Active strength through emergent synthesis

My recent post on "active strength" really isn't complete without a mention of what astronomers are doing now to boost their ability to see farther into space and detect even larger structures.

As the picture shows, many radio telescopes (the satellite dish-shaped things) are often used simultaneously to get a better view.

But, something almost magic is going on here that you can't see from the picture. If you simply collected and added up the signals from each dish, and you had, say 100 dishes, you'd end up with a picture with the same crummy resolution one dish has, but 100 times as bright. So, you could see dim objects you couldn't see before, but you absolutely cannot see any more fine structure than you could before. The picture is, effectively, still blurry. You have, effectively, a pinhole camera where the pinhole is the size of the dish.

A law known as Bracewell's Law says that it doesn't matter how many images you take and add up, you can't get better resolution with many images than you can get with one image. (There's an exception, of course, for "hyper-resolution" that I'll talk about sometime.)

To get a less blurry picture, you need to resolve details. However, Bracewell's law prevents you from resolving details finer than the ratio of the wavelength you are using to the diameter of the dish.

But, there's another sort of exception. If you spread out some dishes as in the picture, and you do the right thing mathematically, you can get as good resolution as if you had a dish with a diameter equal to the distance between the farthest separated dishes. So, with one dish in Arizona, and another in England, the effective diameter is 8,000 kilometers or so.

The process is called "aperture synthesis", and I had a more technical prior post on it here.

The points relevant to active strength and social constructs where people work as one are these:

• If we work together we can see way better than if we work separately
• 
  
• All of us have a larger "diameter" than the largest single one of us, hands down.
• 
  
• The more distance there is between our dishes, the better we can resolve ambiguity in what we're looking at. (Effectively, "diversity" helps, and the more axes and larger distance we can get, the better.)

Working together doesn't mean just working separately and pooling our data. It means, in some very specific sense, "working as one". The difference is the difference between incoherent light (normal light) and a powerful laser beam (coherent light). We humans need to be "coherent" and that's a very special meaning of the concept "united" or "unity."

If we can pull it off, our power goes up from some number "N" which is the number of us, to something like N-squared, a much larger number. And here's the astounding thing - no single molecule in a laser is doing any more work than it did when the light was incoherent -- all that changed is that the radiation is synchronized and coherent. The power results simply from changing the timing of what we do, not from doing something harder.

A small change in synchronization or timing can make an orchestra sound terrible, and a small change can make it sound fantastic. Same instruments, same sounds, just a slight change in how the parts relate to the whole.

Or, for a sports team, it helps to have great individual players, but it helps more to have teamwork that "clicks" so everyone suddenly starts acting as one completely coherent player spread out over many people. That's the few seconds of a 3 hour game that makes the three hours worth while to watch. It's why some coaches don't want "great individuals" but want "great team players." An activated, coherent team will always be more powerful than the "best individual" on it or on the opposing team.

Coherent unity is a winning strategy.

This is basically the magic behind The Toyota Way. By stabilizing what everyone does so it's known by others, visible, and fully predictable, and by forcing everyone to be aware of what everyone else is doing, that last 1 percent can be crossed and everyone can suddenly see with hyper-resolution eyes and think with an aperture-synthesis brain the size of the whole workforce. It only works if individuals are willing to let the team be larger than their own egos, which can be a problem in some cultures.

So, we should set our sights on more than just "working together", and aim for the much more powerful goal of "working as one." This is part of why "unity in diversity" is such a powerful concept, way more so than you'd think.

Mathematically, this is much more powerful than the "invisible hand of Adam Smith" trying to select the "best individual" so that individual can lead the pack or find the way the rest of us can try to emulate. Competition and "survival of the fittest" "rugged individual" strategies result in fragmentation and getting stronger individuals, yes, clearly, but at the cost of weaker teams.

Unfortunately, we're at a point in social evolution where the team matters more than the individual now.

So, we end up with some very fine companies being thwarted by a state government, say, that cannot get its act together and manage the state, or by a county government that cannot get its act together and manage the county.

There is a backlash by some very bright individuals and their families at social obstacles everyone else presents to their brightness being "all it can be." The reality is that unharnessed individuals going off on their own for their own benefit is not the kind of creativity we are most in need of right now. That's not where it's breaking.

I discuss this in my post "Houston, we have another problem!" and showed this diagram. The basic message is this. It doesn't matter how smart we can make one person. One person is like "one dish" in radio telescopes. Take any person and make them a million times smarter, and the complexity of social problems that 6 billion people can produce, in real time, is still vastly larger than that person will ever comprehend. There is only one "algorithm" that keeps up with "everyone" with their N-factorial interactions, and that is "everyone" in a coherent effort to work together.

Compared to the size of the problem, even a person with an IQ of a million is effectively an ant trying to comprehend quantum mechanics. This startling idea really hasn't sunk in yet. This will never "go back" to the way it was, the old days, where one person could "know it all" and "rule the world." We have an educational system trying to produce individual smart people and what we need is an educational system that produces collectively smart teams. The curves have crossed forever:

So, the Arecibo radio telescoe, with a 1000-foot diameter dish, is not being funded because the days of huge single "RAMBO" type solutions are over, replaced by networks of individuals where the network is the key to the power. No single "dish" will ever compete again.

IBM stopped trying to make super "CPU's" years ago, and their new "supercomputer", as everyone's, is really a network of 860,000 smaller cpu's, and the key to it (what a surprise!) is how well the smaller cpu's can figure out for themselves what to do and how to do it, without being programmed or controlled by some "master cpu". The "operating system" is the key.

This isn't theory. This is practice. We have a school system designed to develop leaders for 19th century industry, in a 21st century world. We don't need a 20% fix or even a 50% improvement in "productivity" or "teaching skills" or "scores on the GRE."

What we need is a complete transformation of the whole point and purpose of education. Now that no one can know everything, what few things is it just critical that we all know? I think "how to work together" is in that short list.

The paradox is this. Great individuals aren't of value unless they can work together as one in teams. That requires solving how anyone can work together in teams. Once we solve that, we don't need "supermen" individuals any more, because a network made up of just a lot of regular people cooperating will end up being more powerful.

The power is in the network, not in the individuals in the network. Or, more precisely, the power emerges through the network, but is way more powerful than the network.

But, this is not a "team" like that used by ants or bees or termite communities. Those are built from individuals who are entirely inflexible, and the whole structure is rigid to the point of being brittle. If the world changes outside the range of motion of the hive to adapt, the hive will die. Applied to humans, that's the tyranny model.

Humans are, we hope, a much higher-level creature than ants. What we need to strive for is a higher-order community more like Air-Traffic Control, where we have enough imposed and accepted order that we don't run into or damage each other, but beyond that we have flexibility to adapt locally to whatever is going on. Instead of "rigid strength" we seek "active strength".

That picture describes, once again, something that looks like "unity in diversity", with "independent investigation of the truth". It seeks harmony but not homogeneity, unity but not uniformity. The overall structure is not rigid, but can learn and adapt and change as the environment changes or the problem we are all addressing changes.

So, if we collectively decided that we wanted to get some roots down on other planets around other stars, we might take on one shape that is superbly good for solving interstellar travel. But we would be "transformers" as a society, and could flexibly change our overall shape to meet the needs. The flexibility is crucial, because the creativity of such a structure will be enormous, so we will polish off problems that have been here for millenia, before lunch, and then move on from there. Like an airplane picking up speed, we'd need to start tucking in our wings as we get to the speed of sound, and being air-tight as we got above the atmosphere and switchted to rocket power, etc.

No rigid hierarchy or structure would work for that, but neither would the chaos of anarchy -- we need an adaptive, flexible core network that helps us hold on to a certain shape at a certain time, and then, when it is the right time, to let go of that shape again and move on to something else.

As societies, we've managed to get the "hold on to this shape" part down, but we're not very good yet at "now let go of that and move on." The only "let go" we're generally familiar with is disruptive and revolutionary, or anarchy. Like the ants, we've build some corporate and social structures that were fantastically good solutions to problems we had 200 years ago. Or, like Southeast Michigan, we've build a social structure that worked fine 50 years ago.

Our problem now is that it's not 50 years ago, it's not 200 years ago, it's now. This is a new world, and "the cheese has moved." We don't have very much experience figuring out which parts of our culture are crucial to hang on to , and which parts are in the way and we need to let go of. And, that is made complex because the value of things needs to be assessed over hundreds of years, not over 3 months, or we'll miss the point of some structure and "throw out the baby with the bathwater."

That's where we are today. Disruptive external pressures are demanding that we adapt and transform the way we live and our social structures to new realities, and we have very little personal experience with that magnitude of change, let alone that rate of change. In China, cities like Shanghai have experienced 1000 years of growth in one generation and are a little dizzy from the altitude change and need time to adjust. This is totally new. Change has never come this fast. In 1500, kings could take weeks or years deciding what do to; now the world changes in 12 minutes.

So we are doing what physics does all the time, "searching for invariants of the motion". Amid all the apparent chaos, what are the few things that need to say the same? What can we release our death-grip on, and what should we hold on to even tighter? Where have we mistaken "positions" for "interests" and gotten stuck on some local maximum and missed the big picture?

That's where we need "active strength", and enough trust to let go a little bit and see if things get better or worse, and prepare to be surprised.

For Islam and Christianity and Judaism, the challenge today is to disentangle what is degeneration from what is regeneration, to block the first and embrace the second. These are decisions we need all of us to grapple with, not just a few of us.

As a recent post discussed, evangelical Christianity is struggling with this right now. In the Mideast, everyone is struggling with this right now - modernism versus tradition, chaos versus order, new versus old, what to hang on to and fight to the death to defend, and what it's OK to let go of now, finally, since that storm is over and now the wind is from a different direction and the challenges are different.

As with any active structure or building, the parts may need to shift "positions" in order to keep on doing a good job of the interests of keeping the building upright as the winds shift direction and velocity. It's the same task, the same goal, but new ways of accomplishing it.

It's the task of technology not to replace humans and cultures in this sense-making, but to enable them to do it faster and better, dropping less on the way. Even technology is falling into its own wake, with the support of advanced bookkeeping yielding to support of social collaboration and redefining entirely the purpose and values of "I.T." We've moved from "data processing" to "word processing" to "image processing" and are getting beyond "content processing" into the realm of "context processing". We're getting beyond information and into living and dynamic social wisdom. We're getting beyond what someone said to why they said it and who they are, anyway, and how come they never call anymore?

It's a new day.

Wade

Racism, prejudice, and unity in diversity worldwide

working together
Originally uploaded by tigerluxe

"Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy."

October 22, 2007
New York Times

Editorial (Excerpts)

Ain’t That America

Think of America’s greatest historical shames. Most have involved the singling out of groups of people for abuse. Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy.

We are heading down this road again. The country needs to have a working immigration policy, one that corresponds to economic realities and is based on good sense and fairness. But it doesn’t. It has federal inertia and a rising immigrant tide, and a national mood of frustration and anxiety that is slipping, as it has so many times before, into hatred and fear. Hostility for illegal immigrants falls disproportionately on an entire population of people, documented or not, who speak Spanish and are working-class or poor. By blinding the country to solutions, it has harmed us all.

The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It’s in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It’s on talk radio and blogs. It’s on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions. And it can be heard nearly every night on CNN, in the nativist drumming of Lou Dobbs, for whom immigration is an obsessive cause.

In New York, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed allowing illegal immigrants to earn driver’s licenses. It is a good, practical idea, designed to replace anonymous drivers with registered competent ones. In show after show, Mr. Dobbs has trained his biggest guns on Mr. Spitzer, branding him with puerile epithets like “spoiled, rich-kid brat” and depicting his policy as some sort of sanctuary program for the 9/11 hijackers. Someday there may be a calm debate, in Albany and nationally, about immigrant drivers. But with Mr. Dobbs at the megaphone, for now there is only histrionics and outrage.

[ what might be done? ...]

C. Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.

And so here we are at C. It’s a policy that can’t work; it’s too small-bore, too petty, too narrow. And all the while it’s not working, it can only lead to the festering of hate. Americans are a practical and generous people, with a tolerant streak a mile wide. But there is a combustible strain of nativism in this country, and it takes only a handful of match tossers to ignite it.

The new demagogues are united in their zeal to uproot the illegal population. They do not discriminate between criminals and the much larger group of ambitious strivers. They champion misguided policies, like a mythically airtight border fence and a reckless campaign of home invasions. And they summon the worst of America’s past by treating a hidden group of vulnerable people as an enemy to be hated and vanquished, not as part of a problem to be managed.

Comment -

In economic hard times, it is all too common to focus on those getting the jobs that are left, not on those who set what policies in place that led to us having so few jobs in the first place. It's closer and easier to stereotype and rally around.

Historically, this has often led to hatred against precisely the latest group of people we just attracted and imported, or even "Shanghai-ed" and virtually enslaved, to do dirty work at low pay that no one else wanted to do. Many groups have held this spot - Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Irish, Chinese railroad workers in the mid 1800's, Italians (Sacco and Vanzetti), and currently it seems to be "Hispanic-surnamed" that have become the focus of hatred and blame for economic hard times and pain and frustration and job losses that they had nothing to do with creating.

It seems it's not enough that they are subjected to working conditions in migrant labor or meat-packing that are nightmares, (Like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle) but then we have to get angry at them for having taken on such work in the first place and done it for us and in our name.

I think the actual causal loop that slowly deepens is this: first some random group of powerless people is exploited, then we can't live with ourselves and the fact of our being exploiters of decent human beings, so we solve that by "dehumanizing" the group we're currently exploiting which lessens the pain and justifies the sub-minimum wage, which makes them easier to exploit if not actually "deserving" of being exploited to "get even" with them for some never-named crime.

It is a feedback loop where our own guilt and actions lead to beliefs which lead to actions in a downward spiral - driven by a mistaken attempt of our own minds to reduce the conflict between our actions and our self-image as being "good decent people" who would never harm innocent people.

A generation later we snap out of this hypnotic trance, and can't figure out why we thought that particular group of people were "bad" when it now is obvious they aren't ... it's this OTHER group of people who are now "obviously bad."

So a few cases of "bad people" are magnified and echoed by TV and media until we think these represent the norm, and that all "those people" are "that way" - whatever it is this time. It seems to take a generation or longer to undo the damage caused by these successive waves of hatred-as-national-policy - a sort of "genocide-lite".

But so long as attention focuses on some target of choice, it distracts us from getting back upstream to the root-cause problem, and fixing it. We should be asking "Why are there so few jobs left?" and one that is so common we don't even ask it "Why do I and my wife have to work three or four jobs when my grandparents could make do and get by on just one?"

Put another way - "Why is my life going downhill when the TV says things are getting better? Who can I blame for this? It must be someone's fault!"

Well, it's not the fault of other people who are in the same boat as you, for starters.

There are two larger forces at work here. First, a basic law of economics or pressure of any kind - in an open world, "real wages" will tend to even out around the globe. It it is as easy to order a widget to be made in Thailand as next door, and they charge much less abroad, money will flow to Thailand, raising their average wage and standard of living, and lowering ours. That's huge and dominates what's going on around us and has been going on for the past 50 years.

Globalization and arrangements like NAFTA may speed it up, but it will happen regardless, one way or another. The pressure just finds some way to leak out and equalize.

So one fact of life we can count on is that Asian standards of living will go up, and our own standards of living in the USA will go down, regardless what policies we follow, unless we figure out how to make the "pie keep growing." Lately, this shows up as wages and bank accounts grow by 2 percent a year, and the global purchasing value of the dollar falls by 8 percent a year - we earn slightly more, viewed locally, but it and our pension savings are all worth a lot less so we can afford to buy fewer things for even more money.

The only escape clause is if we can make the "pie keep growing." We'll get back to that.

A second fact of life is that the very rich are more or less addicted to the "pie growing" life and tend to make sure that their total income continues growing.

In the US then this produces a whipsaw effect, as the rich have to extract even more and more wealth from the poor in order to keep their own income rising in a falling world. So not only is there less and less real wealth to go around, but most of us get a smaller and smaller share of it to keep. Again, it is not likely that any human force will change that trend.

A third and scary trend is that the very rich see the USA in decline and are moving their bases of operations off the sinking ship, and moving their headquarters offshore to someplace like Dubai, as Halliburton did recently. Since much of the world has rising standards of living, there are some pretty nice places out there now, with way more open space and better and cheaper health care than the US can provide.

The effect of that is equivalent to the rich pulling their kids out of public schools - which then lose the students, the income, and the influential parents caring what happens to the schools, and leads to yet another downward spiral of schools getting worse and more rich parents pulling their kids out and sending them to private schools.

All three of these changes are "structural" not "cyclic" - which means the past is not a good guide to the future, and these changes will just keep on going, not reverse and return to some mythic equilibrium if we just wait long enough.

In short, the dismal picture is that, unless the pie can be made to grow, the average person in the USA will lose on all three fronts - falling in health, education, and welfare, let alone their paycheck and job quality. We can't ever cure this by shutting some group out with immigration policy, because these changes aren't due to something that immigrants do or did.

In fact, it is the immigrant populations that tend to keep revitalizing the nation and providing the new growth that finds the one way out - new growth of innovative new approaches and industries.

As I've discussed in numerous other posts, the real hope is in "synergy" or the unlimited upward power of collaboration. It is precisely in the niche-space created between our own culture and other cultures, interacting creatively, that new life and new growth and new hope are born and flow into this world.

Here's the problem. For that to happen, for creative power to exceed the normal power of decline and decay, we need to have the largest "angle" possible between our own culture and each other culture. If you think of an angle as the point of a piece of pie, the amount of pie goes up as the angle at the point goes up. More angle = more pie.

If we interact well with another culture, we want the largest angle (most pie) we can get, which means we want them to be as different from us as we can stand and still interact.

We need, in other words, "unity in diversity". If they are identical to us, the angle is about zero and the slice of pie will barely matter.

So, the only policy that will work in the scenario I just described is one where we are very open and specialize in finding and dealing creatively and cooperatively with as many diverse other cultures as we can, treasuring their difference from us as our joint asset, which it is.

The worst possible policy in that model would be to (a) shut our borders and cut down interactions with others, and (b) avoid dealing with people who are different, or try to make everyone the same as us.

Parochialism, inter-group hatred, conformity, and higher walls of isolation are the opposite of what we need to be doing as a national policy.

True wealth decays away, regardless, everywhere. It is a living thing. Some strategies regenerate new wealth faster than the decay rate, and those groups will grow. Building a wall around the US and cutting off the living interactions that generate new growth will not, and cannot possibly "sustain" our wealth -- those policies will simply guarantee that no new growth will occur and hasten our decline.

The statistics are plain to see. Other countries have passed the US and are pulling further and further ahead in health of their populations, in skill and knowledge, in industry of all kinds, etc.
The last thing we need now is to cut off our interaction and ability to learn from them.

One measure of health of a population is simply average height, which reflects how healthy, overall, our childhood was for us. Healthier people tend to be taller. This year the USA finally lost the place of tallest country, and the average Dutch males is now taller than the average US male by almost an inch. "Size doesn't matter" but the implications do.

We need to take down the barriers to embracing global unity in diversity, not put up new ones of hatred and fear, if we are going to start growing again economically.

I should comment that I don't support these ideas because the Baha'i Faith tells me to - I support the Baha'i faith because it has been preaching this "unity with diversity" message for over 150 years and I'm finally understanding why that is so important and how all the feedback loops and emergent system effects work together.

So what to do?

If the world is too complex for one human to understand, even a truly great, high IQ one, is all lost?

Hardly. People, managers, politicians, analysts, scientists do need to abandon the idea that the world can be simplified enough to fit into their single human brain in a model that will give them the right answer to "what if" type questions.
(Try your intuition on the "amazing devices to impress your friends, for example.)

If that ever worked, it won't anymore, ever again. Now, we are our own problem.

The key that can work is to address the problems of working together, which, reflexively, recursively, we need to address together.

It appears that there is no way around one truly inconvenient truth: we need all those diverse people, cultures, and opinions and backgrounds to balance out our own blind spots and mistaken assumptions that no one we hang with questions any more.

Wealth, even immense wealth, is not sufficient to break our interdependence and set us "free" of needing to work together. This problem is squarely in our path, and it's time to stop trying to finesse it or get around it or pretend it isn't important.

We need "unity in diversity".

Collectively, (dirty word, i know), we can synthesize a thinking engine that can get past the limitations that any one person or viewpoint or culture must have. In complex systems, the enemy is "oversimplification", and the key to survival of a species is "diversity." If all we have is "elm trees" and there is an elm tree disease, we are screwed. We lose all out trees.

This arguing over WHICH viewpoint is right is pointless, because NONE of them can POSSIBLY be "right", because human beings are too tiny, too low dimensional, to short-lived, to ever even begin to understand, as individuals, the important relationships and how they unfold.

But, we CAN understand a process - that if we figure out how to work together as one, then THAT larger "ONE" can solve problems that we, as individuals, even brilliant ones, cannot.

As it says on every bill and coin in the USA, lest we forget, "E pluribus unum." (From many, one.) This is what to remember when times get rough, and, guys, times are getting rough.

Can even diverse races and ethnic groups and religions act like grownups and work together to solve common problems? That's a question many people, such as the Baha'i Faith have been looking at for a long time. (Baha'is say "yes!", by the way.)

It is crucial that we get "scientists" engaged in this discussion. It doesn't matter if we find new sources of energy or water or food or high-mileage engines if we destroy our planet while we're doing that.

The core problem can be stated very simply:

How do we have to act and think
so that adding one more person
to our group improves the result
of our thinking?

That's it.

Mathematically, this is what is known as a recursive solution. This, restated,
is the problem between us, today, and our grandchildren surviving or all dying.

Solve [N+1} > [N] for all N, including N=1 (two people),
where [ ] brackets indicate "working together on a common problem."

One thing leaps out from this starting point -- the whole "competitive" approach to solving problems, trying to make individuals the key, trying to make superhuman individuals, is doomed to failure and should be abandoned immediately as a solution route.

Our entire educational system is based on a false premise, that our goal is to maximize individuals. We need to maximize [US] not [me].

We've started to stumble into this realization, finding that teams, not individuals, are the authors of most great new research papers, but we haven't adjusted our Nobel prizes or other pay incentives to reflect this, let alone the way we teach or "grade" students, or the way we evaluate and reward "employees."

In health care, the Institute of Medicine has recognized that "teams" or ("microsystems") are the key to reliable, safe , cost-effective care, not super-individuals -- even surgeons with 8 years advanced training. Errors spring from broken teamwork, and great results spring from functional teamwork, and there is no way around it.

Most commercial aircraft accidents occur on the first day that that set of people is together as a team. in the cockpit. (74% to be exact, according to Johns Hopkin's researcher Bryan Sextan).
The individuals are highly competent, but until the TEAM becomes competent, "they" cannot fly a plane safely.

Maybe it helps to think of it this way. Each feedback loop can hold information and sustain a concept. If we put "N" people together, we can make N-factorial combinations of connections, but then way more ways to send feedback percolating through that. This is the model our brain is built around - rather dumb neurons, individually, interacting to be, collectively, bright enough to handle the world.

This is the core problem. Not terrorism, not Iraq, not weapons of mass destruction, not urban decay or competitiveness. All we're doing with those problems is stirring the pot, generally making things worse by our efforts to make them better -- unless we can pool our energy and spirits and thinking and overcome our intellectual silos and work together.

The planet's climate is breaking. The ecosystem is starting to oversimplify and unravel. This is not good. This needs more attention, but it has to get it from [US] not from us.

We need to advance one more rung along the evolutionary direction of giving new life to our collective self, including our corporations in particular. They need to grasp that, if the people all die, they will die too. No one will be left to spend the vast wealth they are trying to accumulate.








This is not parallel play type "teamwork" or "groupwork." This is seriously different.