PISA - OECD Programme for International Student Assessment

Comparison of students in the OECD countries was in the news today, with the latest report on science and math among 15-year olds. I want to present a contrary view, that "individual" performance that matters today, now, this decade, has little to do with math and science, and a lot to do with how we interact with and relate to each other. That's where we should be looking.

A typical AP news item is here "Other Countries' Students Surpass the U.S. on Tests" and the actual Programme for International Student Assessment report is here. US scores for reading are not included, since, ironically, the printed test in the US was not proofread adequately and was offset a page, making all the references to "the diagram on the facing page" nonsensical.

The report itself is 350 pages, and even the executive summary is 56 pages long. Results for the US are rather dismal, and you can read those yourself. A few highlights that I thought were interesting related to differences between males and females, which I quote further below.

I object to the entire test, not as being "wrong" so much as being misleading and supporting the efforts to "teach to the test" we see in the US, and certainly here in Michigan.

Local news shows that the areas called "social studies", "civics", group music, literature, history, government, and humanities in general, as well as team sports, are being neglected or eliminated in order to improve school rankings and funding. Ratings of schools in New York City recently have created a hornet's nest of debate over "corrective action" required for "bad schools."

I've thought about these issues most of my life. Early in my life, I taught one year at the high-school level in trade school, 10th-12th grade "problem students" from a tri-county area in upstate New York. I taught MBA's for two years at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. And I've spent most of my adult life in a large university setting, paying attention to educational issues. At Cornell University, at one point, I was the Director of Institutional Planning and Analysis, and very focused on long-term directions in education. I'm currently involved with work involving "leadership training" and quality improvement among teams and executives.

And, my undergraduate major was Physics, heavy on the Math, with a lot of Computer Science thrown in, at which I did very well, so I'm not speaking as one biased against something I can't do, motivated by "sour grapes."

But I have to say that, after a lifetime watching this issue, I don't believe that an increased focus on "science, math, and reading" is where we need to be focusing our attention.

There are two crucial assumptions behind this focus on science and math in this multi-level world we live in. One assumption, on the individual level, is that a child in the US, say, can get the best future for himself or herself by seeking to become excellent in these areas, and in fact to become competitive with international students for good jobs. The other assumption is that, if many or most students succeeded at this goal, things would be much better for the country as a whole -- economically, on a corporate level, militarily, and in terms of the quality of our health and daily lives.

Both assumptions seem patently false to me. They represent the worst of denial, "tooth-fairy" wishful thinking, and unexamined models of how things work.

Regarding the first assumption, the US is so far in the hole at this point, after years of neglect and unjustified self-confidence, that the odds we can make our students individually competitive in a global marketplace are very low, in my judgment. We have a whole generation, if not two, of teachers in place who don't really understand their own subject areas. We have an ethic and status quo of speaking and reading only one language, and being proud of not doing very well at that.

And, we have a hugely anti-intellectual culture in many places, where students attempting to excel are punished by their peers. In fact, the only thing US students seem to rank highest on, based on research studies, is their self-esteem. In other words, there is a disconnect between how they actually perform and how they think of themselves as performing. At that, the USA seems to excel.

This has been a long time coming, and the resistance to the perception of a problem is deep, despite vivid descriptions of this by educators, industrial leaders like Bill Gates and Ross Perot, etc. In the late 1980's, the B-school at Cornell considered setting up an outreach program in Europe, and did a survey of alums living there to get a sense of what we should be teaching. The answers were uniform and startling. Basically, they were a mix between laughter and scorn that the US management education had anything to offer Europe. We weren't even in the running.

Meanwhile, our graduate schools have been making it in science and engineering only by a huge influx of foreign students, in some cases 70% of the graduate student body, because we couldn't find qualified American students. In the life sciences, the ratio seems more like 90% from walking around and peering into labs, but I don't know the exact numbers. It seems clear that, if China stopped sending graduate students and post-docs, the Life Science mission in Michigan would be essentially gutted.

So, the top 10% of our students might be able to compete in that marketplace, but it's just not clear to me that the other 90% of them will stand much of a chance, in the next decade, of catching up. The odds would shift if we could use the power of television and marketing to market multi-lingual, multi-cultural education, familiarity with the world, and an ethic of hard work and putting off present pleasure to invest in the future benefits. Instead, despite whip-cracking from above and jawboning about a need for education, the country seems to be heading towards increased parochialism and isolationism, rejection of science, rejection of reading, and focusing on instant gratification and distracting "entertainment" as the end-point of life.

This seems to me part of a consistent and predictable pattern of denial of inconvenient truth, combined with a helpless/hopeless syndrome, combined with a startling inability, at every level, to carry on reasoned discussion and reach agreement on "hard issues". As I'm writing this, the Michigan government still hasn't sorted out the budget, due last October 1st. The Federal Government is ten days from either a shutdown, or a bitter "showdown", knock-down, screaming public battle over the budget, also due last October 1st. Social security is probably out of control. Health care costs are clearly out of control.

Oh, and the credit markets and home mortgages are out of control. The US debt passed $9 trillion, almost half of which was incurred during the current administration and is accelerating in the wrong direction, out of control, and for that matter almost entirely out of sight of most citizens who either don't know, don't care, or care but feel helpless to do anything about it. It is unmentioned in the political debates. Whatever is going on in the middle East isn't impressing anyone either.

So, I have to ask, what fraction of that mess would be improved if all the participants were simply better at math and science?

Right. Essentially none of it. We are not dying, as a country, because of a lack of math and science. It is something else entirely.


We are dying, I would suggest, from an inability to work together and to reason together and to make hard choices together.

So, now we get to the second assumption I refer to well above, that if only we had more technology, oh boy, then things would be fine for the country, you betcha.

Not.

I'm not a Luddite. We don't have to return our technology to the store and get a refund since it didn't work as advertised, although that's an interesting thought. This "better life" we citizens were promised seems to be less and less likely. The promise of having world control and dominion through advanced technology and weaponry also seems to be surprisingly distant.

Maybe, it is not true that "technology will save us." Either individually or collectively.

If more of the same results in more of the same, I'd say we're going the wrong direction.

So, before we rush off to focus what's left of our national treasure on a solution to our problems, we need to have a serious look at whether we're addressing the right problem, and, if so, are we doing it with an intervention that has any chance at all of working as designed. We need to be alert to signs of wishful thinking and denial and avoiding hard-choices and painful subjects, or subjects which produce high-emotions and social conflict.

What about the argument that if we just had more math and science, that level of logical thinking would fix everything? I have to look at our centers of academic wisdom, our universities, and ask how good a job they do at dealing with internal conflicts and making hard choices. I am not impressed. They don't make the choice that a world composed almost entirely of highly trained people, who are strong in math and science, seems to be any better than the rest of us at making hard choices and managing its own affairs.

I referred in an earlier post to the University of Oxford, which has been in business for over 1100 years now. If there was any place that highly educated people should have had a chance to sort out these issues, you'd expect to find it there. Yet what I read in their on-line documents is that they have spent years arguing over what e-mail system to use, and cannot reach any resolution on the issue.

Would more math and science knowledge help them out? I doubt it. Do they just "need more time" on the exam? I doubt it.

Frankly, I'd suggest doing this. Take technology off the table entirely. Imagine for a moment, as I have, that the problem is not that we have insufficient math and science and engineering to be able to thrive and prosper and be healthy and happy as individuals and as companies and as a society.

Then, hmm, what is the problem? Where is this process of prosperity-reaching breaking down?

Whether it is a symptom or a root-cause, it's clear that our ability to get together, put our heads together, and come to grips with our own problems is not very good. In fact, it probably deserves a failing grade, based on how well the annual budgets are coming along and how civil and rational the discussion is about selection of the next US president.

So, back to my opinion of this whole PISA - Programme for International Student Assessment.

It appears to me that the mental model of that assessment is that only one level matters of the multi-leveled biological world of life that we live in - and that is the "individual." And even there, I find the conclusions unhelpful.

I think we need to take that level off the table as well, keeping technology off it, and say, yes, but what else is needed to make this baby fly?

Very bright individuals, by themselves, can deal with some issues -- fewer these days than you'd think, after accounting for not only internal roadblocks like depression and unexplained fatigue and ill-health, but for external roadblocks in getting almost anything done - which is like trying to get anywhere on an airplane this holiday season in the short 2-3 hours that you'd think a jet aircraft could deliver.

In fact, that's a perfect example. We have jet aircraft, that can go 550 miles per hour, and cross the country, potentially, in 4 hours. Yet, to travel from Detroit to Miami, say, for Christmas, it would be good to leave, oh, 1-3 days for the trip.

Would it help if we had even faster planes? Nope. We've run out of what we can buy with faster individual planes, and need to look at how the system of many planes, interacting, behaves.

This is exactly what's going on with education. We've run out of what we can by with brighter individuals, and need to look at the system of how many individuals, interacting, behaves.

Pouring our remaining bank-account into making faster planes or brighter individuals have equally likely chances of fixing the problems, which are not at the individual level but at the "system" level.

Now, this is nuanced and subtle. The behavior at the system level is dependent on what sort of internal decision-making and behavior-generating rules individuals use. If you change the nature of the individuals, you will definitely change the nature of the emergent system behavior. All research in complex systems shows that.

So, I come full circle. The "problem" has to do with something "wrong" inside individuals that our educational system should strive to make "right' -- but the something has close to nothing to do with math and science, per se.

Yes, maybe if science advanced another 200 years at the speed it's going, you could get to the root problem that direction, but we don't have 200 years, so that's not very helpful.

We need to leap ahead, pull our heads out of the box, climb a tree, and see where this path goes.

It seems to me that a closer first-approximation to where the "wrongness" is that we need to address is suggested by words like: morality, integrity, honesty, humility, sincerity, trust, compassion, civility. In fact, a really big word is this one: maturity.

As a society, in the US, the term "adult" or "mature" seems to have been hijacked to mean "old enough to buy pornography and alcohol and cigarettes and drive a car and generally behave like an adolescent jerk and not have to listen to anyone anymore or take advice about anything."

What the educational situation highlights instead is that the US students are the world leaders in what could be termed pride, arrogance, self-esteem, or conceit. Which means they are also world leaders in unawareness of reality or denial of same.

Which means they are breaking precisely the key feedback loop required for any adaptive entity to, well, adapt to changed conditions in its environment -- namely, it has to be aware of the gap between where it is and where it should be, and it has to be responding to that awareness.

Of course, awareness of a gap produces internal conflict, that seeks to be resolved. It will, in fact, be resolved, come what may. So, if the gap cannot be closed, then the awareness of it will generally be shut off instead. That seems to be what has happened here. We don't want to be so far behind, we don't like being behind, it doesn't reflect well on our leadership to be behind, we can't deal with being behind, so we will effectively agree to ignore it and act as if it doesn't matter one bit to us. And maybe it will go away.

Not.
Summary so far:

• Houston, we have a serious problem here.
• It's not going away.
• In fact, it seems to be getting worse.
• Pouring another decade of math and science into it looks unlikely to help, on any level.
• Technology will not save us this time.

and

• We are going to have to grow up and learn how to act like adults and work with each other and with hard-choices and sacrificing some short-term desires for long-term needs, and some personal desires for some social requirements of continued existence.
  

In other words, the "individual" performance that matters today, now, this decade, has little to do with math and science, and a lot to do with how we interact with and relate to each other.

That's what we need to develop metrics and tests for, and that's what we need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to do, since we obviously don't know it now.

And, incidentally, that's why so much of this weblog is devoted to "religion" and "social feedback".

There are things outside science that we need to get good at, whether science can help us with them or not. If you get past the high-profile single-issue religious zealots, a large fraction of what religious people are trying to tell scientists is the above message.

I care less about whether life was created in 7 days or 7 billion years than I do whether people have some basis on which to grow up and deal with each other that doesn't involve killing the other party as the only imagined "solution." All major religions attempt to provide such a basis.

Scientists say that atheistic philosophy can serve the same purpose, but that's not obviously true based on any society that has thrived based on technology, absent some embedding religion.

The problems we face as a society are not "in the box" or "in the org chart" that science is good at dealing with. They are in the context, the "white space" between boxes, where, historically, science and mathematics have not gone. To be fair, science is increasingly aware that there is something important going on in this "complex adaptive living system" space.

Our solutions involve things like "norms" and the word "should", which are areas, again, that science, trying to fight off a legacy of "proof by intimidation or inquisition" thought it could get away from by being scrupulously "objective" and "distant" .

While there can be a lot of debate about which "norm" is "right", I'd suggest that norms which result in the destruction of all life on the planet, or of our own society, are probably worth re-examining. It would seem to be a wiser choice to select our norms from the set of norms that actually generate a future for us.

That issue can be thought about scientifically, maybe even at some point using mathematics or simulation and animation to gain insight about the implications, downstream, of processes too complex for our finite brains to comprehend.

These advances require focusing attention on how people relate, how they work together, what works and what doesn't, what's worked out how in the past, what works in different cultures and countries, etc. But, those are the humanities, the subjects that "science and math" fixations are driving out of our school systems.

We have to address how we "should" treat each other. It's a hard issue. It's a bootstrap issue, because our inability to face and deal well with conflict and emotion and differing perspectives makes it hard to deal with precisely those issues.

So, it's a feedback loop. We need to spiral it towards better mutual understanding, not away from that. We need to take on pain to do that. And face reality. Both of which we cannot do in a single step, but these have to be approached slowly, hesitantly, but insistently.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that seems relevant. "I will speak the truth, even if my voice shakes."

The answer is over there, I think.

==========
I promised some interesting information from the PISA executive summary, so here it is.

Males and females showed no difference in average science performance in the majority of countries, including 22 of the 30 OECD countries. In 12 countries, females outperformed males, on average, while males outperformed females in 8 countries. Most of these differences were small. In no OECD country was the gender difference larger than 12 points on the science scale.

This is different from reading and mathematics where significant gender differences were observed.

However, similarities in average performance mask certain gender differences: In most countries, females were stronger in identifying scientific issues, while males were stronger at explaining phenomena scientifically. Males performed substantially better than females when answering physics questions.

Reading is the area with the largest gender gaps. In all OECD countries in PISA 2006 , females performed better in reading on average than males. In twelve countries, the gap was at least 50 score points.

Photo credits:
Amish barn raising (Swarming) by heyburn3 (click on it to go there).
Team crossing stream photo credit: Ollieda
Houston Graphic by the author.

Why we don't need more water ( or energy supplies)

It turns out that finding more water is one of the worse thing that can happen to us-in-the-long-run -- what makes this a problem is that more water would be great for us-in-the-short-run.

Any environment has a natural limit or "carrying capacity". Growth of the population rises in a "S-shaped curve", slowly at first, then rapidly, then hits a limit near the carrying capacity. What happens then depends of whether we've altered or used up the environment in the meantime.

If the only thing that changed is us, then we can happily go on at that limit state. If we're using up the environment, the limit state will start dropping. If we're growing rapidly while using up the environment, we'll grow in a faster and faster rising exponential curve until it's all gone, and then the population will plummet like a stone to zero.

That's pretty much what we did with the Georges Banks, once the richest fishing spot in the world. It seemed an endless charge card, and we used it up, and now it's gone.

Recent article have describe what's going on with water worldwide. By finding more water, we raised the limit, and the population started surging -- but at the same time we're using up the water since we're way past a sustainable rate of use, so the inevitable result will be that a crash is coming.

In India, something like 20 years ago everyone discovered electric water pumps that could pull water up from the underground natural reservoir, the aquifer. Suddenly, they could grow more crops and support more people, so farms and people boomed, using up the aquifer at an increasing rate. Academics warned that this was going to crash, but no one paid much attention. Now, the water is running out, but there are way more people affected. The crash now will be much worse than it would have been if there were no water-pumps.

Similarly, the Western US and the Southeast around Atlanta have been growing rapidly while water supplies were dwindling. The change in climate has hastened the day of reckoning, to maybe Christmas of this year, when the water will run out for Atlanta. This never happened before, there, so no one really believed it could happen or prepared for it. They're talking about builiding plants to desalinate sea water now.

China is building huge pipelines to move water from the south to the north.

But, here's the thing. Finding more water won't help, in the long run - it will just make things worse on a global scale. It only moves the limit up a little and doesn't change the equations. It puts off the day of reckoning a little more, and makes it way worse when it comes. It's like being in debt and getting a new credit card, which is used to take on more debt.

Water, it is forgotten, has one primary purpose in life - it takes out the trash. More precisely, it moves our own trash "downstream" into someone else's yard. It doesn't actually make the trash "go away" entirely, just "out of sight, out of mind." So, the US dumps a huge amount of toxic chemicals into the rivers that feed the Mississippi, and they all concentrate near New Orleans, and kick the cancer rate way up there.

Say we had more clean water upstream, would that help? More flushing and less concentration so life is good, we might think. Wrong. Being humans, and short sighted, we, collectively, will go "ah, problem solved!" and do what? We'll build more factories and import or grow more people, until we run out of water again. Now the amount of waste going downstream is twice what it was before.

But it goes away then right? Well, it goes into the ocean. killing life there. There is a huge dead zone around the mouth of the Mississippi.

The more water we get, the faster re run this cycle, the more industry or crops or cattle we grow, the more waste we produce, the larger the ocean's dead zone gets.

If we keep this up, we will kill the entire ocean, in our lifetimes. Finding new ways to desalinate the ocean near the shore will increase the rate, and produce huge piles of concentrated waste next to the desalination plants that well will, well, take out and dump in the ocean of course. Far enough out that no one notices. We'll simply take it out ... "beyond the environment" as the next video clip describes.

Here's an Australian comedy teams take on what happens after the front fell off an oil tanker, dumping 20,000 tons of burning oil into the sea. This is too funny! Please pass it on!

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=wl5emy3je0


Unfortunately, the government official's thinking is widely shared. The older generations grew up when the Earth was "limitless", and can't get into their heads that times have changed. 6 billion people and globe-spanning industry is much bigger than 1 billion people and cottage industries.

So if we do discover "unlimited energy" (say in the Caspian area) and "free water" (due to desalination plants), then a few people will get very rich, we'll have 10 billion starving people instead of 5 billion, and the ocean will die entirely, if global warming doesn't get us first. That will lead to "conflict" over what's left, and a war that will make the survivors unhappy they got into that mess in the first place.

What we need to do instead is stop trying to put off confronting the issues and face them head on and deal with them. The strategy of putting things off at the cost of making them worse is just digging us deeper. They say, when in a hole, "stop digging".

Here's some basic principles to count on. The time to fix the roof is when it is not raining. The time to deal with this problem is now, not when it becomes so huge it is "unavoidable."

Because of the simple equations of growth, things will only go downhill from here, unless we cope with the basic issues and learn how to resolve conflicts and stop this endless trying to build up enough of everything to "dominate" everyone else and "win" the world as a prize. Competition on a small scale may have been helpful, but on the scale we're up to now, it's destructive.

There will never be an easier time to deal with this than right now. As the population and industrial base expands, the pressures and conflicts will simply get worse and worse, and it will be harder and harder to calm people down and have a rational discussion.

So, in the Toyota Way, instead of passing this problem on to our children, we need to stop here and "fix it." There is nothing we want, nothing anyone wants, at the end of the road of international competition for dominance. No one can win.

So, we need to start thinking of alternative ways to define our lives and the meaning of our industry. But we need to do it now.

Whole nations, like China and India and Indonesia are racing to go down the path the US has taken, while in the US the average person's life is probably harder now than it was in 1950. Back then only one person needed to work one job to support an entire household. Now both spouses work multiple jobs, are burned out, and the house may be foreclosed anyway.

How is that better? Why exactly would other nations want to be "more like us"? In some ways some people are way better off, but in some ways many people are worse off than people were two generations ago. The progress has been very expensive in human terms and not participated in by everyone. That matters a lot.

In the mean time, we seem to be trying to get to where the average billionaire will have $50 billion instead of $1 billion. I guess I don't really believe that happiness cannot be found at the $1 billion level. This is some kind of pathology that drives initially sane people past constructive commerce into an ever more desperate need that cannot ever be met to be, I guess, "number one" in a world that is like the magic dice, where there is no best, so no amount of money or power will ever succeed in finding it.

I just wish all the people who had a billion dollars already would just get together on their yachts and decide that was enough, it's time to do something different. Here's an idea - why don't we put the extra money into completing the planet as a planet-sized healthy and smart thing, and then we'll conquer space travel and faster-than-light travel easily, and then every billionaire can have an entire planet of their very own! Wouldn't that be more fun than just fighting over what's left of this shrinking planet, guys?


W.

Science meets religion

Speakers at the National Press Club presented new initiatives by the Center for Inquire-Transnational, according to an article in [November 16,2006] Washington Post. I'll summarize the article here and go on below to comment on the philosophy.

Think Tank Will Promote Thinking
Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public Policy

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 15, 2006; A19

Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of strict church-state separation yesterday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote "rationalism" as the basis of public policy.

The brainchild of Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, the small public policy office will lobby and sometimes litigate on behalf of science-based decision making and against religion in government affairs.

The announcement was accompanied by release of a "Declaration in Defense of Science and Secularism," which bemoans what signers say is a growing lack of understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry and the value of a rational approach to life.

"This disdain for science is aggravated by the excessive influence of religious doctrine on our public policies," the declaration says. "We cannot hope to convince those in other countries of the dangers of religious fundamentalism when religious fundamentalists influence our policies at home."

"Unfortunately, not only do too many well-meaning people base their conceptions of the universe on ancient books -- such as the Bible and the Koran -- rather than scientific inquiry, but politicians of all parties encourage and abet this scientific ignorance," reads the declaration, which was signed by, among others, three Nobel Prize winners.

Kurtz, ...said the methods of science,..., "are being challenged culturally in the United States today as never before."

Several speakers also had strong words for the media, ...

Lawrence M. Krauss, an author and theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said the scientific community has done a "poor job" of explaining its logic and benefits to the public....

The goals of the new group are to establish relationships with sympathetic legislators, provide experts to give testimony before Congress, speak publicly on issues when they are in the news, and submit friend-of-the-court briefs in Supreme Court cases involving science and religion. The Center for Inquiry-Transnational, a nonprofit organization, is funded by memberships.

=================
My analysis of that:

There are at least three hypotheses in contention in the policy arena:
1) All religion is bunk and should be replaced by science
2) All science is bunk and should be replaced by religion
3) Science and religion are compatible

The "Center for Inquiry - Transnational" seems to be firmly in position #1.

Position #2 is subdivided into incompatible parts by actually being
2) All science (and also your religion) is bunk and should be replaced by (my) religion.

Position #3 is also subdivided into two distinct cases
3a) -- Separate but equal: so long as religion stays in its place, and science stays in its place, and the two never meet in the middle, they are "compatible". A significant number of researchers and scientists are in this camp.
3b) -- ultimately compatible: there is only one reality which has multiple valid views, the "incompatibility" between religion and science is largely due to misunderstanding, and religion(s) and science need to be brought together and reworked into a new paradigm that embraces both.

Position #3 is certainly is my own working hypothesis and is the way I understand the Baha'i Faith as well. I present this here less as an advertisement and more to make the case that "religion" is perfectly capable of embracing multiple viewpoints and scientific principles, and does not automatically equate to "fanatic" or "closed-minded" or "intolerant."

We need to distinguish, as it were "the baby" and "the bathwater."

Baha'i Social principles include:

• full equality between women and men in all departments of life and at every level of society.
• harmony between science and religion as two complementary systems of knowledge that must work together to advance the well-being and progress of humanity.
• the elimination of all forms of prejudice.
• the establishment of a world commonwealth of nations.
• recognition of the common origin and fundamental unity of purpose of all religions.
• spiritual solutions to economic problems and the removal of economic barriers and restrictions.
• the abolition of extremes of wealth and poverty.

One of the most insidious forms of prejudice is racism, about which the Baha'is stated position is:

Racism is the most challenging issue confronting America. A nation whose ancestry includes every people on earth, whose motto is E pluribus unum, whose ideals of freedom under law have inspired millions throughout the world, cannot continue to harbor prejudice against any racial or ethnic group without betraying itself.

The nature of "competing" versus "complementary" views

Let me bring this topic back to "systems thinking," the theme of this weblog. It is generally recognized in software systems analysis that most complex systems are larger than the human brain can comprehend in a single view or perspective.

Here's a quote from a current best practices technical textbook by Nick Rozanski and Eoin Woods, entitled Software Systems Architecture - Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 2005) :

If you read the more recent literature on software architecture, one of the first useful discoveries you will make is the concept of an architectural view. An architectural view is a description of one aspect of a system's architecture and is an application of the timeless problem-solving principle of "divide and conquer." By considering a system's architecture through a number of distinct views, you can understand, define, and communicate a complex architecture in a partitioned fashion and thus avoid overwhelming your readers with it's overall complexity.... Using viewpoints and views to guide the architecture definition process is a core theme of this book.

Many people are working right now on the problems we've created for ourselves by partitioning the scientific viewpoint of the world into silos which may seldom speak with each other. A major axis along which such silo-building has occured is the scale of activity within life on the earth. So we have cellular scientists, and tissue scientists and individual-being studying scientists and those that study small groups of people and those that study huge collections of people. It's increasingly clear that public health problems cross those artificial historical divisions.

Until recently, scientists who dealt with parts of reality that could be studied in isolation (with open causal pathways and no feedback) couldn't even comprehend or tolerate the work of scientists who deal with parts of reality that cannot be studied in isolation (with complex systems, intractable feedback). The whole nature of "causality" and "the scientific method" are being revamped and revitalized to deal with complex systems. Let's see where that gets us.

The R21 research RFA I mentioned in an earlier post (Houston, we have another problem!) is an effort precisely to cross those artificial barriers between models of the world at different scales and levels of abstraction.

Earlier this week, the National Institutes of Health (in the U.S.)
announced the availability of $3M to fund approximately 10 projects
designed to facilitate "Interdisciplinary Research via Methodological
and Technological Innovation in the Behavioral and Social Sciences."
Complete details about the grant program are available online at:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-RM-07-004.html

In some ways all I'm saying is that, if you keep going up in scale, you'll come to a scale where issues commonly termed "religious" or possibly "theological" are the current common way of modeling and investigating and understanding what mankind has observed about itself over millenia.

It is not surprising that the tools, concepts, and approaches are different from those used by civil engineers. Sociologists and psychologists and biologists disagree all the time. That doesn't say anything about whether the data are ultimately compatible in a more comprehensive model.

We have all heardthe story of the blind men who encounter an elephant, with one finding the tail, one finding a leg, one finding the ear, and arguing about whether they have come across a
huge rope, or a tree, or a huge blanket, or whatever.

What's really pivotal here is that these differences do not automatically make the viewpoints incompatible. "Incompatible" would mean that the viewpoints cannot be reconciled into being fully valid points in a larger picture. The viewpoints of the elephant can be reconciled, and must be, if one is to understand what an "elephant" is.

The question of incompatible is this: after accounting for the different observers' perspectives and viewpoints, are the observations still irreconcilably different?

Humans are not born understanding that others see the world differently than they do. Two very hard facts to accept are (1) sometimes both viewpoints are "right", and (2) sometimes the other person's viewpoint is "right" and your own, regardless how obviously true it is to you, is wrong.

Some of this accounting for viewpoint or "frame" or "reference frame" or "perspective" is something we do every day. If I look at people in the distance, I could say - "Look, people get smaller as they move farther away from me." Then other people could say "No, you're wrong, you get smaller as you move away from me!" Possibly they could fight a war in which "size matters" and battle over who it is that "get's smaller". In point of fact, of course, no one "gets smaller" they just "look smaller".

Why discarding "religion" as a whole is a very bad idea:

Actually, it's ironic that many scientists, who spend all day trying to isolate their work from the rest of reality in order to study it, now abruptly seem to realize that science itself is a social activity and only takes place in a social context.

Yes, religion and spirituality are similar to gasoline and can alternately blow up in your face, or move your fleet of automobiles. The recent work in top-performing organizations, and high-reliability organizations, all point to a need for some key traits to make them work: honesty, integrity, and compassion - variables that religions have kept central for thousands of years, despite their having "no place" in science as it was practiced. "Scientific" and machine-based models of humans, business, and commerce have resulted in as much human carnage as spiritually based models - more, in fact, when the destructive power of mankind was amplified and the integrative, compassionate side demeaned and neglected.

In fact, isn't it precisely because "science" has built huge new technologies of mass destruction and climate change, but neglected the equivalent tools of reintegration and wholeness preached by religion, that we now face the prospect of demolishing our entire planet?

I'd argue that our best route is not to despise and discard religions of the world, but to understand what it is they were trying to tell us and ask ourselves if that's not something we need to hear.

[originally posted 11/16/06 on my other weblob, cscwteam.blogspot.com ]