The power of yarns

Well, it's a holiday week in the US, and my readers need a break, and my wife finally persuaded me to look at what she was laughing at so uproariously, even though it was a weblog titled "Yarn Harlot" and, unlike my wife, I am not a knitter. Surely, I thought, this is not for me.

But, I thought reviewing Michael Moore's new movie "Sicko" and the state of US health care is too grim for a relaxing holiday weekend. I'll leave that till next week sometime.

Anyway, it turns out, the author, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, is more a teller of yarns and Garrison Keillor (A Prarie Home Companion) type tales with some kind of lasting lesson in them, whether they have to do with actual knitting or not. They tell us a lot about life, in a fun and memorable way.

They're viral, and spread by word of mouth, far better than advertising, and cheaper.

She, and the site are immensely popular, with a huge number of regular readers and 250-400 comments a day. She came to town here to give a talk, and the library thought, well, "yarn", we'll put her in a room that seats 30. That got quickly overturned, and about 300 people showed up to try to fit in a room that seats 150. People had to wait 4 hours because her flight was delayed, and they fought to save their seats.

You'd have thought she was giving away iPhones.

Anyway, I am putting a permanent link on this weblog to hers. The power of narrative to convey a message is best shown by example, and she is a fantastic example.

Here's the story that was my "tipping point" - a simple story titled "the way things are" , telling about the day she got a new stove, and what happened with the movers. It's a stitch. It's worth reading. It's worth sharing with friends.

And for public health advocates, it's worth analyzing to see what elements she puts together that make her stories so engrossing and fun and helpful.

(Oh, the photo above is one she had up of her recent lecture on yarn in Alaska, and the typical completely overflowing room she gets to the total amazement of libraries, most academics, etc. There's a lesson there on how to reach people and "knit them together" through the power of "yarn.")

Here is a comment someone made on that post about stoves, that shows how a discussion can lead to some valuable condensing of experience into useful insight.

Men are confused by the actual size of an item and the delusional size of an item. I won't apologize because we all thought it.

Posted by: marti at June 27, 2007 3:05 PM

I have a stack of much longer academic papers on my desk right now that more or less end up at the same realization using equations and tables and p-values, taking 20 pages or so to get there.

Sometimes, less is more.

Wade

Rising rates and the soon to be homeless

(This and other photos of homeless in Chicgago by crowbert )

The housing boom in the US appears to be over in a big way. Now they estimate that 1 to 2 million families will lose their homes this year to foreclosure, unable to pay the mortgage. It's a good time not to be prejudiced against the homeless.

Anywhere, here's a summary of the bad news, and then some reflection on what's going on here from a public health perspective.

The local reason is that their monthly payments will jump, and in some cases by a lot, meaning they will go from affordable to "not enough to buy food and pay the mortgage."

This is how today's New York Times put it today in
Rising Rates Squeeze Consumers and Companies
by Gretchen Morgenson and Vikas Bajaj

Now that party may be coming to an end....
The fallout is likely to be widespread, and felt most immediately by homeowners and people looking to buy a house.

Particularly hard hit will be consumers with weak credit — known as subprime borrowers — who are faced with mortgage rates that will soon reset to higher, in some cases double-digit, levels.

How many is that in real numbers?

Higher rates are already contributing to an increase in foreclosures. ...Foreclosures in May were up 90 percent from the period a year earlier... the total foreclosures of 176,137 in May were sobering. [ my note - that's a rate of over 2 million a year already]

For struggling homeowners, the rise in rates could not come at a worse time.

And even that number is low compared to what's coming, because many of those sub-prime loans had a 3 year grace period of low rates and the 3 years is just about up.

Last year, adjustable rate loans accounted for 25 percent of mortgage applications, up from 11 percent in 1998, Freddie Mac said. Demand for adjustable rate loans peaked in 2004 at 33 percent; many of those are at or near the reset point....Some $100 billion in subprime loans are scheduled to reset between now and October.

And we have this thought:

“I don’t think they are panicked,” he said. “But now they are wishing, ‘Why didn’t I take a fixed rate three years ago when I had the chance and rates were low.’ ”

Well, first we need to look at whether this problem is going to get worse before it gets better. Sadly, the answer is almost certainly yes.

The unusually low interest rates of the last three years have been an enormous boon to almost every corner of the American economy....The recent rate move came as something of a surprise to Wall Street. It is the result, traders say, of heavy selling by foreign investors...

The first thing I notice is that the article talks about "unusually low rates of the last few years" and then shows a graph of the last few years. Well, that's not very helpful. What are we talking about here? What's the "usual" rate? What's behind curtain number one, Johnny?

The media have done this consistently, and fed this short-term mentality. It took me quite some time to dig out what the long-term trend actually looks like, because almost every news story just had the last few months or years.

I did that for my piece "The Mortgage Trap Begins Closing" that I posted here December 11, 2006. and "Honey, we're losing the house" where I said

As, one analyst put it, people seem to have turned their houses upside down like piggy banks, shaken all the money out, and spent it already, and now there's nothing left to use to pay the new bills. To top that off, the monthly mortgage payment magical 3 year grace period has expired, and the minimum payment they're demanding just doubled. How can that be?

Then of course, as now, Wall Street analysts were baffled and surprised by this. I'm not sure why that is. Long term trends? Here's what the savings rate looks like, long-term, for individuals:

The last time the personal savings rate was negative was in 1933. (Source EBRI Databook, US Department of Commerce.)
US Trade Deficit (From BEA, quoted at invisibleheart. "Does the Trade Deficit Destroy American Jobs, Russell Roberts, George Mason University, Nov 2006.)

These aren't perfectly on the mark, and I get complaints from economist that I'm not using these correctly, but I think the overall point is the same regardless - whether we look at individuals or corporations or the USA as a whole, we've been living way beyond our means and "charging it" but the bills for the party are coming due now.

But let's do some "root cause" analysis and look beyond the surface here. So we have that many actors on every level have been spending like there's no tomorrow, writing checks against an empty bank account. And we have that foreigners, who have a lot of dollar-denominated IOU's, are starting to bail out and get rid of them, even at a loss, because they're getting worried that the dollar will be devalued another 30% or so, and they don't want the value of their IOU's to fall 30%, thank you, when there are other options and other places in the world to invest in.


And that entire process seems to be fueled and encouraged by the media, the banks, the credit card companies, television, all encouraging people to ramp up their debt and buy more stuff.

Aside: Back to the "yellow boxes" on the complicated flowchart I put up yesterday (see below) The "yellow boxes" are where "stories" or "narrative" have direct impact in the feedback control cycle that manages our lives, but that's sufficient to completely alter perceptions (lower right) and external reality and how others relate to us and act toward us (upper right).

-- this whole cycle is driven by a myth and mental story, a mental model, that makes such behavior "OK" or even "GOOD". First, there is the story that "things are cyclical and this is just a downturn and it will turn up again soon because it always does." (That story doesn't play too well in Flint, Michigan, where the GM plants closed and don't seem to be coming back.)

Then there is the story that a huge amount of debt is fine. Everyone's doing it. That always sounded a little too good to be true, but it was pleasant to the ears.

Then there was a popular misconception by probably millions of buyers that couldn't do basic math and slept through all that life-skills-math nonsense in high-school. If Johnny's adjustable rate mortgage is at 5% and he pays $500 a month, and the rate goes up a little, just 5 %, what will his new payment be? $505? or $1000. Most people were willing to buy the story that $505 was the right answer. Wrong.

Then there was that nagging suspicion that something else was too good to be true. How could these ads be right? Buy a $400,000 home for $500 a month? Better RUSH! SALE ends Tuesday!

OK, so, what's my point? A lot of people got "caught up" in this land-office business and thought they could get something for nothing, and that the rules normal mortals lived by didn't apply to them, and that tomorrow was a long long way away, so far away it didn't matter. Except that it IS tomorrow now, and we all live in our own wake of our own past decisions, and Sunday morning those Saturday night decisions aren't looking very good any more, and what a headache, and how did the couch end up in the front yard anyway?

With my annoying "Five Why's" (after Toyota's practice), again, I'll ask, "Why?" Why were people so gullible yet again? Why don't we get smarter as time passes? Why isn't the country a "learning organization?"

Well, some of the country is learning. The part that figured out it could rush in, sell a trillion dollars worth of junk mortgages, and rush out again before the door closed is learning. They just got a lot of positive reinforcement.

But the poor people, heavily minorities, didn't learn.

Why?

Why didn't they learn from history? Why didn't they learn from their own past? Why didn't they pay attention in school? Why didn't they ask around in church and see if everyone else thought this was a good deal or not?

Why are the poor, who most desperately are in need of making as few mistakes as possible, not organized to learn from experience so they don't have to repeat it?

Or is it the other way? Those who don't learn from experience end up being poor and exploited?
Well, some of both, most likely. It's a spiral that feeds itself.

There is a known remedy for gullibility, and that's "consultation". Have some sort of social system in which wiser people are identified and consulted with before rushing into some sort of precipitous action that you'll end up regretting that will, literally, cost you the farm.

This is not a difficult concept, and it costs zero dollars to bring to pass, but it is one that seems hard to carry through on.

Why is that? (I'll keep asking, and keep on going upstream towards the "distal" cultural issues that are generating all this downstream trauma.)

Well, the USA seems to have a culture that is revolted by the idea of working together, or learning from one's elders, or consulting before action, or otherwise limiting personal "freedom" by being burdened with lessons from the past. We bail on our parents, we discard our history books, and we want to be "free", even if it means "free to crash and burn and be exploited." "the past has nothing to teach us!! Everything today is NEW!!!" Oh, really?

Or do we really want that, or did that idea get into our yellow boxes and internal story some other way? Where exactly did this idea come from, and when did we vote on it and agree to it, anyway?

Rejecting every constraint doesn't make us free to run with the wind or sail the skies -- it makes us into jellyfish or slugs that have no bones, and are easy to eat for lunch because they have no shells either. Rejecting discipline and wisdom makes us exploiter-bait. Rejecting all that annoying math and school textbook learning makes us exploitable and gullible.

But, most of all, rejecting each other's consultation makes us end up broke, homeless, and dead.

So, why do we do that then? Don't get a guilty look and say "something inside me didn't work." This isn't a local, personal thing. It's a global, social, cultural thing that's broken here.

If the simple idea of pooling what brains and knowledge we have, and consulting with each other before taking action is such a hard thing, we need to stop, flag this point, and call a meeting to understand exactly WHY that is. Something is broken here that should be working. It can be fixed, but first we need to understand what it is and where it is.

And the something is at a higher level than people, and that's what makes this hard to see and hard to fix, unless you have tools to do "systems thinking." And, of course, you need to believe that there are levels higher than people that matter. I'm convinced of that.

Whatever cultural forces have conspired to cause us to reject education, understanding, discipline, and consultation need to be fought off and rejected, because that is not the way to freedom at all -- it's the way to the homeless shelter. No, they'll be full and overflowing. It's the way to dissolution and death. Social disconnection leads to death. Rejecting the past means rejecting the future, and also leads to death. Life is too complex to try to learn it all on your own dime, at your own expense.

So, we need to ask, if my current story, if our current internal story makes "consultation" seem wrong or impossible, what's a better story and where can I get one? Where can we get one? Can we all get in with one ticket if we come in the same car?

This conversation makes me think a little of a Peanut's cartoon strip, where Lucy walks by Linus, who is playing the piano (Is that Linus?) Anyway, he says "My fingers hurt." and she says "maybe your fingernails are on too tight" and walks away. He sits and looks at his hands in surprise and finally says "I didn't even know they were adjustable!"

Well, yes Linus, we all have internal stories. Some are helpful and some are harmful, but all of them can be changed. Some stories make it hard to do the right thing, and some stories make it easy to do the right thing - they affect that axis. Some stories motivate us and some stories suck the energy and life right out of us -- they affect that axis too. Some stories reach back all the way to our perceptions, and twist our perceptions around so we don't see things truly, but we see a distorted reality, a selective reality, that supports the story. It's as if the story was alive, and wanted to live, and didn't want to fade away, so it twists what we look at and what we see so that it adds up to something that supports that myth and story.

Suddenly, those who've been reading this for a few days may go, "Oh. Another S-loop."

Yes, another S-loop. Stories get into our head and live off our psychic energy and survive by twisting around our perceptions to support themselves, and sometimes even by twisting our actions around to support themselves, or by twisting our actions so as to cause other people to do things that support our self-concept and justify it.

The yellow boxes in my diagram can reach out and change the green boxes. Internal stories can change the lower right corner, and distort perceptions so that we only see things that support our myth.

We can never be free of stories -- they are part of how we operate. But we can change the story, we can reprogram the computer. If we can't have a palace, we can at least have an internal story that supports rational action and prevents us from harming ourselves or doing totally stupid things over and over again.

Such stories are far stronger, of course, if they are shared stories, supported not only by ourselves, but by our friends and family and neighbors.

Hmm. This is sounding a lot like the role religion plays. Or science. Those are each ways to put a story in place that can help stabilize us and make us figure out how to work together and consult and learn together what we can't learn separately.

That was one saying of of the American revolution, that if we didn't "hang together" we'd all "hang separately."

Some stories are way better than other stories. Pick a good one, since you'll have to live with it.

Or die from it.

The summer is gone,
The ground's turning cold,
The stores one by one they're a-foldin'.
My children will go
As soon as they grow.
Well, there ain't nothing here now to hold them.

North Country Blues (1963)
Bob Dylan

So what? part A of why SLOOPS matter

I get tired of writing "Self-aware, self-repairing, goal-seeking, regulatory feedback-mediated control loops" so I'm going to use S-Loops or "SLOOPS" (all caps) to name those in this post.

Again, I need to meet the burden of showing why all this effort is worth it. Where's the payoff? Where's "the beef?" If this doesn't give at least a 10-times improvement over older techniques or frameworks, it's not worth considering, after looking at "transition costs".

OK. So, let me begin showing why this actually helps. Some theory to start, then some fully worked synthetic examples, then some real data. How's that?

First, recapping, I've said that we need to put on lenses that let us spot proto-life, or S-Loops in the sea of interactions going on around us, within us, and that we're within. Those are where I believe "the action" will be for reasons I went into already. Some are the obvious, named parts of "the Ecological Model" -- cells, tissues, organs like the pancreas, body systems like the endocrine system, families, work-groups, departments, corporations, cultures, religions, nation-states.

Then I suggested that maybe this set of what Marsden Bloise called "curiously laminated" levels of life on Earth isn't really many different living things, but only "one" living thing, in the same sense that our circulatory system or immune system is "one" thing, despite having many parts that are, in the short run, not even connected to each other. White and red blood cells appear at first glance to all be off doing their own things. The "ties that bind" are subtle, and not always some kind of physical binding like glue or cement. The "parts" are not always in a fixed or plastic relationship to each other, like our bodies, and can have "gaps" between them (as do blood cells, or the pancreas and various endocrine control centers in the brain.). They are still, in a critically real sense, "one." They act as "one".

But, this is a funny sort of "one". We're used to billiard-ball models, or rocks. We're taught that "one" plus "one" gives you "two". This kind of "one" has a different math, forget calculus, we've already left the building at "addition". We have "one plus one equals ONE" -- where ONE is larger than "one." But it doesn't stop there, because "ONE plus ONE equals ONE."
and "ONE plus ONE equals ONE." So many cells act as "one" body. And many bodies act as "one" corporation. And many "corporations" act as "one" nation-state. -- but each "one" also includes all the previous, "lower" level "ones" too. So corporations are made of people, but people are STILL made of cells. Corporations are big complex organizations of DNA, in fact.
So is the USA. It has the identity of DNA, and the identity of many immune systems and endocrine systems, and the identity of many "people" and the identity of many "subcultures" AND it has an independent identity too, on top of all of that. It seems infinitely branching, almost fractal. (actually, I think it is symmetric across levels, so it actually IS fractal.)

These identities are context-dependent, scale-dependent variables so we have to be careful what kind of math we do with them, and not just "addition."

In the SHORT RUN, with our SHORT RUN lens on, the levels appear to be "obviously" independent and unconnected, although, sure, they "impact" each other a little. Just like blood stream cells impact each other a little as each does its own thing. But that tells us NOTHING about what we see when we rotate the microscope stage to the LONG RUN, large field-of-view lens -- where suddenly all these "different" things are all connected after all and all coordinated and synchronized at a high level, which is almost (but not entirely) invisible at the lower level.

I gave the example of water molecules -- in the short run, molecular interactions are complex and require advanced quantum mechanics and only supercomputers can predict the behavior of a few hundred molecules at one time.

It's the height of arrogance and folly to try to hope to predict one thousand or ten thousand --- using those tools and that base-point and looking upwards.

But, if you keep on going, you get to the scale of household and city plumbing. Suddenly, people who never graduated from high-school are putting in pipes and faucets and getting "water" to do their bidding, and filling glasses with "water" whenever they need a drink. No big deal.

What was impossibly hard from below, becomes incredibly obvious and easy from above. Same molecules. Same you. Different lens.

So, whether things are "many" or "one" is a slippery concept that may be scale-dependent and time-horizon dependent. Whether interactions are "weak" and "loosely-coupled" or "deterministic" is also a scale-dependent and time-horizon dependent type of variable. We can't use our billiard-ball addition, subtraction, and reasoning on such objects -- they have a different system of math. It's very real and very solid, but it's different than we're used to, so our intuition is just terrible regarding it. Our hunches and impressions tend to be wrong most of the time.

So, bring this back down to Earth and focus, Wade.

OK, yeah, here's the thread. It is an important thing to decide how many semi-living things human beings are "one" with already, right now. If we put the boundary in the wrong place, we will get bad predictions on our "what if " thinking.

In my mind, the proper subject of "Public Health" is not the public misperception of "health care for poor people", or "hygene and sanitation", and is not to maximize the sum of the health status of every person, although both of those are virtuous goals. The proper subject is to take care of the health of the living and semi-living entities that are larger than people, including corporations and cultures and nations, going all the way up to Gaia or "all of us."

The "public" in "public health", in my mind, is ONE living thing, ONE highly complex, fractally organized set of DNA in a fantastically complex dance. Viewed through one lens, it is one planet. Viewed through another, it is separate "countries." Viewed through another, it is 6 billion "people". Viewed by a virus, it is some huge number of cells, waiting to be infected.

It's a system, and not a heap, although both have "oneness." The heap, however, just sits there, and a living system, or S-Loop, is self-aware, self-repairing, goal-seeking, and allostatic. In the heap case, our interventions are on a passive lump of clay. In the complex adapative system case, our interventions are on a living Body that has its own equivalent of an immune system and tissue rejection is a very real possibility. Or the patient could be upset by the injection and punch us in the stomach and stomp out and come back with its friends and burn down the clinic.
It is not a lump of clay. It has huge stored energy and active agents within it. And it has a self-identity, and a goal, and will attempt to keep itself aligned with its current concept of its healthy state.

So, much of this is not news. Public Health knows that you can't just walk into a culture and impose some solution and expect it to "take" and expect that you can walk out again and not have your solution thrown out the window after you. Almost every foundation that funds public health interventions in Africa or elsewhere has already learned that lesson the hard way.

One place where this is news is corporate management theory, and the large interest right now in trying to understand why Toyota, coming from behind with about zero to start with, could walk slowly up to and past General Motors and keep on going. Despite the unseemly screeching about "unfair trade practices" and "unfair cheap labor" and "unfair currency valuation", there is a realization that they're doing something right that corporate America better wake up and figure out and emulate while they still exist.

After reading 20 books on "lean manufacturing" and "The Toyota Production Process" and "Lean Six-Sigma", and attending a weeks training and exercises, I come away with this -- Toyota understands the multi-level living model, and aligns itself with that, and GM still thinks the parts of the Body operate best if they are at war with each other.

Economically, especially if you live in Southeastern Michigan near Detroit as I do, this is one very big deal. This is the dominant thing happening on the economic landscape right now, and it has, surprise!, a huge impact on employment, education, health care, and the health of the states, cities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, ancillary services, and physical health of the people who live there.

I have trouble imagining how that could NOT be a proper subject for "public health" to attend to, but some don't share that view.

People are not well because their companies are not well. Their companies are not well because they are pursuing a bankrupt, dysfunctional model of human behavior that ran out of steam in the late 1960's, after McGreggor's Theory Y was published -- but the news hasn't hit many corporate boardrooms yet. Why? Because the companies have banded together to maintain a set of stories and myths about why things are the way they are, in which CEO's are "good guys" with "white hats" and labor, environmentalists, unions, lawyers and terrorists are the "bad guys" with black hats. It's a very powerful story, capable of distorting perceptions and selective attention to discount and ignore incredibly strong evidence that the myth doesn't hold water any more.

Well, I have to go. Let me put in a bookmark here. The bad news, from the point of view of activist "people", is that the level of corporations and managmeent a few levels above them seems to be so short sighted that all hope is lost.

My message is don't despair. It's like the water molecules. I'm sure there are idiots and crooks wearing CEO hats, but there are many good people wearing them as well. And, if you get high enough, as with the water and plumbing example, the ultimate investors, the huge funds, the John Templeton's of the world, are not evil people and are not in a frenzy about making 37% return on their money this week before the dude comes with the tire iron to break their kneecap for the loan they took out and failed to repay. The huge investors would be ecstatic to find ANY place to put a trillion dollars that would even RETAIN its value from year to year, or, wow, maybe even grow 1% in absolute real value. China's bankers are sitting on that kind of money and have that very same problem.

So, while the CEO's seem "high up" and out of reach from below, from far above CEO's are hired guns and "a dime a dozen." They can all be replaced, if there is a better way to make money in a sustainable fashion, with less fuss and anxiety and fewer disrupted golf afternoons. Probably entire nation-states can be replaced if they're in the way by the Club of Rome type crowd, or "organized crime" bosses.

Everyone one of them has the same issues, the same problems, the same S-Loop issues to worry about. Every cell, every tissue, every organ, every body system, every person, every company CEO, every Governor or President has the same set of questions they face daily. These are the ones we need to get better at. FIRST, there are the 7 basic steps of the core S-Loop, that I've gone over before.

Yesterday's picture - above. My Capstone picture below.



Second, there is not ONE loop doing this activity, but millions of them, or at least very many, horizontally at each level of the hierarchy of life. Third, there is a whole fractal tree shape of higher and lower level "ones" doing exactly the same activity in their world, at their level, at the same time, interacting vertically. All that gemisch looks only loosely coupled, but I think a deeper investigation will show that, like the body's immune system or circulatory system, the distal parts are really tightly connected after all, in at least a few important ways.

So, we have one huge, fractal tree shaped collection of DNA, all trying to figure out which way is up and how to survive until tomorrow and make it through today. Everyone is working on the same set of 7 questions, over and over.

where to intervene? John Kenneth Galbraith would call them "mental models", but for public health or psychology these days they are "stories" or "narratives" (or myths) that we tell ourselves, tell each other, and make self-sustaining by passing them back and forth so they don't die out. The ones that link up to make an S-Loop will persist and end up dominating.

So, the intevention points are the boxes in yellow then. These are non-tangible "stories" and changing them will change all the very real, very physical parts of the S-Loop located at the right side of the diagram. The IOM had it perfectly -- use "feedback" to inform and reshape the group, and it will become self-working and self-managing and self-righting without any more "guidance" from management. My addition is, use S-Loop feedback, not just "feedback", and your efforts will be 1000 times more self-persisting and have way less "tissue rejection".

Besides, there's a resonant notch there, so it tends to "click into place" or "snap to grid" if you get close to it. It has a familiar heft and ring. We know this place, because it is us.


As 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.

Wade