Science, religion, and business - three ways of seeing life

Science, religion, and business may capture three different ways of knowing about life. They seem to correspond to the "near field", "far field", and "intermediate field" properties of a radiating antenna.

What does that mean and how is it helpful?

This isn't a math lesson but one example may be useful, so here it is:

When physicists or engineers analyze electromagnetic waves radiating from an antenna, something unfamiliar appears: there are three different worlds, that tell different stories. The worlds appear initially to be in total conflict with each other, yet they can't be.

Very near the antenna, much closer than one wavelength of the signal, the radiated power appears to follow one law - it may clearly fall off as (1/r) where r is the radial distance away.
The measurements and math are quite clear and easy to do. The answer is clear.

Very far from the antenna, many wavelengths away, the radiated power clearly can be measured to fall off as (1/(r*r*r)) or 1 over r-cubed. The measurements and math are easy to do. The answer is clear. (but different from the one above).

And, in between, the equations are a mess, measurements are much harder to make sense of, and a third world applies, possibly the field varies as the inverse square of the distance.

What's the point? The point is that all three observers and measurements are "right", from their point of view.

These really do seem to have a lot of resemblance to the ways of knowing the world that are described by science, business, and religion respectively. Science tends to be very accurate and short-range, specializing is studying phenomena that can be studied "in isolation" - the core of the "scientific method". Religion tends to be very far-range, specializing in dealing with the biggest picture one can get - everything, with all the parts connected together, over all space and time.

And business tends to occupy the very messy place in the middle, often despised by both sides.
From science's viewpoint, business thinking is too messy and imprecise. It is "unclean." It deals with too much at once.

From religion's viewpoint, business is too down-to-earth and pragmatic and short-sighted. It is unclean. It deals with too little. Like "science" it is viewed as neglecting the very important human and non-quantitative factors that are critical.

So, this is the world into which "system thinking" and "system dynamics" really comes to play, trying to cross the gap from the "science" world where things can be studied separately, into the business world, where it seems everything happens at once and nothing can be known with certainty. It is a world where action is more important than study, where feedback from motion has more wisdom in it than any amount of analysis from a static point of view.

It is a world perhaps like the one birds occupy, where static vision may not be very good, but high-speed motion vision is astoundingly good, and they can fly through a tree of twigs at 40 miles per hour without hitting something. It's a different way of seeing.

And, one of the unspoken and perhaps unrealized terrors of systems thinking is that, by legitimizing the concept of looking "upwards", some legitimacy spills over into the concept of "religious studies" of the world - the perceived arch-enemy of science.

Like a rock-climber on a cliff face, the question is how to include a little more within one's grasp, without holding so little now that one slides off the cliff to one's death below. What's always worked before is the commandment and teaching to narrow one's view an focus, to cut down scope, to consider less. As one moves towards the intermediate field, the complexity rises as does opportunity for error.

This model does raise the new idea that the complexity doesn't rise forever - in fact, the complexity goes up, but then goes back down again, and, at a high enough level, the complexity gets back down to a manageable level. In physics, this happens in thermodynamics, when you stop looking at molecules and start looking at "a gas". The area inbetween is a mess. Single molecules are relatively easy to study, as are large-scale gases.

So, one issue for systems dynamics is how much more to include in the boundaries. It may be that "more is less", and that adding some additional factors make the model harder, but adding more and refactoring to a larger scale may make that complexity, legitimately, go away again.

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 ]

The blind leading the blind

Today's Washington Post has a piece "Is Atheism Just a Rant Against Religion", discussing the differences between the current social movements of "atheism" and "humanism." (May 26,2007, by Benedicta Cipolla). He notes that

At a recent conference marking the 30th anniversary of Harvard's humanist chaplaincy, organizers sought to distance the "new humanism" from the "new atheism."

In reflecting on that question, I recalled a quote by former US Defense Secretary Rumsfield, quoted here:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, known for his straight-talking, no-nonsense rhetoric, was awarded this year's "Foot in Mouth Award" from Britain's Plain English Campaign. Here's the sound bite that won Rumsfeld the honor:

"Reports that say something hasn't happened are interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know."

My undergraduate work was in Engineering Physics, and I like to believe that I "believe in science" and am oriented to realistic concepts that you can use to build neat stuff that actually works. Still, after 6 years of that training, it was eye-opening to me to take a graduate seminar course entitled "The Sociology of Science", taught by the late Professor Dorothy Nelkin. This course explored "Science", with a capital "S", as a social movement and looked at the empirical evidence of how Scientists, individually and in groups, thought of themselves, described themselves, and then, often at odds with that, how they behaved and made decisions

By Science I will include Medical Science.

Before going on, let me, as always, make a warning on properties that depend on scale. The behavior of individual scientists may be quite different than the behavior of Science, just as the motivations and behavior of an individual doctor may be quite different than that of the American Medical Association. We need to keep that in mind.

I like people who are capable of careful observation and rational thought, as many scientists are and pride themselves in. Still, as a whole, the social enterprise of Science seems to me no different from the social enterprise of Religion, and bears some resemblance to the motto of the Math department at Ithaca's High School:

"Often wrong, but never in doubt!"

While I'm slamming groups, let me include both Management and Labor in that group. In fact, all human enterprises seem to have a problem with perception of their own limits. To the extent it means something, so do machines and automated machine-vision systems.

This is related to a famous problem studied by Godel, that, briefly paraphrased, says that there is no way a closed system can prove it is complete - it can only determine that it is self-consistent, at best.

One of the hardest things to perceive is our own blind spots.

The classic example is right in front of you, and you're not perceiving it right now, namely, your own eyeball's blind spots. (see the footnote). In fact, because a "blind spot" in perception is so annoying and distracting, your vision system papers it over, covers it up, and makes you unaware of the gap.

A similar phenomenon occurs at a larger scale, and well all can think of someone who thinks they know more than they do. In fact, some recent studies show that "stupid" people are often completely unaware that they are stupid. Apparently, our ability to perceive our ability goes down faster than our ability -- so as people become drunk, they are not capable of detecting how drunk they are, and are often belligerent if challenged, until they see the police video the next day -- when they sheepishly drop their complaint.

A high IQ is no defense against this type of blindness, as Stephen Jay Gould researched so well in The Mismeasure of Man, showing how huge biases in Science completely fooled even highly competent scientists. For example, when it was "obvious" to them that blacks were an "inferior" race, even scientific measurements of skulls, measured by filling them will buckshot, "showed" that whites had larger cranial capacities than blacks -- an observation that was completely wrong.

So, when Science, as an enterprise, arrives in town an announces that Religion can leave now, because the new kid has a handle on "everything", we should be a little skeptical of how large the gaps are in that "everything."

Since it's hard to see what we don't know, one way to estimate the reliability of Science, or Medical Science, is to look at the historical record. Over the past 3000 years, the record is quite clear and consistent -- at every point in time, Scientists and Doctors are certain that people in the "past" were ignorant, but now, at last, they have the new facts and are correct and have, you know, 98% of the world nailed down perfectly. But, viewed 100 years later, almost nothing they were asserting is seen, by themselves, to be even close to correct. In fact, the process has speeded up. If you walked into a genetics class with a textbook that was 5 years old, they'd tell you to throw it away because it was "out of date".

Hmmm.

So, observation number one, is that, to date, Science's self-confidence has been unjustified, by its own standards, and even what's "known" about the world changes so fast on a daily basis now that what's "known" today may be thrown out tomorrow. Very confident advice given on child-raising, nutrition, ways to deal with forest fires, is regularly overturned -- and yet, Science is astounded when people react poorly to "Trust us! We're Scientists!" or "Trust us! We're Doctors!"

I'm not saying that Science, as a whole, isn't way better than myth and superstition, but, frankly, that's a "low bar." The question for society isn't whether Science is "better than myth", but whether Science, now, at last, has stopped changing its collective mind on everything and, if it has, how complete a picture does it have and has it correctly identified its own blind spots?

Again, I'm afraid the response from Science is basically "We're now confident that we're right about 98% of everything [we see ] that matters [ to us ]." Well, you can drive a truck through the holes in that warranty.

One way to assess how many "bugs" are out of a computer program and how many remain, invisible, lurking to get you later, is to look at the track record of new bugs discovered per month, and see if it has gone to zero. If the track record is still a high number, odds are not good that "the last bug" has been removed. For Science, this number has not gone to zero yet, and society cannot be confident that all significant "bugs" have been removed.

But, there are the two implicit caveats that I highlighted in the quote just above. First, how much of the social world that surrounds us doesn't matter to Science and isn't counted in "the denominator"? The largest category of items in this bucket is described by the term "soft sciences". These are just "minor importance" areas to us -- such as psychology, sociology, raising a family, reducing crime, organization theory, politics, economics, human relationships -- in which the tools of Science didn't really work very well, if at all. Astoundingly (from outside) and almost without a second thought (from inside Science), these were dismissed not as failures of Science, but as "bad problems."

One is reminded of the story of a young boy who was learning to play baseball. After trying to catch three balls in a row in the outfield and missing every one, he came into the dugout, threw his mitt on the ground angrily, and declare "No one can catch a ball in that darned field!"

Again, hmmm.

I think I had noted earlier in my review of Richard Dawkin's attack on religion that his home base, the University of Oxford, described in public documents that they couldn't even agree on what e-mail system to install, and this organizational dysfunction had been going on for years. So here is a case of some of the world's best academics, all in one place, with 1,100 years of practice, and they have not learned how to make decisions yet about their own household.

They probably view this as a minor issue, but I read it as an indictment of the whole theory behind the enterprise of academia -- whatever problems it is they are solving, don't seem to include the ones that are killing us outside the ivied walls. Well, they say, trust us -- we'll get around to the "soft sciences" someday. That's a nice theory, if you don't care about who's dying right now and you imagine academia will continue to be funded happily by society for another thousand years of patient waiting.

OK, so much for failures we can see from outside the enterprise of Science.

The other highlighted caveat in the quote above deals with "everything [ we see ] ".

This raises a much larger question, and the one Don Rumsfield posed somewhat awkwardly as quoted above, is how right Science is about the "everything" that it doesn't even see [yet].

Is there any way that we can estimate or bracket what fraction of what goes on in the universe has even entered our consciousness or line of sight yet? How much is going on right now that we don't even have a clue is out there? That's what Don Rumsfield was trying to ask.

Well, I recall a nice lecture from professor Frank Drake, then at Cornell, the Director of the huge 1000 foot radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. (That's the big "dish" that was featured early in the movie Contact, as well as the site of some gunfights in some James Bond movies.)
I believe he's involved now in the SETI project - Search for extraterrestrial life.

Frank said that one thing that seemed to be consistent was that, every time we looked in a new part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we found not just new sides of things we already knew about, but we also found entirely new things we never dreamed of before. This was true for "optical" astronomy, "radio" astronomy, x-ray astronomy, near-infrared, far-infrared, ultraviolet, you name it.

The classic example early in the days of radio astronomy was the detection of the brightest object in the radio sky (after the sun) in a direction everyone thought was boring to look. It turned out, this was the center of our own galaxy, which also had so much dust in the plane of the galaxy that it was hard to see from Earth. That detection entirely changed our conception of where we were in the galaxy, literally.

In that context, I'd assert my own observation, which is that there is an equivalent effect along the axis of "scale" or size-of-phenomenon. That is, at every new scale we look at, we discover not just a new angle on what we knew about before, but entirely new things that change entirely our picture of the universe we live in and where we fit in it.

And, it's increasingly clear that the "emergent " properties at higher levels are not something that can be determined or even suspected by looking at lower levels of scale. Few scientists, looking at a beaker of "air", would "see" within it the potential for tornadoes and hurricanes.

Or, a water molecule in your kitchen faucet has no concept that it is in a "pipe" that came from a "water tank" on a distant hill, as part of a system assembled by a town of people. It has even less chance of "understanding" your concern about whether a friend will "get into Harvard."

There is, at this time, I am sad to say, no "scientific" way at all, let alone a reliable and validated way, to look "upwards" and see phenomena that are much larger than ourselves in the organizational hierarchy of Life. Our toolkit for detecting "purpose" or "meaning" is empty, even for small scale problems we constructed that have a purpose. Most employees of a company are probably clueless about what the President of the company does with his time, and would only detect the difference if he or she stopped doing it. We live in the local present, and are not aware of efforts or movements that relate to longer term, larger scale possible futures and where, as a whole strategically, the company should "go." In fact we don't understand "go", on a company scale, we only understand "job" and "layoff".

And our Science, for all it can do in technical wizardry, cannot even tell us how to design a small company that will thrive and provide stable employment, let alone design a whole ecosystem of mutually supportive companies, communities, and civic life. It can't tell us, for sure, what to do to lose ten pounds and keep the weight off. It can't tell us what to do so our children don't go of the wrong deep end. And it certainly cannot tell us why it is worth it to get up in the morning and go to work, instead of just throwing in the towel and giving up.

I read in the paper of major initiatives to increase emphasis on "science and technology" in our national school system, so that we can "become competitive."

That seems to me a little like saying the reason we don't have a national medical record system is that we need more powerful computers -- when you can buy a laptop off the shelf with more power than the entire planet had to work with 50 years ago.

Maybe, in the perverse way that complex systems show us is so common, our problem is not that we don't have enough Science, as that we have too much of it, relative to some other things that should matter more. I'm not suggesting a Luddite approach of removing what we have, but, hey, really, if no one developed new technology for the next 100 years, we would get by and maybe we could learn to use what we have.

The problems in organizational structure that have to do with creativity, innovation, reliability, stability, agility -- those are problems that have to do with how human beings relate to each other, not problems of "technology" or "Science." These are the problems that Science said they'd "get to later".

Well, it's "later".

What we're dying on looks to me more like issues of "theory X" versus "theoryY" of management, Positive Psychology, small team cohesion, personal honesty, transparency, and integrity, etc. (See Virtue Drives the Bottom Line) These have to do with "purpose" and "meaning" and "other people."

The more we rip out meaning from our lives and try to replace it with technology, the worse things get - and the worse things get, the more desperate we seem to be to rip out more "humanities" (or humanity) and replace it with technology.

Maybe it's time to recognize that that's a death spiral we need to let go of as an approach.

I don't buy Science's claim that the problem is religion, and if we could only stomp out religion, we'd be able to reach Nirvana -- and our trade deficit with China would be resolved, and our children would be safe.

Instead of trying to kill religion or a particular Religion, maybe we should be trying to listen harder to what Religion is trying to tell us. Maybe there's one of those invisible "gaps" in our understanding.

"Often wrong, but never in doubt."

Interesting motto.

Should the FDA regulate tobacco?

According to the New York Times today, "Report Seeks FDA regulation of Tobacco",

A report from the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, urged Congress and the president to give the Food and Drug administration the authority to regulate tobacco.

Use of tobacco is recognized in Public Health as the second largest cause of premature death in the world today. The World Health Organization estimates that half of the smokers will be eventually killed by that habit, with the death toll 5 million people per year now, and rising.

So, this is a surprising thing. The USA launches a whole occupation army and spent over a trillion dollars because 3000 people were killed. But the same country sits by and watches the tobacco industry kill 5 million people a year, every year, and that's no big deal.

We really need to pause and make sense of these observed facts, and what they can teach us about ourselves.

There is a very long history of attempts to regulate tobacco, which has a specific exemption put in place by our very own Congress, specifically to prevent such regulation. Any consideration of that kind of regulation also has to look at the dismal results when the US tried to regulate the sale of alcohol during "prohibition" with a constitutional amendment.

The Times story continues:

The report said cigarettes contained carcinogens and other dangerous toxins and would be banned if federal laws did not exempt tobacco. A bill before Congress would give the F.D.A. regulatory authority, but the agency’s commissioner, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, expressed skepticism, saying that if nicotine levels were reduced, smokers would change their habits to maintain current levels. The report also called for higher tobacco taxes and a national ban on indoor smoking.

The Johns Hopkins Institute for Tobacco Control estimates that 1 billion people will die prematurely, in the 21st century, from use of tobacco. According to that site, "The Institute for Global Tobacco Control works to prevent death and disease from tobacco use through research, education and policy development."

Apparently, "research, education, and policy development" have not been very successful and solving this problem.

In fact, while non-smoking areas are now commonplace in places wealthy Americans hang out, the companies have only moved operations abroad and expanded them tremendously. The death toll is expected by WHO to double in by 2020, to 10,000,000 people - a year, each year.

I would like to suggest that "research, education, and policy development", while helpful locally, will never solve this problem.

There are two reasons I think that, related to the whole theme of this weblog.

First, our ability to reason about such things is poor. The fixation on numbers in much of Science, and explicit belief by many that only numeric results are meaningful, has short-circuited our ability, as a society, to reason correctly about things that cannot be measured with numbers. Even for things that can be measured with numbers, the fixation on linear statistical models has short-circuited our exploration of feedback models.

In the perverse way of complex systems, our biggest problem is now of our own making. Like the blades of a helicopter, we must travel in our own wake. The very success of the mechanical view of the universe, of Science and technology, and of linear statistical models have made it almost impossible to now move forward from there. These techniques have, effectively, become religions, defended with blind religious zeal against perceived enemies at the gates.

So, when we are confronted with a problem which shimmers and changes with the size and scale of the observer, we are effectively paralyzed. Do tobacco companies kill people? On the scale of populations, the cause and effect is clear and unambiguous, and satisfies all the requirements of causality, except one we'll get to. Raised marketing efforts by tobacco companies precede and have a dose-response relation to the number of people smoking and the number of people dying. Etc. The problem is that if we shift lenses, on the scale of individual humans, this relationship is no longer "causal." Individuals have free will. Any particular individual may or may not respond to marketing efforts by the tobacco industry. The solidity dissolves.

It's not that there is no solidity to the causal argument - it's that the solidity depends on scale, which is a concept that is not yet recognized as pervasive and important.

I go on about this at great length in some other posts. ( Search "scale" or "causal" in the search window above to find them. ) See "Ten most important lessons from physics" for a discussion of how even water pipes have this property. From a human scale, there are entities called pipes, and water towers, and faucets and there are measurable factors like pressure and volume and flow-rates. These seem very solid. But if you drill down to the molecular level, this solidity dissolves. Molecules don't think, or act, or respond to any of that. Those words are meaningless to molecules. Molecules just respond to their local environment, and their neighboring molecules. A given molecule may linger at the pipe wall forever, it doesn't matter.

A few more such examples are given in my post: Amazing devices to impress your friends.
These include hollow tubes that cause air to separate into boiling hot air and air so cold it creates frost, pumps that pump water uphill with no power source and essentially no moving parts, hollow spaces that convert battery power to microwaves in one step with no moving parts, etc. These are all commercial, off-the-shelf devices, not my imagination gone wild.
They also all have the property of being globally causal and locally non-causal. Like the photo of Marilyn Monroe or Einstein, depending on how far back you stand from your monitor, they are both at once and fall into a space we are not taught about in school.

The second reason that "research, education, and policy development" have not been very successful and solving this problem of tobacco-related deaths is that this is a spiritual problem, and it will never yield to technology.

As T. S. Eliot noted, in Choruses from The Rock (1934):

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.

Or, more precisely, the society that is shall shadow the society that pretends to be. Any individual effort to change the situation with respect to tobacco use will fail on two fronts.
First, the industry will fight back, and that is a cross-scale fight that pits corporations against individuals and guess who will win. Second, human weakness will fight back against our best intentions for our own behavior, and we will give in, as we did with alcohol. The latter is what the FDA Commissioner was referring to, in that regulations limiting tobacco per cigarette would only increase the number of cigarettes smoked until the same physiological hit was obtained, making the industry even richer.

In the contest between an individual and a multi-billion dollar corporate marketing campaign, it is not likely the individual will win.

There are exceptions. For instance, the population of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) in Utah has a well-documented life expectancy ten years longer than the average for the US, and one reason is that they prohibit smoking and drinking.

Look what is going on here. It is not the individuals that are fighting off the temptation to smoke or drink, but the larger scale entity, the, gasp, organized religion, that has succeeded where
"research, education, and policy development" have all failed.

One of the youth in our community asked one day "Why do we need organized religion? Why can't we all just worship God on our own?" The answer is visible in Utah -- larger scale entities can do things that smaller scale entities cannot possibly ever, ever, ever do on their own.

This is not a "cognitive" thing. Yielding to temptation and losing ability to deliver on one's own intentions is a function of being disconnected from a larger entity that helps shape and define and support you, and provides you what structural engineers call "active strength." The simple fact is that human beings are heavily influenced by peer pressure, whether they like it or not, or believe it or not, or have IQ's of 200 or 20.

It's not so much a question of which entity to belong to. Pick one that looks good. What matters is belonging to something larger that supports the values you desire your "self" to have.

Life is too complex to go it alone. We've seen to that. The one church that does not work, and will never work, is "rugged individualism." Whether you believe in God or not, or evolution or not, the math is the same - no individual will ever be as strong as a strong group. In the end, strong groups will win. Multi-celluarism always wins out, in the end - it's just a better solution. The fact that you're reading this shows that multi-cellular architecture can work, because that's exactly the operating principle your body uses to orchestrate a trillion cells and get one body. We're swimming in examples of this working.

Wrapping up the social thought - tobacco deaths continue because we accept them. If we, as a society, collectively, decided we didn't want our companies killing 5 million people a year, we could stop that cold. Such an action requires moral conviction and group solidarity of a type that will not come from "research, education, and policy development".

Such an action requires a change of heart.

Change everyone's heart, and the "problem" will dissolve. Suddenly, "we" will be at the same scale as "the problem", and the "problem" will simply evaporate.

So, I'd suggest that focus as the most likely to succeed. It demands that we come to grips with larger questions of society, morality, religion, science, and our own nature. It's not a simple thing to do, but, from the reasoning above, it looks to me like the easiest thing to do that has a chance of working, based on fundamental principles of what's going on here and the evidence at hand of what works and what doesn't.

Religion, like gasoline, is volatile. It releases tremendous energy in people, for good or bad. It can be misused, and it can kill. It can also power our lives with non-polluting ability to cope.

We don't need to throw out religion. We need to understand, when it works, why it works. There is no shorter path to the solution to the problems we've now made for ourselves, and no path that doesn't involve these questions.

One Common Faith

The booklet title One Common Faith , prepared under the supervision of the Baha'i central administrative body (The Universal House of Justice, 2005) has been recommended for group study. The starting point is this:

Ancient sectarian conflicts ... have re-emerged with a virulence as great as anything known before... A world... is warned that it is in the grip of civilizations whose defining character is irreconcilable religious antipathies. (page 7)

I want to bring some concepts from science to the discussion, and show how they fit with the theological and sociological arguments that are in the booklet. In some ways, this is a translation, as best I can, at first pass, of the document into "scientific" terms. It will be imperfect and I'm hoping that, with comments from you, dear reader, it can be improved. Hopefully, the discussion will not cause any additional hostility. ("First of all, do no harm!")

To that end, let me state that I'm going to look at some apparently depressing facts, but the end of the story will be optimistic, hopeful, and action oriented. My take on life is that, despite all the gloom and doom, some aspects of the global community have never been better, and, with the use of the web and instant global communications, we have an opportunity to improve the process that no generation in history has ever had before. This by itself is astounding, and means the past cannot be used to predict the future.

Part of the reason for the resurgence of religion is described in the booklet as the "bankruptcy of the materialist enterprise itself" -- the failure of various efforts whether secular, humanitarian,
social and economic development, modernization, globalization to make good on their promise to improve life for most of us. The promise of "freedom from want [and] fulfilment for the human spirit" has not been met.

I'd note that not only is the gap growing between rich and poor, as has been well document elsewhere, but even within the USA, as I described yesterday, the "economic miracle" seems to be sinking. Gasoline hit $3.59 a gallon in my town yesterday. Housing foreclosures are at record levels. Layoffs abound. Personal savings has gone negative and hit a rate not seen since 1933 in the "Great Depression". Obesity, depression, diabetes, asthma are rising rapidly. And so on while people seem, individually and collectively, numbed into a type of helpless-hopeless passive despair, as I described in "A Patient Dies in Los Angeles" , occasionally breaking out into extreme violence, and resurgences of anger, blame, hate crimes, and racism, individually and collectively. Why isn't this economic model working?


The answer given in One Common Faith, to paraphrase, is that we have "thrown out the baby with the bathwater." Observing the abuses and downside of religious thinking and warfare, our society attempted to break free of those problems by discarding religion and God and adopting a "scientific" and materialistic model where "competition" and "free-markets", it was argued, will produce the best possible social outcomes. Exactly how and why that was supposed to work was vaguely described as "The invisible hand of Adam Smith" or some version of "survival of the fittest", although I can't recall ever seeing a simulation model showing that individual unbridled local self-interest produced the maximum benefit for all and a stable society. (If you know of one, please comment.) And, regardless what any model might show, the actual outcome was described yesterday, and looks more like economic and social ruin than "The Great Society."

On page 12 it is argued that "global integration" has only perpetuated and intensified gross inequities, resulting in

a questioning of all established authority, no longer merely that of religion and morality, but also of government, academia, commerce, the media, and, increasingly, scientific opinion. (p12)

and

Loss of faith in the certainties of materialism and the progressive globalizing of human experience reinforce one another int he longing they inspire for understanding about the purpose of existence. Basic values are challenged; parochial attachments are surrendered; one unthinkable demands are accepted. (para 16)

Despite the tremendous accomplishments of religiously inspired actions in the past, the question is raised as to why people are not turning to that spiritual literature for guidance today - or, if they are turning to it, not finding relevant guidance.

The problem is, of course, twofold. The rational soul does not merely occupy a private sphere, but is an active participant in a social order. Although the received truths of the great faiths remain valid the daily experience of the individual in the twenty-first century is unimaginably removed from the one that he or she would have known in any of those ages when this guidance was revealed. ... In large part therefore, loss of faith in traditional religion has been an inevitable consequence of failure to discover in it the guidance required to live with modernity successfully and with assurance.

A second barrier to a re-emergence of inherited systems of belief as the answer to humanities spiritual yearnings is the effects already mentioned of global integration. Throughout the planet, people raised in a given religious frame of reference find themselves abruptly thrown in close association with others whose beliefs and practices appear at first glance irreconciably different from their own. ...

Each one of what the world regards as independent religions is set in the mould created by its authoritative scripture and its history. As it cannot refashion its system of belief in a manner to derive legitimacy from the authoritative words of its Founder, it likewise cannot adequately answer the multitude of questions posed by social and intellectual evolution. Distressing as this may appear to many, it is no more than an inherent feature of the evolutionary process. ...

The dilemma is both artificial and self-inflicted.
(para 21 and 22)

There are several familiar threads in this section I'd like to


highlight, and bring the experiences of some other fields to bear on. The concepts I'd focus on are these:

1. The idea that "truth" depends on context.
2. The idea that context changes over time.
3. The question of how what should change over time so as to preserve "truth".
4. The question of sliding the respective "truths" of different religious founders across time and comparing them to see how much they agree, after correcting for the distortions produced by context shifts.

I focus on those because those are actually the core issues that are pondered and completely solved in the entirely "scientific" area of "General Relativity" - which is the study, basically, of how to make measurements and think and operate in a world in which context (space-time) and content (matter and energy) interact bidirectionally and affect each other, producing many "fictitious forces" that are artifacts of the accidental details of each careful observer's reference frame in which they are inextricably and invisibly embedded. (See my earlier post on Context versus Content, Silos and the Electronic Health Record. )

In other words, I'm saying that the concepts necessary to understand what is happening to religious truth over time have already been developed in science, but never been brought to bear on the problem in theology.

This is not surprising, because the concepts have an aura of "complexity" that "only Einstein" would be able to understand, because they are so "alien and unfamiliar".

Well, I've scouted out that territory, taken a good, solid graduate-level course in General Relativity, solved those equations, and can report back that this material is not at all that scary if you hide the math in the calculator and just use the results.

Furthermore, it is not at all "alien." In fact, we are born being comfortable with these ideas -- such as the fact that, in general, the volume of a liquid depends on its shape -- and then, as Piaget showed, we have these beaten out of us by "education" and finally "learn" that volume doesn't depend on shape, and that the tall, skinny glass of juice has the same amount as the short, wide glass it was just poured from. The problem is that, THEN, when these students reach grad school, trying to teach them that volume does, in fact, in general, depend on shape except on small, cold, rocky places like the Earth, they find the idea that was native and "came with the unit" to now be "unthinkable."

I have to wrap this up for the day and will continue working my way through "One Common Faith" in the next few days, tying it into the related scientific concepts that help understand it.

Let me close by at least pointing out that the idea that things change shape as they are slid through space or time is captured in the concept from General Relativity (or Hilbert Space mathematics) called "parallel displacement" or "vector transplantation."

In "curved" spaces, which are common on cosmological scales, the way things change as you slide them across space and time can be exactly computed, and therefore it can be "backed out" of the equations and corrected for. Seemingly inconsistent observations, such as two observers each seeing the other's clock run more slowly than their own" can be completely explained, predicted, and corrected for, revealing the beauty of an underlying, absolute reality, the perception of which was distorted by each observer's invisibly distorted reference frame,
and the attempt to measure straight lines with curved rulers.

Fascinatingly, the key concept comes down to what paths light travels, or "geodesics", as light's path pretty much defines "straight." That should be of particular interest to Baha'is, as the word itself means "light of God."

What is really fascinating is to imagine taking all the great religious prophets of time, assuming that they are all saying the same thing (plus noise in the reporting), and computing whether a single consistent curvature of space-time could be applied to bring them all into perfect alignment. Or, if not perfectly aligned, the "transported versions" of them could be tweaked slightly to fit the shared truth great grand estimate, then the process reversed and the "tweaks" transported back to the original context, and assessed to see if those would in fact be legitimate and acceptable small changes in concept of the source religious doctrine or not.

I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but the very fact that science does say that such a thing is conceptually possible is really important to grasp - that there are techniques to figure out what properties transport over time as "constants" and which ones transport over time as "invariants" and which as "covariants" and what properties will be preserved regardless and which ones will appear to change, due to the change in context.

If we don't even use that basic level of mathematics to compare two religions it's hard to know how we expect to tell whether, at the core, they agree with each other or not. We will be overwhelmed with accidental changes due to reference frame changes that look like they matter, but that, in the final analysis, add up to exactly zero difference.

It's time to cross-breed these scientific and religious issues. Quoting from my old textbook,
Introduction to General Relativity (Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer, McGraw-Hill, 1965), on page 16,

In order to make these general and rather abstract considerations more specific, we shall have to develop an elegant notation and proper mathematical tools which are provided by the theory of tensor analysis. The basic problem of tensor analysis is the determination of those constructs and concepts which are independent of the accidental choice of the coordinate system employed.

This, in my mind, is exactly the same problem that is involved in showing that all the world's major religions have, at their core, exactly the same constructs and concepts, underneath the apparent differences due to the "accidental choice" of reference frame in which those constructs had to be expressed at that time and place by the religion's Founder.

Science and Religion are on the same quest, trying to look through the surface complexity and noise, and see the constant Beauty behind and under it all. Science is starting at local details and working upwards, Religion is working at the global scale and working downwards, and, when they meet in the middle, if we've done our sums correctly, the two large pieces should mesh perfectly and the larger picture be revealed.

How neat is that!

Tomorrow (I hope) I'll expand on the phrase quoted above "The rational soul does not merely occupy a private sphere, but is an active participant in a social order" and explore what the current evidence in public health and social epidiology teach us about changing concepts of the nature of "an individual" and why we need a larger concept to explain the very solid biomedical data from the majority of studies that show that "connectivity" of an individual to society is the major predictor of biomedical outcomes - disease, poverty, death, heart-attacks, obesity, violence, suicide - you name it. This whole area of very robust and solid scientific data from public health forces us to change the way we think about what it means to be a "person" and "an individual" in "society."

See: The hierarchy of life
and Key Findings from Public Health
for more information on what the data actually show about how "separate" we are from each other.

Photos of the "same" Earth from various viewpoints and times are from NASA.

The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations - part B

Yesterday, in my post The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations, I reviewed a few of the lessons Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline teaches that we can learn from thinking in circles, not in lines.

There are other properties of loops that are critical, but as subtle as the difference between the behavior of a spinning bicycle wheel (a gyroscope) and a stationary one, or attempting to throw a plate or a playing card that is spinning rapidly versus one that is not spinning. At first glance you might say - it's just spinning, so what? But the behavior of trying to throw a plate and a "Frisbee" is quite different - the plate may go 20 feet and the Frisbee 100 yards.

Spinning rapidly in a circle matters. All feedback is not the same. The speed of feedback in a feedback loop also matters. The feedback rate matters ( loops per second or per day or per year).

But this morning I want to start looking at vertically oriented loops in hierarchically structured organizations - for which a triangle or pyramid shape is more helpful than a circle for discussion.
(Imagine the pyramid shown on the back of every US dollar bill.)

Say that the "boss" is the eye on the top of the pyramid, and that the boss's orders come down the right side, through the "chain of command" (which is actually a branching tree shape.)

At the bottom of the organizational pyramid, where it actually touches the reality and "ground truth", employees attempt to carry out those orders, and imagine that activity moving us from right to left across the bottom of the pyramid. Finally, status reports ("mission accomplished!") move back up the chain of command being consolidated at each level all the way back to the boss at the top. So, we have a vertically oriented loop, or cycle, because now new orders come down the chain and that loop pattern repeats.

So far, so good.

In a static, simple world, if all employees except one named "Joe" report success, and Joe keeps reporting failure, the classic model would say that the action management needs to take is to replace Joe. The model says all employees are interchangeable machine parts and if a part fails to do its job, the part is broken and should be replaced. This is a simplified version of McGreggor's "Theory X" of management, very popular in the machine age, from 1850 - 1950.
Another implicit assumption is that the boss completely understands the tasks to be performed, and is the resident expert. If people don't "perform" it must be because they are "lazy" and what is needed is a "bigger whip." Employees are told to "jump" and they don't need to understand why or agree -- they just need to ask "yes sir, how high sir?"

That model worked for early industrial models, such as workers in textile mills, or slaves picking cotton.

But, in a dynamic, complex world, that model breaks down and doesn't work. Actions and responses that worked yesterday suddenly no longer work. The "cheese has moved." The organization has to learn new responses to the same old inputs. The response of the outside world to an action is no longer predictable, and has to be judged based on rapid-feedback and a quick poke to see what happens and learning from that. We move into McGreggor's "Theory Y" of management where the expertise is now on the bottom of the pyramid, where front-line
troops are as likely to reply "What bridge? The bridge is gone!" as "OK, yes we crossed the bridge." Now an ever-changing set of facts or dots of information have to be aggregated upwards and "reporting" has to change into continuous "sense-making" of shifting patterns and images of the battlefield truth.

Again, this model is not that strange. It's the basic model we use when we have to move a bit of food from the table to our mouth on a very windy day - we move the hand a little, see where it is now, move it a little move, see where it is now, etc., in a very rapid sequence that automatically adjusts for the wind. If we don't adjust for the wind, the hand and food will miss the mouth on the downwind side. We don't "compute" wind velocity and use Newton's laws to figure out what to do - we just do it and watch while it's happening. It's no big deal. It's the basic "cybernetic loop" of tiny intent, tiny action, tiny perception, and repeat the loop rapidly over and over. It's a loop we can use to cross an unfamiliar room in the dark. Move slowly, stay alert and aware, and adjust as you run into things. It works. It doesn't require quantitative analysis or calculus or a computer or a PhD in robotics. It just requires using a very basic action and sensory loop over and over.

And, like any feedback loop, causality disappears in the normal sense. Motion alters perception and perception alters motion and the two become one, in a very real sense, a single motion-perception action and a loop as an actor.

Again, no big deal. So why is this important?

The big deal is that our society is in the middle of adjusting to this change from "Theory X", and a stable, static world with expertise at the top to "Theory Y" with a very dynamic, unknown world and the expertise at the bottom. In fact, because of the property of loops, there really is no longer much of a "top" and "bottom" in the classical Theory Y sense of the terms.

Just as the level of the water could be seen to control the hand on the faucet, the staff at the bottom of the chain of command can be seen to be controlling the General at the top of the pyramid -- and both those models are wrong, because it's actually the shape of the feedback loop that now has taken on a life of its own, on a whole different scale, and is controlling both of them.

Senge's point, and mine, is that most of the organizational problems we see around us are because we haven't managed to get that much right. In some health care organizations, an extreme case of the expertise being on the "bottom" of the pyramid, the top management still thinks in "Theory X" terms and tries to see itself as the expert in everything and "gives orders" to move in a certain way. The body reports back "No -- what bridge?" and the boss sees this as stubbornness, stupidity, or hostility and things just get worse from there.

Arguably one of the best "learning organizations" around is the US Army. I've mentioned many times before role of Doctrine in FM22-100, the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The pyramid model I just described is the theoretical basis for the doctrine, and every field action is supposed to be followed with a "lessons learned" session. News, particularly surprising news about a misfit between upper management's concept of where the battle or bridge should be and what actual boots on the ground see in front of them, is supposed to be free to travel upwards. Management, as it were, is supposed to listen to the staff and learn what's actually going on, not what management imagined yesterday was going on. It's not insubordination to say "Sir, What Bridge Sir?"

By simple trial and error experience, repeated millions of times, the Army has finally figured out what works and what doesn't and come to some conclusions that are startling to the Theory X old guard, but not at all surprising to the Theory Y thinkers. For one thing, listening has to go upwards, at every level. It's as important that superior officers listen to junior officers as vice versa. If new conditions at the bottom don't result in a new picture of what's going on at the top, the whole pyramid will simply drive off a cliff or otherwise carry out actions that bear no resemblance to reality.

And, because the picture of reality is not perceived directly, but has to come up the chain of command and be re-filtered and consolidated at a dozen different levels, that process has to be incredibly accurate, frank, honest, and unbiased. Even a 10% "adjustment" in facts, repeated over and over at each level of consolidation, can result in a reported "reality" at the top that is 180-degrees out of whack.

In a profound sense, the key word is integrity, and not just integrity when the going is easy, but integrity when the going is tough - not because of enemy action but because of "friendly fire from above". That kind of integrity is also part of the other key word in the doctrine - character.

If the information flows freely and rapidly and can spin up to a high rate of rotation, as with a bicycle wheel or gyroscope, this whole design pattern becomes very stable, agile, nimble, and capable of navigating the most bizarre terrain as events unfold in surprising and unexpected ways. BUT, if there are pockets of resistance to the flow of information, such as cover-ups, that model breaks down. Or, if there are superiors who think "superior" means they know everything and they don't need to learn from their men, the model breaks down. So, another few important words are honesty and humility.

See US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100
and What relates Public Health and the US Army?
and the whole posting from my Capstone slide 7 Theories are Changing which has twenty more references to the literature on high-reliability organizations in nuclear power plants and chemical plants and aircraft cockpits and hospital intensive care units, and what makes them actually work in practice. It just keeps coming back to the same thing and the same model that's right in front of us be we haven't finished mastering.

And, again we have a place where our religious heritage has been observing what makes society work for thousands of years and has more wisdom to offer on this than scientists, although the science is beginning to catch up at last. Our religions have been stressing virtues - integrity, honesty, compassion, humility, etc. - for centuries but we haven't really been listening or haven't thought that "mattered any more in the modern age." Actually, the basic cybernetic model is ageless, and true at any size and scale. It's going to be something we have in common with aliens from other worlds when we meet. It's a universal truth every bit as solid as other physical "laws" we rely on.

These are truths that are seen by Hindus, by Muslims, by Christians, by Jews, by atheists, and by learning organizations like the US Army. They can serve as a basis for unity among even such diverse groups and cultures. They can link science and religion without either side having to admit they were wrong about something and lose face.

Grasping and implementing that truth certainly looks like it could give us far more "bang per buck" than investing in new technology, new weapon systems, new gizmos and gadgets, and other ways to shift the detail complexity around.

Also, see my early post Virtue drives the bottom line with many links at the end to such literature. (excuse the formatting near the top of that post - I'm technically challenged by the html editor.)

Another author's take on this subject is "Spirituality in the Workplace - The Sixth Discipline of a learning organization, by Harish Midha at the University of Toronto.

Peter Senge's latest book is Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future and readers interested in that book might also be interested in Stephen Covey's book The Eighth Habit. All these books teach the same gospel - that we are going to have to come to grips with the nature of community to "make it" through our social problems of this century, and that community requires us to realize the power and impact of "virtues" when amplified by the feedback properties of complex systems.

Another post I wrote exploring the role of community, virtues, and organizational learning and agility is The Importance of Social Relationships (short)

I also recommend: Pathways to Peace - beautiful slides and reflections to music on the value of virtues

A general summary of what I think are my best dozen posts on related subjects is here.

This is also relevant:

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

Enjoy, and please, for reasons this whole post embraces, send me feedback! A human can't sustain a thought without some measure of social support! Criticisms and objections are welcome. Use the comment box below, or send to my email in my "profile" box above.

Wade

The Sixth Discipline for Learning Organizations

There are some things common to the diverse fields of medicine, public health, business, religion, science, and the military.

• They all tackle problems which result in "success" or "failure" in a changing world.
• Failure can cost property, lives, or even entire nations and cultures.
  
• "Success" depends on how well they can detect failure and adapt to it.
• They all have bright people, but really operate more at the organizational level
  
• Adaptation depends on how good the organization is at seeing and learning.

So, a book like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is very important to us all, and impacts us on many fronts.

Senge points out an extremely pivotal insight: there are two different kinds of complexity, and most of what we do is focused on the wrong one.

He describes "detail complexity", which is the type we are familiar with, where there are thousands or even millions of details to be kept track of and managed. That one we're pretty good at, with the help of computers.

But then he goes on (on page 71 of the 2006 revision):

But there is a second type of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity, situations where the cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity...

When the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long, there is dynamic complexity. When an action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in a different part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious interventions produce non-obvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.

He adds

"The real leverage in most management situations lie in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity."

This understanding comes from "system thinking" and that, in turn "starts with understanding a simple concept called feedback."

Of course, to say feedback is "simple" is misleading. The impact of feedback is wildly subtle, counter-intuitive, perplexing, and paradoxical to most of us. Some simply refuse to accept the concept at all because it overturns so many cherished notions of how the world works and how things "should" be.

Senge goes on, echoing many others and American Indian culture, "Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines."

The point is that when people or things form a causal loop, where each thing influences the next one down the chain, and the chain is closed, then all our notions of "causality" are thrown out the window. Every actor in that loop is both the cause and the prisoner of the effects of the entire loop. In many ways, the shape of the loop becomes the dominant "cause" of what unfolds, far more so than the people caught up within it.

Senge describes a person filling a glass of water. As seen by a person, their hand is controlling the level of water in the glass, and adjusting it as the glass fills. A perfectly valid alternative description is that the level of the water in the glass is controlling the hand, causing the hand to close the faucet as the level reaches the right place.

Both descriptions are partially correct. The hand affects the water level, and the water level, in turn affects the hand. There is a feedback loop in place. Both are "causes" and both are "effects," and "which came first" is an irrelevant question.

It is the intrinsic property of complex systems to be dense with such feedback loops between the people inside them, making everyone a cause and everyone a trapped recipient of effects.

This means bad news and good news.

The bad news is that, if the output of "the system" is wrong, then the blame should be shared among everyone in the system, not just the last person to touch something that failed.

The good news is that every person in the system therefore also has the opportunity to change the flows and impact the system's output. In conflict situations, either party has the ability to increase the tension or decrease the tension.

In fact, in most conflict situations, the whole reason for the conflict in the first place is that there are feedback loops that are reflecting each sides actions into later behaviors by the other side, which are misinterpreted as new "actions", not "reactions."

Thus, in 2006, when Hezbollah forces in Syria reacted to Israel's capture of many of their own, they captured two Israeli soldiers in return. However, Israel saw this not as a reaction, but as a new "unprovoked action", which therefore demanded a new massive "reaction" and counter strike - a 34 day assault by Israel. The counter strike, in turn, was perceived by Hezbollah as a new "unprovoked attack", and the cycle simply continues to feed itself.

This is a classic no-win situation, where each side downplays the value of lives of the other side, and feels that the loss of one of their own should be responded to by killing two of the "others",
in order to "get even" and also "be even." By that flawed match, the conflict spirals out of control because there will never be an "even" situation.

On a smaller scale, within organizations, the same phenomenon occurs - but generally without actual explosives and death. The vast majority of conflicts can actually be traced back to people, or teams, or departments, or divisions, or managers blaming others for behavior that is simply the downstream result of their own earlier behavior, reflected and sometimes amplified through the structure of "the system" of feedback loops and lags. Similarly, management and labor can get into the same endless loop of conflict over "getting even" for behaviors that are the result of their own, forgotten, earlier actions.

In a bizarre sort of hallucinogenic dance, at all levels from personal to national, we are fighting demons that are simply the delayed reflections of our own earlier behavior, which we fail to recognize and blame instead on the "others" being "bad."

Senge mentioned the problem with dynamic complexity over space and over time, but he missed the third dimension, namely, over scale, or location in the hierarchy of life. Actions or interventions may look very different, ranging from great to wretched, as we rotate the lenses in our microscope stage and view different time-horizons, different space-horizons, and different perspectives from the bottom of the organization to the top.

Worse, actors in one place who perceive, at their location, time, and scale that their own actions are "good" may be completely baffled by hostile responses coming from actors at other locations, times, or level who are only responding to the "terrible" thing being done to them by that obviously uncaring and bad person somewhere else. And, of course, this would mean that those people responding with hostility must be "bad people" and need to be fired, neutralized, or killed, depending on the context of the conflict.

Dennis Severance describes the same kind of error being made by a mythical management in the book Making I/T Work. That management tries to impose an an enterprise-wide computer system, runs into "hostility", tries to "deal with" the "opponents" by firing them, and then is blind-sided when the computer system, "out of the blue, with no notice", fails to operate as intended, and they can't grasp why no one ever warned them of problems. The fact that those who raised these issues at the start were fired for their "hostility" is completely lost. This is a very common problem across industries.

These problems are not, as they might seem, problems of perception, but are actually problems of the intrinsic properties of systems. The people in these systems are all well-intended, doing "good jobs" locally, and yet, like M.C. Escher's pictures, taken together form an impossible loop that simply can't operate.

The variables that depend on the horizon of space, time, or scale are the keys here, and are as surprising as seeing an object that is red close up turn to look green when you back up several steps. This seems "impossible". Actually, New Scientist published a marvelous picture a month ago that, if viewed close up, was Albert Einstein, but if you backed up across the room, changed into Marilyn Monroe.

( Hybrid images: Now you see them…

• 31 March 2007
• NewScientist.com
• Gregory T. Huang )
  

These system effects are much more prevalent than people realize, and are the things that are "to blame" for most of the conflict and corporate dysfunction and national conflict around us.

It is clear to me, and I'd say to Peter Senge, that these effects need to be somehow made visible and accessible to everyone, at every level, from every country, so that we can get enough comprehension for people to see that, in Walt Kelly's Pogo's words, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Of course, many scientists, working a small scales, would have a hard time accepting wisdom from theologians, working at large scales, who see different pictures in the same world. Biomedical researchers, used to looking down the microscope for the cause of problems, are not prone to look out the window instead, and even less to consider that their own scientific culture could be implicated in producing the conditions that produced the cancer that they are now working to "cure".

Still, the logic of Senge's arguments is sound. "All" that is required is for people to stop blaming others for all the pain and recognize that the others are just as good people and are just as trapped in the pain, and, in any case, as with Jimmy Buffet in Margaritaville, they might realize that, yes, maybe, they themselves might be partly to blame.

If this looks remarkably like the basic golden rule of most religions ("Do unto others what you would have them do unto you") that's because it is. Other really annoying commandments like "Forgive us our sins as we forgive others" also come readily to mind.

Like the "Marilyn Einstein" photo, reality is multi-scaled, and the scientists have the fine-detail or high-frequency detail right, and the religions may be wrong on details but have the long-wavelength, larger picture right.

All of this should be something that can be animated, simulated, and taught in K-12 school, as well as in continuing education. And it should be.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Key findings from public health

Healthy "people" aren't localized rocks, but are normally well-interconnected bidirectionally into the social fabric around them.

Social connectivity is the most robust predictor of internal, "physiological", "biomedical" outcomes, such as morbidity, mortality, survival rate of surgery, resistance to infection, level of depression, outcome of diabetes, obesity, "mental" health, you name it.

Prevention is a thousand times more cost effective than repair. ( A lesson from software engineering and many other fields as well.)

The caring human loving touch of another individual is very important to human health and healing. Infants who aren't touched do poorly or simply die.

All interesting social phenomena (such as relationships, jobs, teams, family, stress, love, sex, the economy, depression) involve intimately bidirectional feedback loops.

But, classical statistical measures and attitudes, based on prediction of yields of crops, assume critically that causality is defined in one direction only, and that all phenomena of interest can be "isolated" from context and one part of it varied by the experimenter while other parts of it are "held constant." None of that applies to "complex adaptive systems", including social systems, which are inextricably interconnected, context-dependent, interdependent, and riddled with bidirectional feedback loops. Since the tools and expertise breakdown when applied to these areas, rather than admit that the tools and expertise are inadequate, the problem space is instead defined as "non-scientific" or "soft-science" and demeaned as unimportant or "non-scientific."

Possibly due to such schizophenia, the US "healthcare" system behaves as if none of the above solid empirical facts were known. There is no focus on social connectivity, less than 2% of the budget is spent on prevention, and machines and processes have replaced people at the bedside. People are treated like machines, and diseases are treated as if they were independent of each other and the rest of peoples lives. "People" are reduced to "patients". "Caregivers" are too busy to stay and chat for a while with "patients" and are increasing renamed "providers" which is ironic, since mostly they consume resources, particularly money, while being forced by "the system" to be too busy to stick around and observe the actual outcomes of their "treatments" on the people they serve. It's a lose-lose scenario, disliked by the patients, disliked by the caregivers, and apparently continues to exist because it's loved by the insurance companies. The whole thing needs to be rethought based on the above new facts of life.

Perhaps, not surprisingly then, the outcomes of the US Healthcare system are terrible, compared to peer countries. Infant mortality is something like 19th in the world. Costs are huge but a recent study showed that the BEST quartile of US citizens (the rich) have health outcomes worse than the WORST quartile of British citizens in the UK. (ref ?). Depression, obesity, diabetes are widespread and rampant epidemics in the US.

But, efforts to build healthcare interventions that are designed around social connectivity and whole persons are demeaned and ridiculed as being "non-scientific", or avoided because the feedback loops make computing "p-values" problematic for academic researchers, for whom such mathematical bases for certainty are held with a sort of blind obsession despite the fact that the assumptions of the theory (General Linear Model) don't fit the problem they're trying to address.

The result is that the most effective interventions are known, and involve teams of people assisting individual humans to modify or control their behavior and life style, but the advocates of these interventions are academically shunned and have to present their work in embarrassment in back rooms. The Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR) within NIH is treated like an awkward in-law.

Probably the single best book that summarizes interventions in health care that actually work is Health Program Planning : An Educational and Ecological Approach by Lawrence W. Green and Marshall W. Kreuter, now in it's fourth edition. (c) 2005 McGraw Hill, initial version written in 1961. It was around that year that non-communicable diseases began to replace communicable diseases as the leading causes of death, disability, and impaired quality of life, but the older, biomedical model had a very tightly held death-grip on the "health care industry."

On page 3 of that book the authors note:

Ecological approaches have proven difficult to evaluate because the units of analysis do not lend themselves to rand assignment, experimental control, and manipulating characteristic of preferred scientific approaches to establishing causation. Although the linear isolatable cause-effect model of scientific problem solving remains the point of departure for the training of health professionals, practitioners find ... they cannot ignore the contextual reality that health status is unquestionably influenced by an immensely complex ecological system. ...

To address those systems in our planning, we must first be able to see them ...
By definition, ecological sub-systems do not operate in isolation from one another ... [but] interact with one another to influence health. [We need] a kind of ecological map or "web" or "systems model" enabling us to visualize the network of relationships that need to be taken into account as we plan our intervention strategy tailored to the unique circumstances of the target population and the place where they live and work.

The primary tools up to this task are described by John Sterman in his tome Business Dynamics, 999 pages in length. The simpler techniques of mapping on a white-board is known as Causal-Loop Diagramming or CLD. These qualitative webs can be assigned some semi-quantitative values, such as directionality and general magnitude (large, small, strong, weak) and then simulated using tools such as Vensim (tm).

That, however, is a lot of work. "Systems thinking" didn't show up in the MPH curriculum until 2006, and is absent, by that name, in most courses, even at leading universities. Only MIT and Worcester Polytechnic Institute seem to have embraced these tools, although the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan is starting to build a systems thinking program after the auto industry started demanding it.

Note that the pressure for innovation here is from business, and the academics are lagging behind, sometimes kicking and screaming, in stage 2 of Schopenhauer's three stages:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer

So, this pretty much summarizes the state of affairs today. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has started a new department of Health Behavior along the lines of the new theory, but most health and public health people are famously non-quantitative, and so they are attempting to think through such problems mentally, unassisted by available tools used in other industries for over 50 years now in systems dynamics.

And, the biomedical establishment has a strong lock on most thinking and peer-review journals, and alternates denial and violent opposition to the "new paradigm" which it perceives as a throwback to mystical soft thinking instead of a more general version of the scientific method that can embrace feedback loops and complex adaptive systems without distortion of the tools or violation of the assumptions behind the models and statistics.

Even at Hopkins in the department of Epidemiology, the ratio of new thinkers to old-paradigm thinkers is essentially 3 to 70, and this new paradigm is ridiculed, rejected, opposed, despised, by most old-school thinkers who wish the answer to health had stayed down the microscope, under control, where they had strong muscles and good intuition - instead of showing up increasingly outside the window of the lab, in the social fabric of society, in all the places the scientists grew up despising and where their tools and muscles and intuition all fail.

So, where does that leave us humans?

Apparently, we can't expect either academics or health care workers to take the lead in fixing this terrible mess, and business is going to have to get down to business and do something about it.

(This is not without precedent - the center of innovation in the USA has increasingly moved out of universities and into businesses, despite the very strong marketing campaign with the opposite message. Witness the pulling-teeth it's taken to get systems thinking into the Ross Business School curriculum.)

Business today is much more cybernetic on a real-time basis than academia, and utilizes "good enough" models which, with cybernetic feedback control, get the job done and produce the desired outcomes - - while driving academics crazy because the underlying models are "so bad."
The National Institutes of Health is still heavily dominated as well by biomedically oriented researchers of the old school, who resist the new paradigm.

So, with a few exceptions, industry money may be the only way to advance health care in serious ways, and address the findings at the top of this post sometime this century when we're still alive to care about it.

We have, as in so many of M.C. Escher's paintings, (see this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Escher_Waterfall.jpg
created a world that is locally-sensible and globally nonsense, but few people working locally are motivated to address the global wrongness, and no Masters or PhD student or young researcher would be encouraged to tackle a "large" problem, and so it sits there, unaddressed by academia and a thorn in the side of everyone: patients, doctors, nurses, payers, industry.
Like Escher's paintings, one is hard pressed to see or point to exactly "where" the wrongness is, and yet, standing back, it's clearly wrong.

That's where things are today.


[ M.C. Escher website: http://www.mcescher.com/ ]