Healing and empowering relationships

"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me"
( From Tommy, the rock opera, by The Who)

A concept that keeps coming up in looking at how relationships take shape and keep their shape as they are recreated daily is that of active vision.

This really needs a term of its own, so maybe I'll call it proactive-vision.

What is involved is a kind of looking and seeing people that is not passive, not like the way a television camera looks. It is a kind of looking that active reaches out and shapes the person or thing that is being "viewed", and helps coax or even force that "external" state into a stable viewable state.

I think you need something like Quantum Mechanics, or advanced database concepts to find scientific examples of this on other scales. In quantum mechanics, for example an electron doesn't really "have" a shape -- it has an infinity of possible shapes and it swims happily in that sea of possibilities UNTIL some crass and cruel OBSERVER comes along and, by the very act of observing, FORCES it to resolve itself into one particular shape. What is unmentioned is that the forcing has a persistent after effect, and now the electron has been forced into that shape even after the observer waltzes away to force some other electron into a single shape.

Photons, or bits of light, also have this kind of behavior -- they can enter an atom and be TENTATIVELY absorbed by the electron shell of the atom, where they sit for a while and see how that goes. If they don't like it there, they can EXIT again, exactly UNDOING what they did on entering so that the final state of the atom is exactly as if the photon was never there at all. (You can do the same thing in advanced databases -- you can execute a transaction that attempts to update all necessary tables, and, if it fails, it automatically is "rolled back" in such a way that it, effectively, never really happened.)

In other words, on at least some scales and some instances, Life or Nature has an amazing ability to try out a billion things at once, see which ones it wants to keep, and then UNdo the (billion minus one) that didn't work out as if they had never happened in the first place. They don't need to be "killed", which would leave a billion dead bodies around, they simply are UN-happened away, to coin a phrase. They are magically made to never have been here in the first place. It is and ASTOUNDINGLY efficient use of resources and, aside from some side effects, is 100% undetectable by most scientific means, because, hey, how can you detect something that never happened in the first place.

It is as if life has a "before you begin" page (one of my pet peeves) that comes in, looks around, goes "Nahh, I guess not", and leaves before it begins, taking the packaging and even the memory of the event with it as it goes, and leaving no hole behind.

Anyway, the point is that PEOPLE seem to have an equivalent sort of affair. By simply sitting and LISTENING to a person, or by LOOKING at them, as the intrusive OBSERVER, you are actually CAUSING their billions of possible states to take shape. WORSE, or BETTER, your framework for vision and your very expectations of WHAT you EXPECT to see actually has an impact in tweaking, nudging, or even FORCING that person into one of the shapes that you EXPECT to see, where they are now stuck, even if they were not there and didn't want to be there in the first place.

OBSERVATION IS INTRUSIVE. There is no such thing as "passive" observation of electrons, nor, I think, of people. Much, or even MOST of what the observer SEES was brought to the scene by the observer, not the observed person.

In other terms, life is just chock FULL of self-fulfilling expectations when it comes to what you see. Especially in situations where someone with higher authority is doing the "looking", this can be a very powerful, even determining, shaping effect.

When Professor Lev ? from Harvard was here giving a talk on Theory X (old style hierarchy) versus Theory Y (new style collaborative) teams, he gave an example where someone asked him, "Well, which is it, are people basically theory X or theory Y?" and his answer was "Yes"...
meaning, your staff or team or employees or children or students are WHATEVER you FORCE THEM or EMPOWER THEM to be by your own expectations and the way you "LOOK" at them.

If you expect them to be unruly, selfish, lazy trouble-makers, and you SEE that in them, and you keep SEEING it and persist it in your own head and mind, you will soon see much more of it because it will embody itself in the real world, and they will BECOME that way. On the other hand, if you expect them to be organized, efficient, helpful, reliable people , and you SEE traces of that and keep on persisting THAT vision of them in your mind, they will become THAT way.

Either one is a self-fulfilling PERCEPTION. This is real. This actually happens.

Reproducible research studies show that, in school, if teachers EXPECT a student to be a good student, odds are very high he or she will turn into one; and if teachers EXPECT a studentn to be bad or a trouble-maker, odds are also very high he or she will turn into one. Again, here is a very strong argument that all forms of prejudice and racism are, in fact, in themselves a kind of hate-crime, causing continual damage to the target group, and effectively FORCING The target group towards or into the very behaviors that are detested.

I recall once, in freshman Chemistry at Cornell, a teaching assistant got it into his head that I had cheated on an exam. He noted that I had simply written down the answer to a problem with no intermediate steps shown. When I explained to him that I had use the technique shown in the book to get the answer, it became apparent that he had not read the book, and further, that he was unwilling to consider the concept that he was wrong and that I was NOT a cheater. He left the meeting with words like "You got away with it this time, but I have my eye on you, and I'll GET you before the term is done!"

That single framework destroyed the rest of the course for me. I had a terrible time. I got migrane headaches when I even thought about going to class and facing him. I felt a tremendous URGE to cheat on exams, even though I don't do that, just because I was being TREATED that way so I might as well behave that way. It was a startlingly strong impulse.
At the end of the course, I literally tore my textbook into small pieces and threw it in the dumpster, along with any desire to EVER take another chemistry course again, EVER. It reshaped my life.

I can only imagine what it must be like to be black in a city where every time you walk into a store, you are followed by security guards who expect you to be shoplifting because you are obviously a thief because you are "one of those people." I can imagine the rage of President Obama's friend when the police forced their way into his house and arrested him because the neighbor reported that an obvious intruder had gone into the house. This is not a passive act, to be continually treated as a criminal or as an enemy of the rich-white-man's-system. If we do it long enough, we can FORCE people into that identity, good people who would never have gone there if not forced to by our prejudiced "observation".

The UPSIDE is that we can similarly EXPECT people to deliver their very best in such a way that we EMPOWER them to do so, and release their latent energy to do so.

Every day, in every observation, in every glance, we challenge or reaffirm our own mental model of other people and apply a persistent pressure on them for them to become the way we think they are.

It's an amazing power we hold.

We need to learn to use it wisely.

We need to expect the other people in our lives to use it wisely too, and close the loop, so that we raise each other up, each day, in a thousand small ways, instead of cutting each other down each day in a thousand small ways.

People become what you SEE them as being. TEAMS become what you SEE Them as being.

And other cultures and nations become what you SEE them as being. If you SEE them as being threats to you, your continued perception of them that way and reaction to them that way draws energy into the universe in such a way that it TURNS them INTO that threat, where you can now feel 100% justified and say, "See, they are bad people, they are troublemakers and worse, they are terrorists, they are trying to kill us, so we should kill them first!"

The totally surprising fact is that, had you seen them as being friends from the start, it is very likely that they would have turned out to be friends.

You, we, all of us, have an AMAZING power to RESHAPE the world around us by the simple act of persistent perception.

This is one reason, for example why holding onto a grudge for past behavior is a terrible thing to do -- it FORCES the person you are mad at to STAY that way, even if they want to change.

I thought the song from the rock-opera Tommy that I headed this piece with was relevant.
"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me" are part of the words of one song in that opera.

We do this every day -- except all too often it's "see me, feel me, touch me, injure me". So often in fact, that, despite the pain of isolation and loneliness, many people today simply want to stay apart from others so they are not damaged MORE by poor expectations and looks that kill.

And, yes, looks can kill. Or heal.

It's something we need to become much more aware of, and literate in managing.


In light of this effect, it's interesting to ponder the impact on President Obama to have received the Noble Peace Prize. Suddenly he has to be aware that the world outside the USA views him in a certain way.

Another implication of this effect has to do with the way we treat people in authority over us, including government officials and corporate managers and officers. If the majority of people treat someone in authority as if they are a self-interested idiot and crook, there are very good odds that the person will turn out to fulfill those expectations.

On the other hand, to treat a boss as a wise person when they are an exploitive fool is not a winning move, nor is it wise on the boss's part to treat staff as if they are competent and caring if they are incompetent and amoral.

These transitions from BAD to GOOD sides of both the boss AND the staff need to occur together. The feedback loops overlap and generate a process that will run to completion, but doesn't care whether it runs UPWARDS, generating greatness on both sides, or runs DOWNWARDS, generating pettiness on both sides.

THE REALLY tricky problem, the one I'm trying to crack using virtual reality, is getting a boss+team that has latched into the DOWN side to transition out of that state and upwards into the UPSIDE state.

The same math applies whether it is a couple trying to fix their relationship, or a workteam trying to fix their working relationships, or a nation and culture trying to fix its working relationships with other nations and cultures.

Downside (bad) states are NOT a "fact of life" -- they persist only because we actively participate in persisting them. THAT is the great hope. They are ACTIVE BEINGS, so there are no constants -- they need to be created and recreated every single new day. The very same people can just as well be latched UPWARDS into a mutually supportive state as latched DOWNWARDS into a mutually destructive state.

This is the logjam we need to get an adequate social mechanism to fix, on a case-by-case basis, whether through therapy or "healing circles" on a domestic relationship level, or on a work-team/boss level within a company.

The downside shape simply BLEEDS wealth and opportunity costs. Companies that begrudge the costs of a $12 pizza for the staff for lunch can waste $10,000 worth of good will by this bleeding shape in the same day, and not bat an eyelash at it.

If there is one thing that needs to be fixed in American industry to make us "competitive" and "thrive" again, it is this problem. If there was only one thing we could teach in our schools and colleges, it should be how to recognize and fix this problem. After that, let the empowered work-teams and domestic-couples tackle the rest of our problems.

It's a two-stage solution pathway, and, I think the right one to pursue.

A different model of what's wrong

Mental concepts or models of life are ways of throwing out most information to focus on a few bits that seem more important to insight than all the others. Different models give different answers to questions such as

• What's wrong?
• Why doesn't this work?
• Where is it broken?
• Where should we intervene?
• If we intervene there, should we push or pull?
• If we did that, what effect would we expect to see and when?

It's miserably cold and rainy out, with snow coming this way, so I'm staying inside this morning and working on something more abstract, while I eat breakfast -- such as what a model of the nature of Life and Evolution would suggest is "the problem" in our economy.

Might as well, nothing else seems to be working, and the models used by the government seem to change daily. Meanwhile, they argue over what it will take to stop GM going bankrupt, which again depends on what you think is wrong. Different camps point to:

• too many government regulations
• too few government regulations
• health care costs
• unions -who make unreasonable demands
• management - which makes unreasonable demands
• consumers - who make unreasonable demands
  
• "the economy"
• Housing and mortgage defaults
• Nuclear above-ground testing
• Ozone
• Godzilla
• Unfair competition from larger companies
• Unfair competition from smaller companies
• Hedge funds and banks
• tree-huggers
• commies and socialists
• liberals or conservatives
• lawyers
• dentists
• side-effects of anti-depression meds
• Not enough team collaboration and consultation
• Too much team collaboration and consultation
• Too much decentralization
• Too little decentralization
• Alien invasions, UFO's, and demon possession
• breakdown in the moral fiber of our nation
• God's punishment for [ pick your sin and sinner ]
  

Given that range of diverse opinions about what is "obviously" "the cause" of the current problems in the industry, it seems there is room for one more.

You don't have to "buy" this - just consider it as yet one more possible model, and see where it leads. In particular, see if it leads to an idea we haven't tried yet that seems affordable and that won't interfere with other initiatives underway.

So, my new model of the day looks at the nature of Life - which is clearly and unambiguously organized in a kind of hierarchical and overlapping fashion. Cells are alive, but cells form multicellular thingies that are themselves alive in a whole different way, such as cats and dogs and people and you.

Individual instances of any type of thing collectively form "a species", which itself has many properties of living things, including being the abstract object that really evolves over time. (Individuals don't evolve, at least very much in terms of DNA arrangement, once they are born.)

There is a running argument in biology as to whether genes evolve, and animals are a side effect, or animals evolve, and genes are a side effect, or species evolve, and both genes and individual animals are side-effects.

In my model, they are all evolving, in inter-related but partly independent fashions.

The key feature of this particular multi-level model of life is that each level of Life has its own, largely independent, existence and rules of life and Life. Each level can forget, most of the time (but not all the time) that the other levels exist at all.

You can forget that your body is made of cells, unless your behavior, such as consuming some chemical, affects how the cells work, and then suddenly it matters and un-becomes invisible.

Similarly, management of a company, say GM, or of a country, say the US, lives in its own world with its own rules, and can easily forget that the cell-equivalent (workers / citizens / "consumers") matter -- until some behavior suddenly damages them (or bankrupts them) and they become un-invisible to "the economy".

These actors,however, are all still "people". Just as there are living structures smaller than "people" (such as cells), there seem to be (by this model) living structures that are larger than people, namely corporations and nations.

Smaller, in this sense, means things that make up something, and larger means, things made up of something.

But, our bodies are not "just" a pile of chemicals, or ten trillion cells - they have unique features that only make sense at a person level - such as going to the dentist. Much of "our" lives we spend dealing with issues "mortgage refinancing" that simply have no equivalent at the cellular or atomic level. If we could talk to our cells, it would be a very short and frustrating conversation, pretty much what one gets when management and labor sit down together.

So, let's assume for the moment that Corporations (with a capital C) are themselves life-forms that are dimly aware of their environment, dimly aware of the people who make them up, and yet exist independently (mostly) doing their own things that are similarly unintelligible to us.

We have, in other words, created a new level of multicellular life, called Corporations, which have their own life of struggling with each other, their own rules, and their own economy that is often entirely decoupled from the economy individual humans live in.

What has changed, in a baffling way to these corporations then, is that the health of "the consumer" has suddenly changed. Before this level was a reliable source of income or labor and as invisible as illegal immigrants to our food-processing company stockholders, and now, suddenly, the problems of individual humans have intersected the problems of the corporate world.

The US government is struggling to fix the problems of corporate life forms, because, at their scale, these are the only ones that matter or are even visible. Corporate life forms are trying to stay afloat by laying off 20% or more of their workers, because that always used to work, but it doesn't any more, not once EVERYONE is doing the same thing at once.

Intersecting all this is the confusion and confounding of "management" of a company and the company or industry itself. If there is no such thing as a corporate life form, other than an extension and echo of the top manager, then the company and the leader are the same thing.

However, most of our corporations and industries exist and continue to function even though the top management may be dysfunctional or absent entirely, or entirely engaged in internal power struggles. The plane continues, for a while to fly, even though the crew is having a huge fistfight.

So one thing we need to distinguish, when possible, is the survival of the current pilot and crew, versus the survival of the airplane. In many cases, the two seem to have diverged, and the crew is more interested in stripping the plane and bailing out than in saving the plane.

But the question here is where "the problem" is. Where is this whole multi-level system of cells, humans, corporations, and government breaking down?

This gets to the crux of the matter. Is it the humans at the top who are blind to any world except their own, a fact that is obvious from below but invisible from up there? Or is it that the higher life form, the corporation or nation, is insufficiently well formed to understand how important its constituent people are to its own existence?

In other words, assuming that most of what we see at a national level is a struggle of corporations and Corporate life forms, do they grasp that trying to survive at 'the expense of" their own cells is a losing strategy?

There is a lot of evidence that this fact is not evident. Congress is obsessed with trying to bail out or save the Corporate life forms, at the expense of the individual composite cells (ie, us.)

It is not surprising that humans at the top of such corporations or government become blind to the realities of cellular-level life. This is no longer where they operate.

If corporations are an independent living species, then the problem we face is that this level entity is too stupid to realize what it depends on.

And the solution that suggests is to make corporations more, not less, capable -- if that can be done in such a way that they don't destroy the entire planet that they also rely on in the process.

In other words, imagine that Corporations are "mostly alive", and "dimly aware" of what depends on what, and what part of individual humans and the earth's ecosphere they rely on to survive, which used to be invisible before there were so many Corporations sucking so much out of us and the planet.

Then, an intervention point, in that model, if we could find it, would be to make the Corporation brighter at perceiving long-range, long-term consequences of decisions IT makes, where the humans in it are mostly just there for show, acting as if they are making the decisions, kind of the way humans think they are making decisions that their bodies and brains made minutes earlier, as MRI studies now show.

This gets to the core question of how emergent, synthetic, multi-level life forms perceive the world, and learn about it, including what is connected to what.

Surely the basic laws of cybernetics apply to such learning. Things that have immediate consequences are easier to learn. Things with distant or delayed consequences take longer to learn.

The model says we're struggling with the wrong thing, trying to figure out WHO should be the humans at "the top" of meta-organisms that don't really rely on "the top" for leadership or guidance any more. The thinly veiled secret of those at the top is that they are also clueless and not in control of what's going on, despite their massive marketing effort to persuade everyone that they are just crucial and should be paid massive sums for their invaluable contributions.

We should take some time, remove the individual humans from the equation, and look at how the overall system is organized, and self-organizing to perceive the world around it and to improve its own ability to perceive and act and make alliances and adapt. Such seeing has to extend downward to humans and cells and plants and the ecosystem, as well as upwards to nations and planetary composite life forms that Corporations are themselves cells within.

This seems abstract, but it may be very real. It is certainly outside the normal box!

A few points in closing.

One is the key assumption that collections of things do not just have 'emergent properties", but that the emergent properties themselves take on a persistent, self-perpetuating "life of their own" that no longer depends directly on the collection of things that initially made it. Life has, in some sense, like an electromagnetic wave, been radiated outwards and no longer depends on the existence of the broadcast antenna. In fact, the corporate entity may turn on its founding fathers and expel them and go off its own direction, and often does.

The huge mental barrier to this concept is the idea we have of "life" being a property of collections of cells that are touching in a more or less fixed arrangement, although even that breaks down if one includes blood and white blood cells, etc.

To "see" or visualize the type of "life" I'm talking about, you may need to just follow the feedback loops and see what aspects of things are self-regulating, self-perpetuation, self-repairing, self-defending, DESPITE the efforts to go a different way by the employees ,management, stockholders, regulators, etc.

It is, ultimately, not DNA or proteins or genes, but the existence of these abstract "feedback control loops" that seem to be the universal property that defines something that behaves as if it were "alive". If we look at it from that point of view, this includes all biological life, but now includes as well ecosystems, the planet, corporations, major religions, etc. as living things.

This would also suggest that the key aspects of information transfer, the web and Google, for example, are at the core of the thinking neurons of this meta-being that has taken shape, or is taking shape around us even now.

That in turn suggests that the place to look for successful new product innovations for Google or Web-3 systems is beyond collaboration into synthesis of smaller-scale living units, something akin to "teams" but way beyond them, as well as synthesis of dyads of people that have a life beyond that of each of the two separately.

What structure, system, framework, boost, database, service, etc. would catalyze the emergence of such multi-human life forms, detect them, make a space that nourishes them and makes them bright enough to surround us safely instead of destructively?

That may be the question some people should be asking. That may be the gap. It's not just a question of groupware and collaboration and working-together, or of fixing 'broken" relationships or marriages. It's a question of what the positive side is, what levels of emergent life we can make with and out of our interactions with each other.

What kind of network service would detect and facilitate the closure and stability of such closed, feedback loops between individual agents -- the substrate of Life itself?

NOW you're talking "market share" and pent-up demand.

Wade

Why we have so much trouble seeing

(Columbia shuttle launch. / NASA )



The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes

To understand how we “see things”, we need to realize that vision is not at all some kind of biological TV camera that simply projects its image where “we can view it carefully and without bias. The picture that forms has been so filtered, edited, and amended as to sometimes bear little relationship at all to what is before us. Our hopes, fears, mental models, stereotypes and prejudices intervene long before the image delivered to us has been formed – as surely as a political candidate’s own words have been replaced by many layers of handlers. And, worse, the intervention is itself as invisible to us, and hard to see, as our eyes’ own “blind spots” – which are effectively papered over with an extrapolation of the surroundings so that we are not burdened (or informed) by what is there.

In our evolution it was valuable to be able to discard the ten thousand leaves and, based solely on a little patch showing through here and there, to connect the dots and so perceive the dangerous animal behind them, and to do so with sufficient certainty that we would take immediate defensive action, even if sometimes over-reacting to shadows. The process is built into our hardware and is automatic and invisible. The process is accelerated if everyone else around us is screaming and running – we too see the beast, real or not.

Two features of our visual system contribute greatly to disagreements between humans to what is “obviously going on”.

One feature is a type of automatic “zoom” feature, which brings whatever we are contemplating at whatever scale to just fill our mental TV screen. Whether it is tying our shoe-lace, or contemplating global thermonuclear war, the subject occupies exactly one mental screen.

A second feature, adopted from our need to survive, is the way our eyes cause anything that is constant to fade from view, literally, so that we are able to detect quickly anything that is moving or changing or different.

These two features combine to make it startlingly easy to take some small disagreement between two people and have each person “blow it all out of proportion” and lose track entirely of how much in common they have, and all the good things they share. After cooling down, each wonders how that could possibly have occurred. This is a perfect example of a problem actually caused by the “features” of our visual system.

Another problem is the astounding impact of context on how “the exact same data” is seen on our mental TV screen.

Here’s one example, in which you should simply ignore the background and note that the two vertical red bars are exactly the same height. It is extremely hard to do, even after you print out the image and measure them and confirm it.

Below is an even stronger illusion.

The dark gray square at the top was made by simply cutting out a section of the "light" gray square in the "shadow", and pasting it up in the white background area.

Your eyes "auto-correct" it for you to account for the "shadow." You can’t stop them from doing this. I have yet to find anyone who can easily “see” that the two squares marked are the same shade of gray, even when they have confirmed that they are.

I know this seems hard to believe, so do this" print out the picture, get a pair of scissors, and cut out the square in the shadow and slide it over to the edge, where it magically "changes color" and becomes dark. As you slide over "the "shadow", the same square changes shade right in front of you.

This is just one of the thousands of things your perceptual system is doing to be "helpful" to you, including altering the way you perceive people around you, so that they fit your mental model of how things "should" be.

The same effect is at work if you're deep into depression, when your mind is "helpfully" coloring everything around you "depressing" before it shows it to you.

That's what makes prejudice or bias or depression so hard to detect and treat - they seem so "obvious" and "external" that you can't figure out that your eyes changed reality before they showed it to you. This realization that your mind can lie, convincingly, to you, is the first step in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and overcoming depression.

So, our minds and eyes can be gripped with not just an image, but an attitude or mental model that is almost alive, that filters and twists and selects and changes everything around us to fit its own view and thereby survive. It fights back against our inroads, undoing our progress. No wonder earlier humans thought they had become “possessed” by a demon.

This, sadly, is not just something that occurred to ancient man, and we, being modern, are no longer subject to. These are the same bodies and visual systems that ancient man had, with all the pros and cons.

In modern terms, we are captive to mental models and feedback loops. The famous economist John Maynard Keynes, observed the same thing here (quoted in http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes )

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935)

• The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
• Preface
• The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
• Ch. 24 "Concluding Notes"

Sadly, we have not even exhausted the features of human perception that control us invisibly, intervening before we can see what they have done.

Charles Schultz’s cartoon character Snoopy, lying atop his dog house one night, captured it perfectly as he mused:

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?

An equivalent morsel of wisdom from “Dennis the Menace” cartoon is this thought, as Dennis is in the corner being punished for his later mischief:

“How come dumb stuff seems so smart when you’re doing it?”

For better or worse, we are all caught up in an invisible current created by those around and near us, especially our peers. The resulting “group think” can often lead us all to the same wrong conclusion at once, and then sort of latch that thought in where none of us can escape “seeing it” as “obvious”.

This might not be so bad, but if we simultaneously interpret those who disagree as “enemies, out to destroy us”, we have a serious problem.

In any case, as we have all experienced, it is far easier to fall into mischief or sin or wrong ideas if the entire herd around us has already fallen into it.

This impact is remarkably strong, and well known to magicians. If only one person in an audience sees through your trick but no one else near them sees it, they will tend, strongly, to actually “un-see” what they “thought they saw” to reduce the discord.

Because all these effects take place before the images reach your mental TV screen, you can try all you want to be “unbiased” after that, with no impact. And usually, if charged with being biased or prejudiced, people react with anger and outrage, because they are trying to “be careful.” Sadly, they are carefully reasoning with distorted information.

One professor I had in Business School was involved in the design of the Pentagon’s War Room. He noted that, by the time the billions of pieces of information had been processed, filtered, summarized, tweaked, and massaged to make them fit in a one page summary, the conclusion was already built in by the system. Anyone would make the same conclusion, wrong or right, viewing that information. The War Room or central headquarters concept has a fatal flaw that way. How, for example, could General Motors executives not realize that people would switch to smaller cars when their financial pain rose? From the outside, it seems incredible.

Corporations and large organizations have a worse problem, that so far no one besides me seems to have noticed: What small facts or “dots” add up to, how they connect, depends on what scale you are operating on, not just on where you stand.

Here’s one of the classic pictures that illustrate the problem. View this image from normal viewing range, and then stand up, walk across the room, turn and look again.

The image above is from the 31 March 2007 issue of New Scientist and it is from a paper entitled 'Hybrid Images'

http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/141 has many more such images and illusions, as well as this delightful picture:

People who liked this post may like these as well:

Things we have to believe to see

Why men don't ask for directions

Pisa/OECD - Why our education stresses the wrong way of seeing

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Active strength through emergent synthesis

US - Economy of arrogance (and blindness)

Virtue drives the bottom line - secrets of high-reliability systems

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help

Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper)

High-Reliability.org web site

Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Houston - we have another problem (on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Here's a few quotations from MIT Professor John Sterman's textbook "Business Dynamics".

Many advocate the development of systems thinking - the ability to see the world as a complex system, in which we understand that "you can't just do one thing" and that "everything is connected to everything else." (p4)

Such learning is difficult and rare because a variety of structural impediments thwart the feedback processes required for learning to be successful. (p5)

Quoting Lewis Thomas (1974):

When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing things with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century.... You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obligated to understand ... the whole system ... Intervening is a way of causing trouble.

IN reality there are no side effects, there are just effects.

Unanticipated side effects arise because we too often act as if cause and effect were always closely linked in time and space. (p 11)

Most of us do not appreciate the ubiquity and invisibility of mental models, instead believing naively that our senses reveal the world as it is (p16).

The development of systems thinking is a double-loop learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term dynamic view and then redesign our processes and institutions accordingly. (p18)

Quoting Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon (p26) : The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problem...

These studies led me to suggest that the observed dysfunction in dynamically complex settings arises from mis-perceptions of feedback. The mental models people use to guide their decisions are dynamically deficient. As discussed above, people generally adopt an event-based, open-loop view of causality, ignore feedback processes, fail to appreciate time delays between action and response in the reporting of information, ... (p27)

Further the experiments show the mis-perception of feedback are robust to experience, financial incentives, and the presence of market institutions... First our cognitive maps of the causal structure of systems are vastly simplified compared to the complexity of the systems themselves. Second, we are unable to infer correctly the dynamics of all but the simplest causal maps. (p27)

People tend to think in single-strand causal series and had difficulty in systems with side effects and multiple causal pathways (much less feedback loops.) (p28).

A fundamental principle of system dynamics states that the structure of the system gives rise to its behavior. However, people have a strong tendency to ... "blame the person rather than the system". We ... lose sight of how the structure of the system shaped our choices ... [which] diverts our attention from ... points where redesigning the system or governing policy can have a significant, sustained, beneficial effect on performance (Forrester 1969.). p29.

People cannot simulate mentally even the simplest possible feedback system, the first order linear positive feedback loop. (p29). Using more data points or graphing the data did not help, and mathematical training did not improve performance. ([p29). People suffer from overconfidence ... wishful thinking ... and the illusion of control... Memory is distorted by hindsight, the availability and salience of examples, and the desirability of outcomes.

The research convincingly shows that scientists and professionals, not only "ordinary" people, suffer from many of these judgmental biases. (p30). Experiments show the tendency to seek confirmation is robust in the face of training in logic, mathematics, and statistics. (p31).

We avoid publicly testing our hypotheses and beliefs and avoid threatening issues. Above all, defensive behavior involves covering up the defensiveness and making these issues undiscussable, even when all parties are aware they exist. (p32).

Defensive routines often yield group-think where members of a group mutually reinforce their current beliefs, suppress dissent, and seal themselves off from those with different views or possible disconfirming evidence. Defensive routines ensure that the mental models of team members remain ill formed, ambiguous, and hidden. Thus learning by groups can suffer even beyond the impediments to individual learning. (p33).

Virtual worlds are the only practical way to experience catastrophe in advance of the real thing. In an afternoon, one can gain years of simulated experience. (p35).

The use of virtual worlds in managerial tasks, where the simulation compresses into minutes or hours dynamics extending over years or decades, is more recent and less widely adopted. Yet these are precisely the settings where ... the stakes are highest. (p35).

Without the discipline and constraint imposed by the rigorous testing imposed by simulation, it becomes all too easy for mental models to be driven by ideology or unconscious bias. (p37).

System dynamics was designed specifically to overcome these limitations. ... As Wolstenholme (1990) argues, qualitative systems tools should be made widely available so that those with limited mathematical background can benefit from them. (p38).

Most important ... simulation becomes the main, and perhaps the only way you can discover for yourself how complex systems work. (38).

On things you have to believe to see

Why do people disagree about what they see?

If they disagree does it mean that at least one of them is wrong?

The short answer is that even very competent trained observers are often wrong about what they see, and, in many cases, even if they perform flawlessly, it turns out they are wrong.

And, very importantly, these differences in perception, combined with a lack of understanding of the causes of them, have led to many arguments, battles, and probably entire literal wars.

And, has been so well captured in Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, totally new paradigms are often strongly ridiculed and not "seen", let alone "obvious" to the vast majority of competent scholars early in the lifetime of the idea.

And, from long experience with the insidious impact of unconscious bias, even among very highly trained researchers, the standard in medicine is a "double blind" study, to get around the well known tendency to see what we expect to see, or to see what we want to see - or not to see things that would be very painful if seen. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
describes extensive case studies of how things scientists were sure were true about humans have proven to be patently false.

Human vision is a very tricky thing, swayed by peer-group pressure, swayed by biases from fears and desires and prior experience and conditioning, subject to numerous kinds of reproducible errors at best. Yet, it is good enough for us to get by, mostly.

I do not share the view of those who swing the pendulum to the far side, and therefore claim that
"nothing can be known" or that anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's, "because it's all relative and subjective" anyway. Even Einstein, so often misquoted, showed that with the corrections and adjustments he proposed, the seemingly conflicting views of two observers could be in fact perfectly reconciled.

We do not know and cannot see "everything", and at the same time, we do know and can see "something" -- the truth is in that inconvenient middle ground.

Some improvements can be made by multiple observers working together. Again there are traps and pitfalls, such as "Group Think", or tyranny of the majority, and suppression of minority or inconvenient views, but the truth is neither pure white nor pure black.

Because humans heavily use their visual processing circuitry to do "thinking", and attempt to "see" things meaning "understand them", the failure modes of this circuitry are of interest to us all. Further, humans tend to put strong judgmental values on top of what they perceive as "true" or "obvious" - so social action often follows from such broken vision.

Furthermore, groups of humans tend to influence each-other's perceptions in invisible ways, so that the entire collection of them, starting perhaps with one undecided state, can break into "camps" each seeing something different more and more as time evolves. Differences from other "camps" are viewed as some kind of enemy action, further suppressing rational discussion. Once very widely held, these mistaken views latch in and lock down, and b ecome shared norms and prejudices, filtering further information gathering to only support themselves and there becoming self-supporting, and, in fact, attacking efforts to dislodge the majority error.

Most of this, it turns out, is really a function of perception, and is as true of robots trying to "see" something as it is of humans.

What do we make then of a person who "see things" in a way different from our own? Or a person who sees entire things we don't even see at all, and don't believe are there? Are they to be considered "crazy" or "heretics"?

The human visual system has both feedback and feed-forward, and learns over time. As a consequence, things that we really need to see, we can often learn to see easily. A botanist, glancing at a plant, or a professional IT person, glancing at software, can often see a huge amount that a layperson cannot see at all, even when instructed where to look. We don't have to train our eyes, they figure out we need to see stuff and show it to us dynamically better with time.

But this system in humans is linked into the pleasure seeking and pain avoiding systems as well. Some views or perceptions are essentially certain to lead to painful memories, or to actions that will produce pain and have produced pain in the past, and our visual systems happily and automatically reshuffle neurons so that the painful perceptions and conflict is reduced. Often, the systems reduce pain to zero by making certain perceptions simply impossible for us to see any more. If we're not testing for this, we can easily miss the effect.

So, for example, if a person feels extremely insecure and vulnerable, their perceptual system may figure out that most complexity or harshness causes intolerable pain, and may decide, on its own, to shut off perception of complexity or threats. The person has been moved, by their visual system, into a very simplified world where nothing is complex and everything is safe, despite what others see. At the extreme, we classify such people as "mentally ill", but most of the intermediate states -- inability to cope with complexity -- simply turn into types of "political" viewpoints where simplistic, black and white views of the world are desperately clung to and become self-righteously self-reinforcing by blocking out all contrary information and often blocking out all those who disagree with the conclusions as being "enemies".

There are many counter-measures we can take, such as pooling notes, or all agreeing that we should be polite to those who disagree with us or espouse contrary opinions, and hear them out. The trend these days in the USA seems to be to shout them down, not to hear them out, however.

On a personal or team or department or national level, providing a forum for different "sides" and hearing out each other, where possible can avoid many errors we would later regret. This too, the essence of civilized discourse, is out of vogue in the US, where even allowing the impression of uncertainty is considered a sign of "weakness" and inappropriate in a "leader".

The literature of high-reliability systems is clear that suppression of dissenting opinions is a fast path to disaster, but this result is not widely understood, even if known.

I think it is probably correct, although not necessarily "safe" to say, that at least half of what each of us believes to be "obviously true" is, in fact, not true. The problem is, we don't know which half. And, most adults are not very happy to have one of their errors pointed out to them.

Trained and practiced collaboration in a psychologically safe environment can get around most of these problems, but is hard to do and not taught in school. Most "meetings" of "committees" at work are not best characterized as a sincere and loving search for the truth amid seemingly conflicting interests and viewpoints.

Despite the dismal track record, it is still possible to actually get consultation to work, if properly facilitated, and always worth it.

Many of the current catastrophes in the news could have been avoided entirely if widespread consultation was the norm. People would not have bought into ridiculous mortgages, for example, if they had consulted with the community first.

Why and how we have ended up at a point where asking for advice from our own people's experts, whatever people those are, is no longer "cool" is a topic for another day. Part of it is certainly tied up with a definition of "male behavior" that approves driving around for an hour lost instead of stopping to ask directions, and larger scale analogs to that activity on a departmental, corporate, state, or national level.

The title of this post, "On things you have to believe to see", is a reference to a phenomenon in machine-vision known as "model-based perception" -- which is in turn modeled after how humans perceive their visual and audio stream of data that floods their brain.

There is always way more information than can be processed by the fastest processor, much of it ambiguous or supporting conflicting interpretations, and much of the important part being of lower volume than the noise.

In response to that machines (and humans) simplify life by holding an internal mental model of the world until they can hold it no longer, and filtering the fire-hose of data down to that which resolves along the axes of that simplistic model, discarding everything else.

The good news is that, if the model is correct, or nearly correct, this approach discards the noise and keeps the signal, making life good.

The bad news is that the very same stream of data could support hundreds of thousands of interpretations equally well, and the one we have may not be even close to the best interpretation of the data.

However, any model at least lets us operate and make decisions quickly, and get feedback if we are wrong -- and in the real world, that approach usually works far better than the "paralysis of analysis" and attempting to understand everything all the time.

As thousands of studies have shown, we will tend to see what we are looking for, and tend to suppress contrary information. A radiologist, asked to look at an X-ray of a chest, will see different things if asked "Is this a tumor?" than if asked "what do you see here?" Which one is the better question "depends."

Another thing that is fatal to animals and humans, aside from inability to operate quickly, is inability to hold a course of action -- ie, dithering, or continually second-guessing an opinion. Our brains automatically try to avoid that, once we have formed a perhaps arbitrary decision, by selectively showing us data that support that decision, and selectively masking out or hiding data that contradict it. The result is, even if we are wrong, at least we are self-consistent for a while.

Confidently taking the wrong exit off the expressway is probably safer than continually changing lanes as one tries to decide if this is the right exit or not. The problem in most cases will become obvious later, and be sorted out then.

Is it a good thing that we are blind to and oblivious of our own frailty of perception and judgment? Probably, in many cases, we can at least operate at all if we act as if we knew what we were doing.

The downside is that misconceptions, errors, bias, prejudice, and hatred can all become self-fulfilling features of our lives all due to inability to perceive correctly what is going on around us, as well as due to the harsh way we often treat those whose views are contrary to our own, or foreign, or incomprehensible to us, or "clearly wrong."

This mishmash of human emotions, behaviors, perceptions, and prejudices, and norms regarding them is part of the culture that has to be over-ridden in order to establish a "lean", Toyota-Production System type high-reliability operation. To get high quality, reliable product out the back door, we need to have a psychologically safe, humble, listening culture at the front, where it's safe to say "I don't know" or "Can anyone help me?" or safe to say "Er, excuse me Doctor, I realize you are sure of your own viewpoint, but aren't we doing the LEFT arm today?"

We override such civilized culture only at high risk of taking the wrong exit, the wrong arm, or the wrong war needlessly.

I've been framed!

There are two ways to change the meaning of something - you can change the something, or you can change the context in which you say it. If we don't account for this, we will make terrible mistakes in communicating with each other, and even with ourselves. If we grasp this, we can overcome many of the problems that plague our world today, which are results of unrealized context shifts. We have content processors but what we need now are "context-processors."

We all know that a quote, taken "by itself" out of context can be totally different than what it meant at the time. This is often visible in courtroom dramas, where the person is asked by the attorney, "Answer, yes or no, did you say this?" followed by some damning phrase or sentence that sounds totally wrong out of context. We all know this is unfair and somehow wrong, but don't have a strong way to assert that or to understand how pervasive this effect is.

It doesn't just affect communications. It affects our ability to work alone!

My favorite expression of this truth was a cartoon one day by Charles Schultz of Snoopy, the dog, lying on top of his doghouse, staring at the stars and pondering. He said:

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?

This cartoon is profound. Slow down and consider that this means. This says that a correctly functioning human being has a context-sensitive thinker-thingie that produces different answers to the same inputs depending on what larger context it is sitting in at the time.

This is, in my mind, a "feature not a bug." In fact, this seems to me to be the key to reconciling humans and resolving age old conflicts that have seemed totally impossible to tackle.

This is also a critical insight in trying to figure out how to make decisions today that don't seem totally stupid tomorrow.

That's true whether you are a person, a group, a corporation, or a nation.

We are walking around comparing "content" and failing to account for different "context" in which that content was perceived or generated. In small, local worlds where context is shared and identical among people, we used to be able to get away with that. Once we start trying to cross cultures or "silos" of expertise, and do something interdisciplinary or international, this tends to trip us up every time. We didn't learn the "general case."

Content is explicit, obvious, the kind of thing you can hit with a hammer. Context is implicit, invisible, unstated, and hard to describe even when you try. But it is vital that we learn how to do this, to get by in a diverse world - a world in which different people are operating in different contexts but trying to communicate with each other over space and time.

It is crucial when we try to take some thought or observation, about a patient, say, and "record it" in some electronic database where we will pull it up a year later and compare the two to see what changed. Are we capturing what we need to do that assessment correctly? Are we writing something down in words that will bring up the right thoughts to a different doctor next year?

Tragically, we have failed, socially, to understand the full implications of this issue. The miracle of technology allows us to store or send content across space at the speed of light, but, oopsie, forgot about the context part of the message. What gets delivered is not what was sent, in huge ways.

It does not have to be this way. In the same way that we have built computers that do content-processing correctly, we can build environments that do context-processing correctly. It is critically important that we learn how to do that.

Now, these effects are not flaws in humans that would go away if we were all "rational" or "scientists" or if we all based our judgment on "data" and "evidence." These effects are properties of the very nature of space, time, and information itself. We cannot "get around them" or ignore them. We are going to have to learn how to account for them correctly.

It doesn't have to be hard, but it does have to be done, or we'll keep fighting needless wars, between parties that actually agree with each other but don't realize it.

Take the example of "perspective" -- a distortion of space where it appears to each observer that things "far away from them" are small, and things "close to them" are large, and as you move towards a distant building or mountain it "gets larger."

At some point in life as infants we figure out that the thing we're looking at actually isn't changing size at all, it's an illusion, a distortion, caused by where we are looking from, our viewpoint. If we didn't correct for this, we could argue all day about which of two things was "bigger" and what was "fair" and not get a resolution, because A looks bigger to me than B, but looks smaller to you. Once we correct for that perspective distortion, we can resolve that question in a way that makes us both happy. This happened so early in our lives we forget we had to learn it.

There is a popular misconception that because things are "relative", there is no underlying reality, and no way to ever reconcile them. Einstein said the opposite. He said that actually, once you understand what is going on, you can completely reconcile observations made by two competent observers, relative to their own reference frames, all the time, every time. You can totally account for the changes, say, in perspective between two observers, and figure out entirely how the world I see needs to be warped and twisted to give the world you see.

Computer animators and virtual worlds have to deal with this "perspective" or "viewpoint" transformation all the time. It's a lot of bookkeeping under the covers, but straight-forward if you do it carefully.

Unfortunately, there are other shifts in context that are less familiar to us that impact our ability to reach agreement. The problem is very deep, as I said, built into the nature of space and time itself.

Once, in my astrophysics grad student days, I took a course in Cosmology and General Relativity. I didn't get it all, but I got enough to get the story, which is not that hard to tell, and does not require math. Please don't flee. There will be no quiz. Everyone one here gets an "A".

The essence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity could be distilled down to three insights, widely misunderstood. You don't need to be Einstein to understand these ideas.

The insights are that

• content and context are completely equivalent in what can be said, though widely different in what can be expressed easily in each;
  
• you cannot change one without affecting the other;
• if you do your sums right, the changes are completely predictable.

In the world described by relativity, the meaning of a very concrete phrase or physical expression or very real measurement of velocity, say, changes as you slide it around in space and time, most famously if you attach the observation to different observers traveling at different speeds. I can only observe your speed "relative to me", so depending on how fast I'm going, I'll measure something different.

This is no big deal. People in a car on the highway appear stationary to each other, even though the car is speeding down the road.

Or, if I'm standing on the Earth, I see the sun, obviously moving across the sky, going around the Earth. If I'm standing in some space ship off to the side, I see the earth spinning and the sun remaining fixed. These observations are both right, relative to the "reference frame" in which they were made. To reconcile them you have to account for the different in frames used by two completely competent observers.

Implications
==========

Well, what does this mean? For one thing, it means that where you work or spend time thinking or talking to each other affects what result you'll come up with. A decision that is "obvious", made in a bunker-like dimly-lit War-Room deep underground might not be at all the same decision that would have been made, given the "same facts", in a cheery, sunny deck in a woodsy retreat on a warm spring day.

It means that an "obvious" decision about what to do next, made standing in an urban war zone with explosions in the distance is not the same decision, given the same information, that is "obvious" viewed by people safely out of harm's way, at their leisure, later, reviewing the tapes over coffee and some nice Danish.

In fact, as a child, I observed that the behaviors that seemed to make the great leaders "great" in war movies wasn't that they were brilliant, but that they simply managed to remain stable and sane when the world around them had gone to hell. They remained connected to a larger, stable world despite the fact that their body was located in a locally unstable one.

Maybe, there is value in having content-intensive work like "science" embedded in larger stabler social frameworks that religions have sometimes produced in the past. I find it fascinating that, according to a recent issue of New Scientist, geneticists are discovering that far from being "junk DNA", the DNA between the 22,000 genes that code for proteins (content) may be even more important, and this "junk" codes for the larger context that decides when and whether that content should be expressed, or modified in the way it is expressed. (Junking the Junk DNA, New Scientist, July 11, 2007).

Yesterday, I did a post on the software world "Second Life" and possible roles of virtual reality in getting people to experience worlds they couldn't get to on their own. Today, I want to add to that the idea that virtual worlds are virtual contexts, which means that you can conceivably adjust not just the contents of a scene, but the context of the scene in which those contents are embedded.

This may be the tool we need to explore more how context and content interact with each other for humans, and to learn how susceptible we all are to "framing" of an issue. We can understand how advertisers or demagogues try to use propaganda techniques to shift the frames of discussions so that, even though we seem to be the same people, we end up making different decisions. Even though we don't feel manipulated, we have been - by Madison Avenue agencies that know how to send broadband messages in context-modulation that bypass all our cognitive protections against content-manipulation. That's what TV is all about, to them.

Dirty pool aside, honest and diligent CEO's and civic leaders need to understand what an idea will sound like, or be taken to mean, in hundreds of different contexts, to know how to process the input they get, or how to say anything that won't offend one group or another.

If nothing else, cars for Latin America, for example, shouldn't be named "Nova" - since "No va" in Spanish means "won't go." Underarm deodorant shouldn't be advertised in Tokyo using a happy octopus logo, since in Japan an octopus doesn't have 8 arms -- it has 8 legs. Oopsie.

(photo Walking Alone, by me, on Flickr)

Should we ask Hugo Chavez for foreign aid?

If the shortage at food banks isn't enough, the New York Times reports today that "Government money short to help poor pay heating bills". Excerpts:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About 30 million low-income American households who will need help paying heating bills this winter from a U.S. government program will be left in the cold because of a lack of funding for the program.

The poor, already digging deep to pay for expensive gasoline, also will face much higher heating fuel costs, especially if oil prices stay near record levels.

The government's Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, only has enough funding to cover 16 percent of the 38 million poor households eligible for the program.

The current $2.16 billion LIHEAP budget in only $300 million more than what the program had when it was created by Congress in 1981. Despite higher energy costs, the Bush administration has proposed cutting the program's budget.

The Energy Department forecasts that household expenses for all heating fuels will rise this winter from last year, with costs for heating oil up 22 percent, propane up 16 percent, natural gas up 10 percent and residential electric bills up 4 percent.

"If it is a typical winter, it's going to be a real struggle for these (poor) households. If it's colder than normal all bets are off," Fox said.

Heating bills will be even higher if the recent jump in U.S. crude oil prices sticks. Oil has soared more than $10 a barrel this month and topped a record $90 on Friday at the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Remember 2005?

See "Chavez ships discounted heating oil to US Families"

At the end of November [2005] , 12 million gallons of discounted home-heating oil for 45,000 poor families and social-service organizations started rolling into Massachusetts from Venezuela. The Bronx also is receiving discounted heating oil under Chavez' program, and discussions are underway with other states that experience cold weather. Home heating oil costs are expected to rise 30 to 50 percent this winter - because of Big Oil's price gouging and restrictions on production, say critics. Despite record-breaking profits in 2005, all the major U.S. oil corporations reportedly refused to participate in similar programs.

I've watched this phenomena in upstate New York for 25 years and know what this means in practice. I don't know the exact numbers, but let's estimate that 1 in 10 of the families without heat rigs up some foolish heat source - an old kerosene lamp, a fire in the sink, a space heater that should have been discarded (or was) years ago. Of those, say 1 in 10 leaves the room unattended or with just children in it; Of those say 1 in 10 actually succeeds in dropping something flammable in the heater or tipping over the heater; of those say 1 in 10 starts a house fire; of those say 1 in 10 results in fatalities.

I'll do the math. How many will die from this policy? 30 million times (1/10) times (1/10) times (1/10) times (1/10) = 3000 lives. This lack of "funding", if those numbers are correct, will result in the same loss of life as the World Trade Center attack, fires, and building collapses on 9/11.

Somehow, the way humans perceive things, the 3000 lives lost in NYC are visible tous, but the 3000 people lost from not funding this heating subsidy is invisible. To those who die, there is no difference. To the families of those who die, there is little difference, and sometimes equal bitter anger.

But, it won't announce itself. You'll just see, here and there, on a regular basis, all winter, in every city in the north, headlines like "Horrified neighbors watch as mom tries to rescue 3 children in fire" and some details about how some makeshift space-heater was responsible.

IN public health we try to go upstream and, like Toyota, ask "Why?" five times.

Why did they die? The fire killed them.
Why was there a fire? Space heater caused it.
Why was there space heater? They couldn't afford to pay for heat.
Why couldn't afford to pay? Government inaction or indifference?
Just spent everything on food or medical costs?
No job.
Why no job? No jobs anywhere. "The economy" has tanked.
Why high cost of food and health care? Much debated.
Why was there government inaction? Because the voters tolerate it.

Why do the voters tolerate it?
Probably due to the number of levels that the consequences are removed from the actions that result in them, people actually don't see what's happening, or don't see it with enough clarity and confidence to change their behavior, given the other louder and more immediate problems they themselves have.
Possibly because they buy the argument that the children who die somehow deserve it for being poor.
Possibly because some human agency was in the middle of this causal chain they blame the parent or grand-parent for bad judgment -- possibly forgetting what their own judgment is like when cold and hungry and in pain and your kids or parents are getting sick and asking you why you can't do something to make it warmer.


Congress fiddles, and children will die. That's what will happen.
We just don't know which ones where and when, and no single incident can be clearly "blamed" on this chain of events, and we, as a society, outside of public health, don't have a way to pull together all these separate incidents and discover that there is a pattern here, a common thread and cause.

It's the same problem we have with smoking. Half of smokers will die of smoking-related diseases. Half. But we don't see it. It happens later, far away, out of sight, with too much in-between for our human eyes to relate the two.

Taking a Whack Against Comcast

This week Comcast came to our apartment building and did their usual "two-phase" installation for a new customer. It's always the same - we've seen them do this maybe 8 times in the past 10 years.

First, one guy comes, gets what seems like 100 extra feet of bright orange cable, and runs it from the junction box at one end of the building across the middle of the lawn, across the sidewalk at the entrance to the building, around my mother's plants, up over a patio wall and down into a snaky spiral of an extra 40 feet or so, left on their patio before it connects to the service entrance there.

After a few days of disbelief that they really consider this "done", we call our landlords, who call Comcast, who sends a second guy to do it right. The second guy always seems very sincerely irritated with the first guy. In a way, too bad - I was thinking if my mom tripped on it, we'd be set for life once our attorneys got done with them. Then I dismiss that thought, mostly.

Anyway, it baffles us how they make money doing this, let alone good customer relations. It makes me wonder again if this is even visible at the top, or if every instance of this is discounted and written off as "grumpy customer - isolated incident." It has to be the latter.

It reminds me of when my then wife and I got "Swine flu" shots back about 1980. We'd been healthy for years, got the shot, and woke up the next day very sick. We were sick for days. When we reported this to our doctor, he said this couldn't be a result of the shot, because it didn't have that reported side-effect. We asked if he was going to report our experience. He said no, there was no point, because this was clearly an isolated coincidence. Hmm.

In that mood I was perversely delighted to see the article in this mornings's Washington Post
titled "Taking a Whack Against Comcast", about a 75-year old lady who took her irritation at poor customer service to a new level, involving a hammer. I won't spoil it for you.

Still, it seems a prototype of a reality that belongs in the comic strip Dilbert. How can a company's top management be so blind, or uncaring, or out of touch with reality that they can't believe this is happening, or, believe it but don't care?

The first impression is to say "Well, they are bad people." However, I warned against that repeatedly in recent posts, and suspect that they are actually, as bizarre as it seems, good people who are victims (on their end) of looking at reality through the wrong end of the telescope, and not being able to see what all the fuss is about, and therefore writing it off as "Well, they are bad people" (that is, the customers who complain.)

This problem is so widespread, among companies, that it becomes really important. And when the companies are hospitals, say, as the issue at Kaiser earlier this week in California, the problem becomes life-threatening at the bottom, and then, probably to their surprise, life-threatening to the whole company at the top, who "never saw it coming."

No one wins from this, and no one really investigates "it" because it's so "obvious" to people on each end that the problem is due to "bad people" on the other end.

Those are the kinds of situations we study in Systems Dynamics, and in books such as Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - where "the system" is actually the problem, but no one understands how that happens, so everyone assumes the breakdowns are due to "idiots" or evil people at "the other end."

That's the challenge for the conflict-resolution crowd - to disentangle all the entrenched blame from a problem that is as subtle as the error in M. C. Esher's Waterfall, and then to find the structural "system" problem actually responsible for the resulting perceptions and behavior.

Yes, I think there are "bad people" - but way fewer than we commonly assume. Hybrid scale-dependent vision seems to me the most common culprit in setting the stage for things to go wrong, and then feedback loops close the trap and lock it in place.

Comcast could probably save enough money if they fixed this problem on their end to relieve the pressure that makes them push the first installers so hard that their only choice is to rush and run. There are two "stable states" of the system -- doing a good job and making a decent profit, and doing a terrible job, with everyone unhappy, and making less profit. The problem is that the middle state is worse than either of those, so the system gets hung up on the "less profit" local maximum (the top of the little hill) and can't find its way down and back up to the top of the larger profit hill, because "down is bad" and pressure to make profit is so high.

The challenge is getting people to believe long enough that the "obvious culprits" might be innocent that they can step back and look at what is really going wrong.

Federal budget stalemate hurts the poor

While many organizations are inconvenienced, unable to plan or budget due to the failure of Congress to pass a budget by the start of this year (October 1), the limbo is literally killing individuals who depend on that funding. What isn't said is that federal budgets assume that the price of food is the same today as it was in 1989 when the guidelines were written.

It's part of the psychology that tells us "Inflation rose at a modest rate of 2% last month, excluding the volatile food and energy components." In other words, the rate of inflation experienced by corporations may have been 2%, and that experienced by individuals more like 20%, but you'd never know from those numbers.

The exclusion makes sense if food prices shoot up and down, averaging zero change. The exclusion sabotages the truth if food prices, gas prices, and heating oil prices just keep going up. With oil passing $88 a barrel yesterday, it's not clear how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people are not going to be able to afford heat this winter.

Maybe, Congress is unaware of the "hybrid" or fractal quality of this set of numbers as well, hiding the pain individuals feel from the comfort of on high. It seems that way from below. See Hybrid Images and Hybrid Reality. It would be a different kind of tragedy if the government is not responding because it actually appears to sincere people who would care if they knew that there is nothing important to care about. My "hybrid" posts discuss that possibility.

Certainly other guidelines to policy, such as the Gross Domestic Product, completely mask damaging actions and count spending our nations resources as "income" with no corresponding charge against "assets". (See Genuine Progress Indicator( Canada) :

GDP-based measures were never meant to be used as a measure of progress, as they are today. In fact, activities that degrade our quality of life, like crime, pollution, and addictive gambling, all make the economy grow. The more fish we sell and the more trees we cut down, the more the economy grows. Working longer hours makes the economy grow. And the economy can grow even if inequality and poverty increase.

The more rapidly we deplete our natural resources and the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the economy grows. Because we assign no value to our natural capital, we actually count its depreciation as gain, like a factory owner selling off his machinery and counting it as profit.

and the US "Redefining progress", Wikipedia on the Genuine Progress Indicator with a link to the one article that is a must read if you can only read one. (But you need a subscription or to go to the library to get it.)

"If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?" by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe. Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, pp. 59-78.

Also see: Wake Up, the American Dream is over, Guardian, June 8, 2006:

Even America's richest think they're getting too many tax breaks from a government determined to keep the poor in their place. As poverty in the US grows, Paul Harris wonders what happened to the Land of Opportunity

This flawed accounting is like your child suddenly discovering that they can buy things on your credit card or their cell phone without having to "pay anything" and going on a spree. The result of that flawed perception, as we've demonstrated in our Systems Dynamics class, is that things just look just great, better than normal in fact, in a climbing curve until they abruptly hit the limit when it crashes to zero. This is what happened to the Georges Bank, once the best fishing in the world off Cape Cod, now an underground desert and junk yard.

People only respond to things they see, that seem real to them.

Supplies Dwindle at Food Pantries as Financing Bill Stalls in Washington New York Times Oct 18, 2007. by Winter Miller. emphasis added.

On a recent weekday at the BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger, one of Brooklyn’s largest food pantries, shelves that are usually piled high with staples like rice and canned meats were empty, a stark illustration of the crisis facing emergency food providers across the city.

The Brooklyn organization is among about 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens supplied by the Food Bank for New York City, the largest distributor of free food in the city, whose mission has been crippled by what officials describe as its worst food shortage in years.

At its sprawling warehouse in Hunts Point, in the Bronx, the Food Bank is storing about half what it housed in recent years....

“It’s the first time in a few years that I could walk into the warehouse and see empty shelves,” said Lucy Cabrera, the president and chief executive of the Food Bank, which helps feed about 1.3 million people a year.

Officials at the Food Bank say the bare shelves stem from a steady decline in federal emergency food aid, though a farm bill stalled in the United States Senate could increase that aid.

According to a study to be released today by the Food Bank and Cornell University, New York City receives a little more than half the amount of emergency food annually from the federal government that it did three years ago. The shortfall is occurring as the number of families and individuals relying on soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City has risen to 1.3 million from 1 million since 2004.

The problem besetting the citywide Food Bank is also affecting providers of emergency food nationwide who are supplied by America’s Second Harvest, the country’s largest hunger relief organization, which assists 50,000 providers. Federal food donations to food banks have been stagnant since 2002.

But organizations have been hit hardest by declines in a separate federal program that buys excess crops like peaches and potatoes from farmers and then donates them to food banks. Those donations have shrunk to 89 million pounds last year from 251 million pounds in 2003.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, says he is optimistic that the farm bill will pass within the next month. He said the delay involved sections of the bill unrelated to the nutrition portion.

Separately, the House of Representatives voted in July to increase the budget for food stamps and other nutrition programs by $4 billion, which would include an increase in emergency food assistance to $250 million from $140 million. It also would require an automatic increase in food assistance based on the rate of inflation, addressing one of the reasons food banks are now struggling.

“It’s devastating,” said the Rev. Melony Samuels, a minister at the Full Gospel Tabernacle of Faith who oversees the food pantry. “It has gotten so bad.”

In better times, the pantry might get 190 cases of assorted foods every week; now the shipments are much smaller. One recent week, all it got was six cases of peanut butter and pasta.

“In order to keep food on our shelves, we need to roll in $5,000 per month easily, and you’re looking at half or less of that coming in,” Ms. Samuels said, adding that she might not be able to stock her pantry with turkeys for Thanksgiving.

See also: Flash, US Solves World Hunger

By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 16, 2006; A01

The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."