardware level, a messaging level, an application level, etc. The goal of each level is to function so well that it essentially becomes a perfectly flat, stable platform or metric on which the higher levels can be built. A perfect level "goes away" and "falls out" of the equations.

So, in the best world, when nothing is going wrong, an application such as Microsoft Word can say "save this file!" and, behold, it happens. The application doesn't need to concern itself about the details of what brand disk-drive is in the computer, or how may empty slots of what size are there, or how to chain them together and break up the document into chunks that size for storage and retrieval later.

Or, in business, workers and "the boss" or the next level of management up have a functioning gap between them. The boss doesn't really want to know the details of how something happens, and only wants a simplified, almost cartoon-level sketch, and mostly cares, yes or no, did that happen. The employees see all the details and prefer the boss not "micromanage". The employees have little idea what the boss does all day - so long as reasonable work tasks come down the pike in reasonable order, it's good. The boss has little idea of the complexity of many tasks, or the pains that have to be taken to accomplish them.

On the upside, this makes "management" even possible, because otherwise the world would rapidly become way too complex for anyone to ever comprehend, and the largest business would probably be something like 200 people.

And, if perfectly managed, lower level computer "infrastructure", like plumbing or electrical wiring, should be completely invisible. The thousand upgrades a day, putting in new hardware, swapping out old networks, installing new security patches, upgrading the database or operating system, should all be done "seamlessly" and at most result in a slight slowing down of normal response time.

One downside of this is that it is very easy for the upper levels to mistake the perception with reality. The classic problem in preventive maintenance is that, if perfectly done, all problems are seen coming in advance, headed off, and so "nothing ever breaks" -- and consequently upper management, at the next budget crunch, decides they can lay off the maintenance department because, who needs them, nothing ever breaks! So, they do, and only later discover what it was that the department did.

A second downside is that upper management is shielded from details by multiple layers of oversimplified sketches to the extent that they mistakenly believe that the tasks people at the front, or on the bottom, are actually easy to do, or even trivial. Consequently, it follows that the people doing them are really only one step above morons, and also that failure to do the tasks must be due to not only incompetence, but bad attitudes, because anyone can see the work is trivial.

Thus we have what I call "wicked-II" (wicked two) problems - where the tasks may be enormously difficult, but from above or outside they appear to be simple or trivial.

The immediate consequence of those misperceptions then are that management may decide, in its infinite wisdom, to undertake some new task, or "put in" a new computer system that, from their very limited depth model, should be "easy." First, they seriously lowball the associated work and costs. Then, they interpret reports of trouble from below as being obviously due to incompetence, laziness, or, worse enemy action that demands instant retaliation and disciplining or firing the idiots who resist. Management says "I don't want to hear about problems! Don't tell me you can't do that!" That directive appears to be successful, as complaints drop to zero, until the whole project finally crashes on the rocks the employees were trying to warn management about when they got fired. Management blames the employees for failing to do what they were told to do. And everyone loses.

This model of operation appears to be the norm, and enormously easy to slip into, even if management is trying hard not to. It is what "safety cultures" and "high reliability organizations" have to try to overcome in order to work.

So, we also expect to find, throughout history, a vague awareness of this type of problem and hard-won advice on some benchmarks to avoid falling into that same pitfall in the future - advice typically ignored as old wives tales, so the future generations end up rediscovering the world of hard knocks.

In some ways, this is like the brain-body dichotomy, where our conscious selves are able to think deep thoughts, like what movie to go to, and be generally unaware of all the hard work going on in the body below synthsizing enzymes, digesting food, managing pathogen invasions, etc. It is all too easy, not seeing those details, to take "the body" for granted and neglect or abuse it. And, as with management, complaints can be suppressed and we can continue on deep into fatigue and exhaustion because of higher goals, until some physiological system that was trying to warn us finally collapses. (Recall the old rule of thumb - the time to furl your mainsail is the first time it occurs to you that maybe you should furl your mainsail. Those who forget it as the wind picks up rediscover it after their mast snaps or the boat overturns.)

Similarly, "upper" levels of society are reminded in all religious literature to "remember the poor" and take care of the powerless "below" them. This advice is often neglected for short run gain and long-run disaster.

Similarly, "upper" structures, such as corporations, can easily forget that their existence depends on the lower level existence of a healthy workforce and community, and a stable ecology and climate. Again, industry can take actions for short term gain that undermine the workforce health or environmental stability, with long term catastrophic results. It's very easy to do, and very easy to suppress complaints.

Similarly, "upper" levels of the military, or civilian government, can suppress dissent and ride roughshod over the key needs and observations of their own staff, often without realizing they are doing it. The result is being surrounded by "yes men", being cut off from reality into a fantasy shell, and making terrible mistakes that end up being catastrophic.

The problems listed above are all the "same" problem mathematically. Interlevel communication and the tradeoff between "invisibility / detail hiding" and constant needs that have to be met remains an open problem.

(note: I originally posted this Nov 21, 2006 on my weblog mawba.blogspot.com,
where mawba = "M.ight A.s W.ell B.e A.live", and it got this comment:
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Frank said...

Wade:
A truly great analysis. Are you aware of Macintosh, Moffat, Atkinson's works on resilience and networks? They are going to the High Reliability Organizations conference in Deauville next may (http://www.hro2007.org/index.html ). I find Atkinson book in particular quite congruent with your analyses. There is a link on that page where you can download it: http://www.hro2007.org/speakers.html
Frank H. Wilson

5:42 AM

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