No man is an island

December 5, 2008
New York Times

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says

By PAM BELLUCK

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.

And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood.

So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003.

“It’s extremely important and interesting work,” said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study. Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations.

Publish Post

... (see NYT or BMJ for the rest)

yep. Humans are not solitary animals, and our spirits are not contained within our one body, at least effectively not so, however this is managed. For practical purposes we ARE each other.

This is not just arguing about words. If we are so interconnected that a change in your life produces a change in my body's hormone levels, how is that different from your heart and your own adrenal gland? Connected is connected, if they influence each other, whether our puny math can easily "see" how that connection operates or not. Heck, we can't see how gravity operates either, but we accept that gravity is real.

And so is the fact that we are not really many bodies -- we are one spirit sort of distributed out across many bodies, like a TV image and pixels. The image is not the pixels, but it is, but it isn't.

We lack good words for these simpler concepts, and so discussion of the actual nature of composite and hierarchical, diffusely coupled life is difficult.

And that thing that seems to "take on a life of its own" ?? Why don't we stop pretending and just admit that it does exist and it does have a life of its own, even though we so often kill it?

Life is not contained just within each living "thing", but fills the spaces between us as well, on every scale, letting us effectively become "one", while staying apart, at the same time.

"Love" is not a fantasy - it is science that has the catching up to do here on the very nature of life itself, especially the connectionist, diffuse forms of life.

If you think about it you realize that an image is not "just a collection of pixels", because a heap of those colored dots would have no image at all. It is the arrangement with respect to each other, the inter-relationships, that stores the image, not the pixels.

It is the same with the nature of life, or a tornado. Life is a transient, a set of relationships, briefly, between smaller living things and larger living things, at the same time. Our entire educational system focuses on the pixels, not on the image, and we've carefully been graduating bigger and brighter pixels and wondering why things are still falling apart. It's the working together thing that we've neglected that turns out to be the "baby", and the rest of it, including individuals, is the "bath water".

This is a hugely unpopular and inconvenient notion, instantly attacked by the wealthy as some scheme to remove their money. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with realizing that our personal and national wealth consists of relationships, of "social capital". We've neglected this, and no amount of cash bailout of institutions will make up for it until we wake up and fix the actual problem.

Quoting the song Suzanne, sung by Judy Collins, from memory:

But when He saw that only drowning men could see Him, He said "All men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them!"

See also my prior post "Are you my mommy? What shape am I anyway?"

For Whom the Bell Tolls

by John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

The end of our exploring (T. S. Eliot)
T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

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

This also has very strong implications for policy. If we are all effectively one body, then the idea that the "rich" can get sufficiently far "above" the "poor" to be free of their plight is bogus. It can never work. The US can't operate with 20% of the population of the US totally neglected, or with 5.7 billion people in the world starving. This has "National Security" and "Homeland Security" and long-term strategic direction implications for all nations, if true.

We best put more energy into finding out if it is true, and stop wishing gravity would just "go away" because the political and social structures we've built, and the stories we tell ourselves about "how things are" have a serious built-in fatal flaw the way they stand, idolizing the individual and ignoring "all of us", and thinking that could ever possibly end well. For anyone.

Wade

Christian rebirth

I don't know how the concept of rebirth is reflected in Judaism, or exactly the meaning of "submission", as meant by the word "Islam, " but the Christian branch of this Abrahamic trio of religions has a very deeply metaphysical belief that may not be apparent from outside.

The following quote from Charles Trumbull is taken from the Campus Crusade for Christ's Teacher's Manual, (c) 1965, William Bright Editor. It reflects a nuanced meaning of spiritual that may be surprising, even to Christians of different branches of that faith. It also takes a position on the perpetual tension different Christians have on whether "faith" or "works" is the thing that matters the most.

"Jesus Christ does not want to be our helper; He wants to be our life. He does not want us to work for Him. He wants us to let Him do His work through us, using us as we use the pencil to write with -- better still, using us as one of the fingers on His hand.

When our life is not only Christ's but Christ, our life will be a winning life; for He cannot fail. And a winning life is a fruit-bearing life, a serving life.

...He 'came not to be ministered unto, but to minster.'

An utterly new kind of service will be ours now, as we let Christ serve others through us, using us. And this fruit-bearing and service, habitual and constant, must all be by faith in Him; our works are the RESULT of His life in us; not the condition or secret or the cause of the Life.

He seems to be saying, in other words, that what matters is not getting us in the right spirit, but getting the right Spirit into us.

That gets into a question considered impolite these days, of whether there is also a wrong spirit that can get into us, or for that matter, multiple different helpful or annoying spirits that can drop by and inhabit us and take the reins, as in "The devil made me do it!" -- which has gone out of favor as an explanation for behavior.

Actually, the Christian Bible's New Testament is filled with examples of Jesus or the disciples "casting out demons" and the immediate result of that process being a biomedical cure of some illness or deformity. Demons apparently do not evaporate, for in one case the demons are cast out of a person, and the demons negotiate being cast into a herd of swine instead.

Whether they attributed the observed behaviors to the "right" mechanism, I'll have more to say in future posts, and some past ones, into ambiguities about exactly what the "self" is, and to what extent "we" control our own self, and the surprising extent to which the surrounding crowd or culture effectively constrains some behaviors, empowers others, down-regulates and up-regulates behaviors in the genetic sense, entrains us, motivates and strengths us ("active strength") or demoralizes and depresses us. The people around us certainly affect how we perceive the world, in obvious and non-obvious ways.

To the extent that laws of behavior of complex, composite entities (like us) are independent of scale, we might look at lessons we've learned about trying to change behaviors of others and reflect on what that means about our own behavior.

Certainly, sometimes, even our own behavior seems out of our own control. Many people set off on New Year's Eve with the best of intentions and resolutions, but a month later few of them still have those resolutions. We need a better vocabulary of concepts to describe this nuanced and subtle interplay of "selves" that seem to negotiate with each other over "our" behavior.

Regardless, these days even the esteemed Institute of Medicine in Washington tells us that trying to change "an individual" is difficult, if not a losing battle, but that we should focus instead on changing the behavior of "microsystems" or "small teams". The message is that "individuals", apparently, are so much captive of their peer-group that they have trouble changing behavior if the peer-group doesn't also change. Again, this seems to say that we are not our own people, to a large extent, but that a good sized fraction of "us" is actually embodied and taking shape and living form in the people around us.

As with the VMware I discussed this morning, the edges and boundaries of "self", and even simple counting, are more like "waves" than "particles". Like "Silly Putty", what seems in one scale to be hard as a rock seems in another scale to be soft and flexible or even flimsy and unsubstantial.

This has profound implications for strategies for changing the behavior of other people, or populations of other people, or for changing our own behavior when it seems to be "stuck" somehow where "we" don't want it to be. As System Dynamics demonstrates, a lot of behavior is actually "structural", due to the way feedback loops operate outside people, not due to what the people themselves think or do.

That says that one way, and sometimes the only way, to change the behavior of a person is to change the peer-group they are embedded within. You need to change jobs, or partners, or cities or companies or something, or you are simply "stuck", in some cases, it seems.

The flip side is much more positive, and says that the behavior of many people around us is partly under our own control, way more than we realize. Much of what seems to be "them" is actually a downstream echo of our own earlier behaviors. By changing how we perceive them and act towards them, almost magically, we can find that "they changed."

In point of fact, we appear to have much of ourselves outside our skin, effectively living in the people around us, and much of their life is outside their skins, living inside us. We are not quite so "separate" as we tend to think.

Whatever we are, as people, and as part of society, as members of teams and families and cultures, and as the upper level of ten trillion cells acting as one human body, we are not "simple" entities, and not "single-valued."

To pick an analogy from chemistry, it seems more like "we" are like the electrons in some complex molecule that end up being "shared" across "bonds", and it becomes meaningless to ask exactly "where" the electron is. The electron is everywhere and nowhere, but mostly around here and over there, and "where" is a badly formed question anyway because there's no way to measure it without distorting it beyond recognition. You can only ask questions like "If I do this to the molecule, what will the molecule do?" and the internals are beyond our reach.

But the question keeps coming back to the front of what it means to say "We are one spirit" or "Moved by one spirit" or "One in the Spirit". There is some important or profound physical reality here that is beyond just a fancy choice of words or a sloppy analogy or metaphor.

As always, this comes back to whether we really, deeply understand what it means to have "unity in diversity" or an overarching unity in an organization that crosses "silos" and brings people together, out of their shells, motivated by something larger than their own local and petty personal or departmental interests.

I think, like The Toyota Way, this is beyond what one would call a "philosophy" which is cognitive -- this involves an indirectly measurable change in what we ARE, more than just a change in what we DO.

Sources of Active Strength

Science is just beginning to get some insight into a phenomenon called "active strength", where the strength of a system of parts isn't "in" the parts, or "in" the way they are connected, but "in" the way they dynamically change pressure on each other in response to some external stress. A thin Wikipedia article on Active Structures with one links is here.

This concept is subtle, but is as important to understand as the concepts of "dynamic stability" and "dynamic control", which also seem to our intuition that they shouldn't work, but do, and, in fact, they work superbly. You need to understand these concepts to really get the difference between rigor and rigidity. We want structures we build to be rigorous and not fall down, but that turns out to mean they have to be somewhat flexible, and cannot be rigid. (There are no Oak trees in hurricane country, only palm trees that bend with the wind.)

There are whole institutes that study "Active Materials", such as the "Active Materials Lab" at UCLA. What becomes really fascinating is when active materials are ocmbined to make active structures. See, for example the "Active Structures Lab" in Brussels.

One example of an active structure is your bones. I worked at the Biomechanics Lab of the VA Hospital in Cleveland at Wade Park, helping design artificial hip joints, long ago. Researcher had assumed that bone was, you know, dead stuff like steel, so they had measured how strong it was, which was mostly what I did with my lathe and Instron machine. Then, they designed artificial joints based on that data. The joints mostly either bent or broke. Oops.

It turns out that bone is an active material, and is piezo-electric. When it is under stress, the body sends electrical signals to the bone that cause it to shift shape slightly, but enough to make it much stronger for that instant stress. This trick lets the body have it both ways -- light bones, so we can move, but really strong exactly when and where strength is needed.

It's as if the door to weakness is guarded by some sort of "pong" paddle that simply moves back and forth to block incoming hockey pucks, without requiring that the door be "solid" or even there most of the time. If you go look for a "door", you won't find it. It's like your "lap" -- only there sometimes. It's like a bridge that is mostly empty space except for a little bit just under your car that is extra strong and moves along like a shadow under you.

We don't know how many other places this design pattern is used in nature, but I suspect it is quite a few, because it is very efficient and economical. You get both strength and lightness.

Tall buildings and some other buildings are now being built with active strength concepts and they actually change shape and pressure to deal with high winds coming from one side or the other. Really tall buildings now have a huge weight at the top, that can glide in any direction, that is driven by hydraulic pistons and counteracts vibrations and sway in the wind.

So there are books like "Vibration Control of Active Structures" that examine how to use these techniques to damp out waves and vibrations which otherwise would weaken or shatter the structure.

The theory carries over just as well into dynamic information structures in computing, and dynamic social structures that could weaken or collapse, that we want to make extremely strong even though they are sparse and thin and lightweight. Even "control", viewed in the right dimensions, is an entity that we want to "hold together" and not "fall part" or "lose the center", but we want control by management or government to be as "light" and "sparse" as possible to get the job done.

For example, the US Air Traffic Control system is designed to keep planes from running into each other, but within those constraints, pilots can do pretty much whatever they want to. Pilots can say - "No, that doesn't work for me. How about this instead" and get different clearances. It's the pilots that can see out the window and know what's going on in the plane and weather around them, not the "controllers". This is another example of a hybrid vertical loop, where the controllers issue "orders" and "clearances" and yet the pilots can give information that changes the "orders". It is actually run from the bottom up, and just consolidated from the top down. Controllers only redirect traffic when they are force to by weather, for example - they never tell you that you don't want to fly to Miami, you should think about flying to Memphis this time of year.

So, what would an active-strength social structure look and act like? How could you recognize one if you saw it? How could you see where active-strength would help.

Well, for one thing, if you try to push it over, it will rally and push back on you, not crumble and flee. In war, some cultures are incredibly strong at fighting back in spirit as well as in body. Whatever this active spirit is, it is the key to their strength, and war strategists focus primarily on how to break the spirit of the opponent, because the military collapse always follows from that.

So, the flip side of that is figuring out what it takes to make our own spirit strong.

This "spirit" thing or concept is important. Whatever a "spirit" is, in this sense, it describes what holds the team together against all odds and keeps it running at or beyond its capacity.
"Team spirit" is more real in terms of changing outcomes than just certain color clothes and cheers.

Similarly, doctors know that some patients have a "strong spirit" and can survive trauma or burdens that would simply kill patients with "weak spirit." Many doctors have seen at least one patient simply decide to "let go" and proceed to die. What's that about? It's also really frustrating because the strong spirited patients tend to complain a lot and are a "lot of trouble" for the nurses.

People have the capacity to be very strong together, but they don't always use it. It's hard to understand, and you can't "see" whatever it is we call "spirit" directly, and yet it seems to be a word that has a scientifically measurable outcome. I'm using the term "spirit" here more like the active sense of something, not like a "ghost".

One thing is clear - opponents or people with no spirit simply crumble and crumple under pressure or duress. Whatever this spirit thing is, it affects biomedical outcomes as well as social-level outcomes, in measurable ways.

Further reading :
A Wiki on "active architecture" you can participate in is here. Active Architecture in the meaning of a building aware of and responsive to its occupants is here.

A much more technical look at the subject would be "An Active Architecture Approach to Dynamic System Co-evolution" by Morrison, et. al., which is about the conceptual "architecture" of the information structures that happen inside computers - and how to make they adaptive and dynamic and capable of learning and evolving but not collapsing.