Does goodness pay?

On my continuing quest to examine the common ground between religions, sciences and business, I'm looking for good research questions. A "good" question would be about something that all three areas claimed to know something about and have some different perspective and expertise to bring to bear.

The point wouldn't be to prove one side right and the others wrong, but to try to figure out what reality might explain all three viewpoints.

Even better, the topic should have clear medical, health, and public health consequences. And, people should care about the answer, but so should larger groups of people such as families, teams, businesses, neighborhoods, communities, cultures, and nations.

That restriction is from my general rule that if it's not true across multiple scales, it's probably not the right place to start looking for stable truths.

So, this morning's candidate research question is: Does goodness pay?

This complements an earlier posting on "Does crime pay?" and, of course, after those two soon come a post on "Which pays better - crime or goodness?"

Why does any stakeholder care?

At every level, people are looking for clues or rules about 'what works." CEO's and investors want to know whether there is some rule of thumb that lets them look at a proposed action and go "yes" or "no." Is "goodness" defined at a corporate level, and if so how, and if so is it a good guide to profitable action or investments? As Gil Grissom on CSI would say, what's the evidence?

First, what exactly does "pay" mean?

We need to sharpen the question more to make it suitable for an academic research study.

Researchers might ask whether goodness and financial rewards are "associated." That is, if we make a graph of goodness on the horizontal axis and financial rewards on the vertical axis, will we get pretty much a rising curve or straight line? Are "poor" people "bad" and are "rich" people "good"? (I'm asking that loaded question somewhat tongue in cheek.)

Then, we could ask whether this association if there is one, might be causal. Have we picked out of all possible choices just two variables that are causally related and not in some feedback loop, so that either goodness causes wealth, or wealth causes goodness? if there is some phenomenon that the religious might refer to as "God rewards the virtuous", we might see goodness preceding wealth. Or, it may be that rich people can afford to be "nice" because it doesn't really cost them much, relative to their total net worth. In that case we might see wealth precede goodness.

But, it would be frustrating to find an association without knowing which way the causality went. Certainly there are rich people who feel all wealth is justified because, almost by definition, they themselves must be rich because they are good and, of course, poor people must be poor because "God is punishing them for their sinful behavior." This was quite a popular view among the rich in England in the 1800's, and all the poor were considered "undeserving poor."

So, to get around the questions of causality and shorten the study, we could ask "Does an increase in goodness result in an increase in wealth?" If we study people who recently became "gooder" would we also find that, in general, they shortly thereafter became richer?

With any "psychosocial study" we're well advised to have at least half of the equation well defined. So, maybe, measuring dollars is not very satisfactory, but at least it can be done done, and many people would think they understand what is being measured.

Second, what exactly does "goodness" mean?

But, we still have a problem with the left side of the equation. There is no accepted scientific standard for what "goodness" means, or how to measure it reliably and reproducibly, let alone quantitatively.

A related question is "What is the entity is whose goodness we're trying to measure?" This is a systems thinking question of scale, of boundaries, of connectedness, and of our model of what a person, group, and society are.

So, for example, if "people" are actually tightly bound up in their local family, neighborhood, business, culture, and nation, then the "entity" whose goodness is being measured might get all smeared out. And, we can easily imagine that. If a whole neighborhood gets a boost because some new business moved in and pays taxes and hires people, individuals in that area might improve in wealth through no "fault of their own." How are we going to deal with this multi-level effect?

For example, Professor Kim Cameron's Positive Organizational Scholarship site has examples of businesses where an entire company "got religion", or, more precisely, changed their culture together to one that is more interactive, loving, compassionate, and cross-supportive and, as a result, it would appear, the whole group was vastly more successful and really boosted the financial "bottom line."

So, it may be that "goodness" has to be rather wide-spread across many people for it to have an "emergent effect" on outcomes.

Or, on an even larger scale, maybe people, businesses, etc. are only capable of fighting battles, and the outcome of the whole war, figuratively or the literal "war on terrorism" depends not on those battles, but on the larger scale goodness of the mission and purpose of the USA as a whole. Those "multi-level" effects may overlap and need to be teased apart.

This is no different than walking into the boss's office just after she's had a fight with the prior visitor and getting a harsh reaction to an innocent question - you're getting the feedback that was really someone else's fault.

Some feedback appears to spill over to innocent bystanders - both good and bad

It may be that even excellent morality and the best of efforts by individuals can be undone by corruption or incompetence at higher levels of the organization, so their work is wasted and more or less blood spilled on the sand. The "people" as individuals are "good", but collectively, the aggregate is "bad."

That makes it really hard to measure, if there is some bad financial outcome, whether it's because the person wasn't "good" enough, or whether the boss wasn't "good" enough, or whether the company as a whole wasn't "good" enough -- assuming that goodness causes profit.

Maybe some thing, on some scale, got what "it" deserved, and "you" just happen to be caught in the larger-scale cross-fire. We all know that does happen to people, in some cases the entire populations of countries seem to be suffering from acts of a few at the top. How do we separate those effects? Do the good people get less of the bad stuff?

The model is now looking like "goodness" of individuals may be beneficial, and would result in a net profit if everyone had it, but it is also rather easily defeated if not everyone joins in. So, in that scenario, bad outcomes financially, locally, can result despite good behavior. Maybe the people have earned a palace in Heaven after they die, but that is not measurable and not a scientific research question where everything has to be measurable in this life.

Where do we put the cut-off boundary?

The scale and boundary effects actually change the right side of the equation as well - the financial outcomes. When do we stop measuring? If there are effects, how long do they take? Is there a "lag time" before there is the amplifying effect of an influx in "wealth" resulting from an input of an increase in "goodness"?

Or, if the outside environment is active and reactive, the result may be hard to see. If the local tax rate is very regressive and goes up to capture, in an extreme case, 105% of the increase in wealth, the person or company may have done very well, but had it all taken away leaving it now poorer, net, than when it started. That would mess up the measurement. Or, the person may gain much wealth but give it away to the poor, and, again, on a financial scale they didn't benefit, net. (Which shows that dollars are not capturing all the important things that are going on.)

Designing a study that doesn't isolate the actor from society is the only way to make the effect, if any, occur - but it also makes it challenging to be trying to sift out what is a response, and what is a counter-response from that environment by some other actor.

And, regardless, tracing out the pathways for 'emergent behaviors" and "synergy" are a whole area we are just beginning to understand how to study. So, in many cases where Positive Organizational Scholarship or "Theory Y" has been implemented in some division of, say, Ford, upper management remains skeptical because it's just not clear exactly WHAT got changed, or HOW that change percolated through to CAUSE the change in the output or bottom line.

So, the question remains open and actually, despite the Templeton Foundation's research efforts, rather poorly studied. The World Bank and others are studying "social capital" to try to figure out how social goodness in that form makes sustainable development work, and how corruption tends to instantly destroy most of that good impact. Those studies are ongoing.

================

References and further readings

Morality and Foreign Policy

George Kennan, Foreign Affairs

Professor Kim Cameron's work at the University of Michigan has certainly shown that psychosocial factors (squishy stuff with people being nice to each other and supporting each other) can make a $billion improvement in outcomes and make the impossible possible. That's a significant data point.

Video: "Making the impossible possible"

technorati tags:morality, goodness, rewards, pay, academic, causality, systems, organizations, assessment, poverty, wealth, investments, choices

US Army Full Spectrum Operations Field Manual FM 3-0

The New York Times editorial today rejoices in the new US Army Field manual, whicih would be the new version of FM 3-0 Ground Operations.    A key to Army field manuals follows below.

While I agree with the Times that there was, indeed, a catastrophic planning failure, I think it is worth while backing up further upstream and asking how on earth that could have happened.

The real issue here isn't whether the Army knew what to do, but what the Army should do when it tries to do what it should and the civilian leadership refuses to listen to the discussion and doesn't want to listen to inconvenient facts.

This gets into the subject of High Reliability Organizations,  Safety Cultures, and the
US Army Leadership Field Manual FM 22-100, previously discussed here.

Here's a glimpse into the articles and source documents.  I was unable to find a copy of the new, revised, draft FM 3-0 online for the general public at this time.

====================

The New York Times, Op Ed

Learning From Iraq

Nov 26, 2006

While politicians from both parties spin out their versions of Iraqs that should have been, could have been and just maybe still might be, the Army has taken on a far more useful project: figuring out why the Bush administration’s military plans worked out so badly and drawing lessons for future conflicts.

...Two hopeful examples are the latest draft of a new Army field manual ...Last week, The Los Angeles Times published details of some of the major changes being incorporated into the new field manual, while The Washington Post reported on some of the lessons learned in the Iraqi training programs.

The field manual, the Army’s basic guidebook for war, peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, quietly jettisons the single most disastrous innovation of the Rumsfeld era. That is the misconceived notion that the size and composition of an American intervention force should be based only on what is needed to defeat the organized armed forces of an enemy government, instead of also taking into account the needs of providing security and stability for the civilian population for which the United States will then be responsible.

Almost every post-invasion problem in Iraq can be directly traced to this one catastrophic planning failure, which left too few troops in Iraq to prevent rampant looting, restore basic services and move decisively against the insurgency before it took root and spread.

==============

What are Army Field Manuals? (From Slate Nov 16, 2006)

FMs—for just about everything a member of the Army might need to do,from handling nuclear material to cooking dinner. As of a few yearsago, there were over 650 different manuals. Some cover broad topics(for instance, FM 1 "The Army," and FM 3-0 "Operations") while others focus on more specific issues—like FM 8-50,"Prevention and Medical Management of Laser Injuries." The standardfield manual is written at a sixth-grade level and broken intochapters, and adorned with charts, tables, and hand-drawnillustrations. Some of the books come with appendices of examples orreal-life vignettes. Many—but not all—of them are available to thepublic on Web sites like this one.

Commentary

Commentary on field manuals

Officer of Engineers

02-09-2004, 02:29 AM

...
FM 3.0 - OPERATIONS (...)- By far, this is the most important document in the USArmy. It detailsthe strategic intent. Without this document as a reference, the rest of thearticles would be of little use.

LA Times article Nov 20, 2006

FT. LEAVENWORTH, KAN. — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld may be leaving under a cloud of criticism over his handling of the Iraq war, but his invasion plan — emphasizing speed over massive troop numbers — has consistently been held up as a resounding success.

Yet with Iraq near chaos 3 1/2 years later, a key Army manual now is being rewritten in a way that rejects the Rumsfeld doctrine and counsels against using it again.The draft version of the Army's Full Spectrum Operations field manual argues that in addition to defeating the enemy, military units must focus on providing security for the population — even during major combat.

TRADOC- Army Training and Doctrine Command

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (TRADOC News Service, August 25, 2006) -- In future conflicts, the United States will continue to face adversaries who use asymmetric approaches to warfare.

Col. Bob Johnson, chief of the Future Warfare Division Concept Development and Experimentation Directorate at Fort Monroe, Va., made this point at the Training and Doctrine Command Doctrine and Concept Conference II Aug. 16-17 at Fort Leavenworth.

The purpose of the conference was to discuss outstanding issues in Army Field Manual 3-0 Operations: Full Spectrum Operations, which is being revised, and to look at future operational and tactical maneuver operating concepts, said Lt. Col. Jeff La Face, division chief for the Operational Level Doctrine, Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate, here.

Full spectrum operations refer to simultaneous offensive, defensive, stability operations and civil support. FM 3-0 covers the fundamentals and principles that the Army uses in today's military operations, said La Face, whose CADD team is revising the manual

technorati tags:army, preparedness, learningorganizations, bigpicture, systems, systemsthinking, strategy, management, government, listening, mindfulness, safety, NIM, response

Business redefines science to suit

Science a la Joe Camel

Washington Post

By Laurie David
Sunday, November 26, 2006; B01

At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.

The producers of former vice president Al Gore's film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association NSTA for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.

The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other "special interests" might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs.

Gore, however, is not running for office, and the film's theatrical run is long since over. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

Still, maybe the NSTA just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the NTSA capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers (including this one) questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits.

It's bad enough when a company tries to sell junk science to a bunch of grown-ups. But, like a tobacco company using cartoons to peddle cigarettes, Exxon Mobil is going after our kids, too.

And it has been doing so for longer than you may think. ...


(Photo by m.o.m.o.)

technorati tags:business, science, education, inconvenient, propaganda, myths, influence, tobacco, warming, climate

The Penguin Revolution - Students in Chile

Amish Barn-raising by "heyburn3".

You have to wonder to what extent text messaging and internet connectivity powered this non-violent social movement, and where it will go from here. It has the earmarks of social cohesion that surprised most participants, including the student leaders.

Perhaps this is an example of how interacting people form the "water" on which self-sustaining waves can take form, which then take on a life of their own and "might as well be alive (MAWBA)" in the sense that they have most of the rest of the behaviors of what we call life - goal seeking, energy consumption, awareness, etc. That would make it less "artificial life" and more "meta-life" - that is, life occurring on top of other life, as human consciousness rides somehow on top of our body's cells, supported, interacting, but also independently alive.

Or, it might be an example of the computing phenomenon of connectionism in action, where non-programmed learning takes place in large networks, sort of on its own.

The question is, in a democracy, can a collection of normal, intensely communicating people synthesize more wisdom and capacity to produce change than a few very bright people? (need for collective problem solving in today's world)

See posts on social intelligence, unity with diversity, psychiatric treament for high school students in the USA, intellect versus action, role of feedback loops in sustaining a thought,
need for collective thinking in today's world, the importance of social relationships, Lewis Thomas on complex system interventions,

Chile's Student Activists - A Course in Democracy
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 25, 2006; A01

SANTIAGO, Chile -- When the Class of 2006 graduates in a few weeks, its members will look back at a year in which some of the most important lessons took place outside the classroom.

In their black and white school uniforms, they launched what became known here as the "Penguin Revolution," filling the streets, calling for educational reforms, occupying school buildings and sparking a nationwide debate that was quickly labeled a milestone for the nation's young democracy.

Extracurricular activities for student leaders this year meant negotiating with senior government officials. When they text-messaged friends, at times it was to organize rallies that attracted as many as 800,000 people. A few became nationally known public figures in their own right.

"Graduation will be hard, and there are going to be a lot of emotions that come back from this year," said Karina Delfino, 17, who became one of the voices of the student movement during her senior year. "All the friends made, the difficulties and the successes -- this was one stage in life that has been good, but very tough. The only thing I can do now is to try to end this stage as best I can and get ready for whatever is next."
...
The students' actions turned them into the most powerful social movement since the strict military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet was replaced by democracy 16 years ago. They forced the government to increase education spending and -- more important for many of the protesters -- prompted it to reexamine the roots of an educational system flawed by vast inequalities between the country's rich and poor populations.

Not everyone has approved of the students' methods at all times, but it's difficult to find anyone who hasn't come to accept them as a significant part of the country's social and political landscape.

"I believe their greatest achievement was to change the way people think of the youth of the country," said Rodrigo Cornejo, with the Chilean Observatory of Educational Policy at the University of Chile. "A lot of people thought the young people were simply individualistic, selfish consumers. But the long-term changes the students were pressing for this year weren't going to directly benefit them -- it was for their younger brothers and sisters."

...
Instead of plotting a grand revolution, the students said, they simply decided to take what they'd been taught at face value. If Chile's economy was so good -- as they had been hearing repeatedly during the presidential election campaigns in 2005 -- why did some schools lack essential supplies, like books and desks? Why should public schools be managed at the municipal level when that system encourages disparities between rich and poor neighborhoods? If Chile is a participatory democracy, why not participate?

"As the movement started to grow, we had everyone involved -- hippies, evangelicals, all the groups," said Delfino, who belongs to her school's social circle of organizers, those drawn to student government and academic organizations. "We all wanted the same thing, which was change. So we were trying to respect different opinions while at the same time working for consensus. That's all."

...The Education Ministry soon began holding negotiations with student leaders, and Bachelet eventually promised more funding to help the poorest students and created a panel, which included student representatives, to discuss broad reforms of the national educational system.
...
"The decision I have to make is whether I want to try to make changes through working directly with the community, or through politics," Huerta said. "If I work in the community, I can change the lives of a small group of people. With politics, you can do it on a macro level. But I don't want to join a political party."

...

"My age group started it, with the idea that you can be supportive of Chile and democracy without having to agree with everything the government does, that it's okay to be critical," Huerta said. "Now we have to see where the students in the first and second years of the high schools take it. I'm eager to see it."

technorati tags:feedback, students, feedforward, systems, synergy, politics, penguin, causalilty, movements, science, connectionism

When something is nothing

Active feedback systems can also have the frustrating property of revealing change that evaporates again as if it had never been there.

So, competent reliable observers may first measure something to be there, and they are correct, but then it goes away again and future measurements show it was "never there."

There are fewer examples here that most people recognize, although the phenomenon is fairly wide spread, because it is subtle.

Still, in the suburbs, anyone can easily see that the process of putting garbage cans out next to the curb causes garbage trucks to arrive. What's up with that?

The cleanest and least ambiguous example, physically, is the middle-range field of a radiating antenna. As discussed in a prior post, very near teh antenna one set of laws appear to apply, where the stable radiation pattern falls off as the inverse of distance. At long distances, the stable pattern can be measured to be falling off as the inverse cube of distance. And, in between, in the really annoying and complicated mid-range field, the pattern is unstable and appears, if measured, to fall off as the inverse square of distance. Worse, in the mid-range, some fields build up that behave as if they are about to be radiated into space, but then sort of change their mind and get basically sucked back into the antenna.

An analogy from the database world is a transaction in some system such as Oracle that is started, figures out it can't complete, and, rather than leave things in a mess, is rolled back out again. This "rollback" is a standard, required operation in database systems - that something can get started, then the application decides midcourse this isn't working, and the world is restored to a state as if the transaction had never started in the first place. In the local world, all trace that this even began is erased. This turns out to be a necessary process for retaining coherence in a database world. There are even more fascinating "two-phase commits" in distributed database worlds. This is a design feature that adds great value, and if evolution was making databases, it would preserve this if it ever found it.

And, another physical example from the realm of tiny-scale physics, and the behavior of light packets known as photons. When a photon approaches a barrier that has a "double slit" in it, the photon has to decide what to do. If it were a particle, it would either bounce off the barrier, or go through one slit or the other. But, waves behave differently. In a very real sense, the photon looks ahead to the future, sees that there are two slits, sees that if it went a certain way it would result in conflict and interference, so it never goes that way in the first place. The exact same interference pattern is generated as if the slit, acting as a wave, went through BOTH slits, except that, if you measure it, no, photons only are measured going through one slit OR the other.

Yet another example from stage magic is the behavior of perception in a crowd. It is well known among stage magicians that observations are reversible. That is, a few people in a crowd may actually see something happen they weren't supposed to see, but if no one around them sees or responds to it, the initial perception "goes away" again, and, if asked later, the people will claim they never saw anything. But video of the audience shows them registering surprise, looking around, and then dismissing the observation.

On an internal scale, I think human vision and perception play many such tricks on people where pre-perceptual processes form an impression, sort of try it on for size, decide it doesn't fit, and then discard it. The behavior can be seen in functional MRI clinical images of the brain, but the person involved claims nothing ever happened in the first place.

The photon example runs into another phenomenon of look-ahead, or feed-forward (instead of feed-back.) When intelligent, observing, thinking agents are involved, to look at the mathematics, systems respond not only to the past but to the future. We all know that people respond to expectations of the future, which really, really messes up measuring the direction of causality. The scientific tools and statistics we use assumes causality goes forward in time, and causality that appears to go the other direction jams the equipment.

A simple example mentioned above would me observational measurements of the suburbs, where anyone can easily see that the process of putting garbage cans out next to the curb causes garbage trucks to arrive.

(photo by abbamouse on flickr )

technorati tags:feedback, feedforward, systems, antenna, photons, garbage, rollback, causalilty, methods, methodology, science, loops

When nothing is something

When complex adapative systems are involved, very often nothing is something and something is nothing. This makes it hard to get the correct model engaged to use to interpret the data.

A nice, clean example of the first principle, where "nothing" is "something" is a very common regulatory feedback loop often known as a "clamp." Probably the most common examples of these are thermostats and automobile speed "cruise control." The system is engineered on purpose to observe the world, to see a difference between some observable property of the world and some goal, and to take the appropriate action to bring the world's property back into line with the goal that is currently set. No big deal.

However, when the regulatory feedback clamp is the hidden model, it may be much harder to detect and realize what you are looking at. A good example might be, say, a tobacco control ad campaign. Say you measure the historical prevalence of smoking in some area, then intervene with a big educational ad campaign, then measure the final prevalence of smoking, and there is no change. The question is, "Did the ad campaign work?"

One possible underlying model is that no one watched the ads, and so it flopped for that reason. Another possible underlying model is that many people watched the ads and started to change their behavior, which was instantly picked up by the tobacco companies, which responded by seriously ramping up their ads until smoking returned to the level the industry wanted for that area. And, for every dollar spent in the tobacco control ad, the industry had to spend $1,000 to counter the effect. So, now, again the question is, "Did the ad campaign work?"

This is a case where "nothing is something." Because of the intervening active external systems effect, the impact of the intervention netted out to zero, as measured by one particular outcome variable. So, if you assume an underlying linear regression model where
prevalence = some constant plus some factor times your ad campaign dollars, you will measure zero effect for the coefficient factor. If you're sloppy, you would say that the ad had no effect on prevalence. If you're careful, you'd say that you cannot demonstrate any statistically valid impact on prevalence. These conclusions are correct, but misleading, as your ad campaign was very effective, but wasn't the only thing going on.

( Image is from "deadgirl1121" at flickr )

technorati tags:smoking, tobacco_control, causality, reasoning, GLM, general_linear_model, systems_thinking, feedback, feedback_loops, regulatory_feedback_loops, regulation, reasoning, modeling

Flu - weekly influenza in USA

Current influenza activity (flu) reported each week by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta.

This is normal flu, not "avian flu".

It's interesting that the start this year seems to be in the area devastated a year ago by hurricane Katrina.

Last year, the flu started later, and the Southeast US was just about the last area to get flu.

This could be a real effect due to both the higher stress and lower employment and fresh food sources among the population and the continued damage to the public health infrastructure.

So, does crime pay?

Does crime pay? Can you get away with murder?

These are important and unsettled question in public health, government, public policy, social and economic development, religious studies, banking, personal ethics, and corporate ethics.

Furthermore, these are questions that should be amenable to systematic study and evidence gathering by scientific researchers.

One thing is certainly clear, regarding this type of crime or terrorism in general - it's probably way more cost-effective to stop the behavior before it begins than try to intercept it mid-stream. Once criminals take power, it's hard to unseat them from the outside. And, so far as the rule of thumb is correct that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," this is a closed reinforcing feedback loop, where power leads to corruption that, in the short run, leads to more wealth and more power, etc.

For all their downsides, people who believe firmly in a Final Judgment by God and in the idea of hell and eternal damnation are probably less likely to commit crimes or fall into corrupt practices than those who don't believe there is accountability because they haven't seen it yet.

Again, we have multiple systems thinking concepts intertwined in this discussion. The big ones off the top of my head are:

Is there a negative (discouraging or punishing) feedback loop in society that is not obvious to casual inspection? (in this life, not in the next one, as that one is hard to observe directly.)

If there is such a loop, with "lags" and "amplification", so that it arrives finally "with a vengeance", who ends up in the line of fire? The person? The person and family? Anyone in the vicinity? The corporation? The neighborhood? The culture? The whole country? The whole planet and all Homo sapiens? The whole galaxy?

If there is such an echoing loop of any type, can we say anything more about the behavior? Is there rapid gain from a crime, followed by it slowly eroding? Is there rapid gain, followed by an oscillating instability that decays over time? Is there rapid gain, followed by rapid loss and an escalating oscillilation that results in destruction? What? Or is the response of the world purely random and what we see is what we get? Is there gain in this life, but then payment for bad karma in multiple successive lives?

If there is a downside, what is the mechansm of "enforcement" or delivery? Do crimes against people or humanity result in some internal change ("guilt"?) that drags people down? Or some external change ("loss of trust") that drags people down physiologically? Or some external change (loss of social capital and direct investment) that slowly sinks the whole environment?
Or what? Are socially destructive people, like pathogens that destroy our own bodies, somehow flagged ("opsonized") somehow for later neutralization and removal by some other agents, besides the local "justice system", effectively a social immune system?

As with evaluation of any action, the value of the result is probably context dependent and almost certainly boundary dependent and scale-dependent. Viewed locally, at short range, one answer may be obvious. Viewed at mid range, other answers may be obvious. Viewed at very long range, yet different answers may be obtained by competent observers and researchers.
This effect needs to be accounted for in evaluating observations.

So, a king could take some action against a neighboring country that, in the short run, appeared to gain territory or wealth, but in reality turned all the other previously neutral countries against that king, so that, long term, the king's reign was cut short. A tactical victory, but a strategic catastrophe.

Every military strategist knows that it is possible to win a battle but lose the war. In fact, it's possible to win every battle and still lose the war. I used to teach the board game "Go" at Cornell, and MBA's would consistently lose that way - they would focus on short term material gain, ignoring entirely long-range positional loss, and then, after winning a series of battles (by their flawed accounting system), they would suddenly realize that they had lost the entire game. No wonder this game was a required skill of all Japanese Samurai soldiers.

So, are kings, corrupt politicians, organized crime bosses "winning" or "losing"? That's an interesting question that can be studied. I'm not sure it has been.

And, even if it is 100% certain that some behaviors lead to a short-term benefit but a long-term disaster, people go ahead and do them. Smoking is a prime example.

What's the answer? Various people have various opinions. This is a very hard question to answer scientifically with existing concepts and measurement tools. Many CEO's or their large stockholders and investment companies would love to know the answer to this question, but haven't yet turned to "public health" as the researchers to go find out the answer for them.

Ineresting question, though.

(Image by Darco TT )

Social intelligence

When we're looking at the tools science, religion, and business use to look at the world, we have two important properties of human beings that need to be kept in mind.

One is that the shape of a "human being" physiologically is increasingly unclear, but appears to extend somewhat outside their skin.

The other is that the shape of "human consciousness" also extends outside one mind.

What does this mean and why is it relevant?

First, what has been described as one of the "most robust" findings in public health epidemiology is that the physical health of "a person" is highly dependent upon that how that "person" is related to, interconnected with, and interacting with the larger group of "people" around them, and vice versa.

This relationship is very strong, and breaking social ties and connections between "a person" and "other people" can have demonstrable damaging or even fatal effects on that "person."

I use the term "person" in quotes because, from a mathematical systems point of view, if we trace out the physiological and psychological regulatory control loops, they clearly extend outside the skin and include "other people."

This is a very intimate relationship. It is stronger than an "environmental factor", such as the temperature or noise-level. It can be a "phase-lock loop" where internal systems are actually entrained and mathematically "become one" with another "person."

Daniel Goleman, in his recent New York Time's bestselling book Social Intelligence pictured above, describes the new classes of neurons that have been discovered in the brain that facilitate this process, including the "spindle cell" and "mirror neurons".

Where Goleman doesn't go, but I will and have in prior posts, is to look at the multiperson unit from a computer science and information processing viewpoint.

In radio and optical astronomy, a new and very powerful technique is "aperture synthesis", where many small telescopes are mathematically fused together so that, even though they look separate to the eye, they are acting in a very deep sense as "one". The result is twofold - first, the collecting area is vastly increased, so that more signal is available. Second, and more subtle, the resolution of the whole unit is improved, because it depends inversely on the largest diameter of the whole unit, even if there are gaps in the middle.

This unity is very deep, and we don't really have good words to describe it. Mathematically, the many remain separate and yet have become one. (e pluribus unum.)

The unity may not be directly perceived, but the change in output of the combined unit is dramatically different.

Similar phenomena have been observed, now repeatedly, and documented in collections of people that for brief periods of time exceed even slime mold in their power to come together intellectually and emotionally and form a team that is orders of magnitude beyond the normal "committee" that results in putting people in a group.

Professor Kim Cameron at the Ross School of Business nd the center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan study these extremely high performance teams, and how to achieve this result for business purposes, to solve problems and boost the bottom line. This is real stuff, not some fantasy dream. It really works and has a huge dollar impact.

So, when we start to think about how it is that scientists, or religious people, or business men think and perceive the world, we need to realize that our legacy concepts of what a person is, and what a collaboration are, need some polishing.

In a very real, measurable sense, there is a "public" that has a health, which interacts with but is different from the "individuals" that make up that public. Even our counting "one, two, three" is a billiard-ball technology in a quantum-mechanic wave-type world, and doesn't really work very well. We don't yet know "how many am I?" This reflects work at MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab by Marvin Minsky, as in The Society of Mind, which questioned how many of us are inside one mind anyway.

This is a core issue in the generalized systems theory, or life-sciences, or business - the theory and technology and principles of multicellular operation that actually works well and is "healthy".

Psychiatric care for our children - faith or evidence?

On the subject of evidence-based science and medicine, here's a brief excerpt from an article in today's New York Times. Maybe one thing this suggests is that the question should not be an axis of "science versus religion" but a triangle of "science, religion, and business" in terms of what it is that determines our public policy and national behaviors.

Proof is Scant on Psychiatric Drug Mix for Young
New York Times (online)
November 23, 2006

There is little doubt that some psychiatric medicines, taken by themselves, work well in children. For example, dozens of studies have shown that stimulants improve attentiveness. A handful of other psychiatric drugs have proven effective against childhood obsessive compulsive disorder, among other problems.

But a growing number of children and teenagers in the United States are taking not just a single drug for discrete psychiatric difficulties but combinations of powerful and even life-threatening medications to treat a dizzying array of problems.

Last year in the United States, about 1.6 million children and teenagers — 280,000 of them under age 10 — were given at least two psychiatric drugs in combination, according to an analysis performed by Medco Health Solutions at the request of The New York Times. More than 500,000 were prescribed at least three psychiatric drugs. More than 160,000 got at least four medications together, the analysis found.

Many psychiatrists and parents believe that such drug combinations, often referred to as drug cocktails, help. But there is virtually no scientific evidence to justify this multiplication of pills, researchers say. A few studies have shown that a combination of two drugs can be helpful in adult patients, but the evidence in children is scant. And there is no evidence at all — “zero,” “zip,” “nil,” experts said — that combining three or more drugs is appropriate or even effective in children or adults.

“There are not any good scientific data to support the widespread use of these medicines in children, particularly in young children where the scientific data are even more scarce,” said Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

(photo by wendilinxx on flickr )

Faith and evidence-based reasoning

One dimension of the public debate between science and religion is resolved as "faith" versus "evidence."

Yes, I'd agree that where you have tried and true calibrated observational tools, then viewing reality directly should trump legacy impressions or old mental models of what's out there right now. Things change.

The problem with operationalizing that is that we don't generally have calibrated vision. In fact, the observational powers and perception of any one human working alone are generally dismal,
easily fooled, context-sensitive, path-sensitive, and not reproducible.

We are quite biased about seeing personal flaws, so move the discussion outside. Would you trust a person I selected at random from around you to have perfect judgment and perception of the world and to always make good calls about what's going on and what to do Probably not.

Even if you are an academic or scientist or doctor. Maybe, especially if you are a professional, you are able to see flaws easily in others regarding their observational powers, judgment, and freedom from bias favoring mental models clung to despite evidence to the contrary.

And, the field of "science" as a whole, while quick to note reasoning flaws in those outside the field, can be slow to equally weight centuries of evidence that the scientific method is no guarantee of freedom from bias. Stephen Jay Gould documented this very well in The Mismeasure of Man. New data that contradicted existing and beloved mental models have always been rejected more than appropriate, even by scientists, often especially by the best scientists. Thomas Kuhn writes well on the problems of changing the paradigm in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Yes, "science" rejected Bohr's quantum mechanics, Einstein's "theory of relativity", plate tectonics, Barbara McClintock's "jumping genes", etc. Scientists clung to with a religious fervor the idea that DNA and the human genome had 100% of the information in it needed to create an organism, and none of it was "epigenetic", and none of it was, gasp, changeable in real-time by the environment in a heritable way.

And, my favorite - at the current time, "systems thinking" and the need to include closed feedback loops in models of reality is clearly becoming more and more important, but requires letting go of the misperceived "scientific method" restriction that anything important can be isolated from reality and studied under controlled conditions, and described quantitatively. Unfortunately, that removed economics, business, psychology, love, war, sociology, and most of the rest of human activity from the sphere of "science" which, fascinatingly, did not perceive this as a testament to the weakness of its methods, but saw it as a statement of the worthlessness of the problem domains for study. They were, sniff, "soft" sciences, not really the kind one would invite to a garden party.

So, there's the problem. Our individual perceptual system, even among very well trained scientists, remains flawed and biased. And, our perception of the quality of our own personal perception seems curiously exempt from the flaws that everyone else around us seems to have.

So, we don't perceive the world well, and, worse, we don't perceive that we don't perceive well.

The observational equipment humans are born with is blind to its own blind spots.

Thus, grudgingly, we are forced to use statistical methods to try to overcome our own skepticism or gullibility and avoid errors in seeing things that aren't there, or not seeing things that are there. We are forced to submit our beloved ideas to the cold or acidic waters of peer review, where many of them are shown to have flaws we didn't realize.

The blindness problem and lack of humility are true for those in management and leadership positions as well, and the lack of contact with reality are most easily perceived from either below (the staff) or outside (stockholders), but often almost invisible from within, where shared delusions take on the power of reality.

Thus, it becomes critical for safe and sane operations that there be pathways for the staff to point out problems with leadership's mental models and perceptions of the world. These are not always accepted gracefully. Yet, even the US Army Leadership Field Manual, and all the teachings of High Reliability Organizations, stress the need to build a "safety culture" where individuals can question and challenge the prevailing wisdom.

So, finally, swing this back around to questions of faith. If even people who are way above us in IQ and who have ten years more education than us are subject to having their best judgment proven wrong, what level of humility should we have about our own?

If our eyes very often deceive us and our very perceptions betray us, does it make sense to go with personally perceived reality or with a larger, more slowly moving flywheel of socially hard-won and peer-reviewed reality?

So, while, yes, we need to have a culture that allows respectful questions to be raised and taken seriously, and that needs to accept that things change over time, we also need to recognize that any single random observation we have that contradicts that social wisdom is more likely wrong than a brilliant insight.

Regardless of level of experience and education, these factors are at play, and it is a good rule of thumb to have many counselors from many diverse backgrounds vet our observations and point out to us, in as civil and loving a way as possible, where we, uh, are wrong.

In the meantime, whether science or religion, "faith" in the generally accepted corpus of knowledge is the flywheel we have to go on day by day. In either field, that mental model of the world has to be updated if there is consistent, persistent evidence that there is now a mismatch between the model and the reality. The process works better if those with old views and those with new views are respectful of the need for dynamic stability and the ongoing conversation to continue.

What has always proven to be wrong, historically, is to say "Ah, we've removed the last bug, and the system is now perfect." The reality is, very little of what we hold dear seems to survive 100 years intact.

The unbiased forecast, therefore, has to be that most of what we currently believe to be true is equally distorted.

Also, if genes or religious beliefs are preserved over hundreds or thousands of years, they must serve some very important purpose, because preservation is an expensive process. While the value may not be obvious in a quick glance or in a short-run accounting, we should be respectful of the assumption that there is some value, some kernel of truth, something underlying that selection by survival, that would be good to understand, tease out, and hear.

Surviving the white water ahead

Life on earth is rapidly approaching a transition point of very rapid change, where either we will survive the "white water" run, or we will capsize and pretty well lose the planet.

(The photo is of our neighbor in space, the Andromeda galaxy.)

I won't list all the downside scenarios, but there are many. The academic volumes Lethal Arrogance by Llody Dumans and Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow are compendia of just some of the things that could go wrong.

Worse, those authors argue that, in fact, unless we can somehow manage to contain ourselves, we will basically force one of those disasters to occur.

The reason is that every time we solve one safety problem, instead of stopping there we escalate the problem. So, having solved the problem of building 1 story buildings, we moved on to 2 story. Having solved 100 stories we move on towards 200 stories. The same is true for buildings, for automobile speed, for aircraft size, etc. We, as a civilization, can't ever leave well enough alone, and have to take something that works and press it until it breaks again.

The problem, eloquently described by Perrow, is that the costs of these inevitable outcomes or "normal accidents" continues to rise. When Oog's hut fell down, only Oog and his family were at risk. When the World Trade Center fell, tens of thousands were at risk. When Chernobyl failed, tens of thousands were killed. God knows what is going on underground in some secret laboratory that's next on the list of things to run amok.

We passed the point, as a planet, where the majority of problems were due to the elements, and have moved into a realm where the problems we are creating for ourselves and each other are as large or larger than the biblical disasters. And, if anything, we respond to this situation by accelerating our research into new things to do to each other.

So, the point is, we all have a mutual interest in solving the problem of how to survive the next, say, 20 years without killing ourselves off as a species. If that problem isn't solved, the rest of the arguments about who is right and who is wrong about some particular belief or theory becomes irrelevant. The question of which nation, corporation, or political party "controls" what area of the mideast or what oil fields or what agricultural land or what water supply becomes irrelevant. No amount of wealth of any king or sheik will matter.

So, how do we pause our argument long enough to jointly solve this mutual problem? Can we take some sort of time-out and pause to discuss survival of the human race?

The reality taught us by "systems thinking" and observation is that we are at a point where it is not "them" that is creating this hazard to us all, it is the "battle with them" that is doing it, and if we could all agree to a temporary cease-fire, we could check that out.

That is the problem that religion, science, and anyone else with working brain cells should be working on. Can't we forget who is "right" for long enough to figure out how to reduce the hazard that our battle over who is "right" is producing?

Getting to Yes - a winning strategy

The conflict between Science and Religion has way too many similarities to the Cold War between the US and the USSR. Each group has the power, either technical or social, to more or less exterminate the other, although, as in the Cold War, the result of that battle could end up being fatal to both sides.

So, what do we have to do to prevent a lose-lose scenario? Hopefully, sane people would agree that everyone dying is not their preferred outcome.

The Harvard Negotiation project, which did the work represented in the book "Getting to Yes", had to grapple with that Cold War problem: How do we reach some accomodation when each side believes the other side is the embodiment of evil and refuses to budge, or sometimes, even to talk, or even to talk about talking.

The subtitle of the book tells the secret - "negotiating agreement without giving in." The key fact is that most people, or nations, or cultures have used a very broad brush in defining what position they feel is indispensible to their very survival. If these positions are examined, there are underlying "interests" that are actually what matter, and, yes, the parties would be willing to consider other positions so long as they were certain their underlying core values and interests were met.

That turns out to be enough flexibility to find solutions, and, in fact, the US and the USSR did not launch World War III, which they could easily have done.

The key steps, as the book cover details are these:

• Separate the people from the problem
• Focus on interests not positions
• Work together to create options that will satisfy both parties; and
• Negotiate successfully with people who are more powerful, refuse to play by the rules, or resort to "dirty tricks."

Scientists demonize religion to protect what's holy

In a somewhat non-reflective moment, some scientists appear to have ramped up prejudice and stereotyping in the name of open-minded tolerance and honesty. Others were more disciplined in their comments.

The New York Times carried an article yesteday, excerpted here:

New York Times online
November 21 2006
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
by George Johnson

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

...

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science....”

Commentary

As one with a foot firmly in both camps, I think there are several lessons here.

First, respectful conversation is important, not only between "sides" but within each group.
That means starting by not demonizing the other person or their perspective or mental model, and in particular by not demonizing their intentions. There are some people with anger-managment problems, some with sinister agendas, and some crazies, but most people are well-intentioned. Most objections are friendly obejctions, not the start of world war III. Can we start there?

Second, as mentioned in earlier posts here, even within an engineering community, such as a nuclear reactor control room, discussions that challenge mental models are very difficult and can become emotional, to the extent that people identify themselves with their positions. This has been extensively documented, in books such as "Getting to Yes" by the Harvard Negotiation Project. Again, let's start there and learn how to create "safety cultures" where we can talk to each other without fighting, about any subject. Most of us have zero formal training on conflict-management.

Third, it seems that most people, regardless of education, have difficulty seeing the end of their own expertise and the start of areas where their experience is a poor guide. And, unfortunately, there is a "Nobel prize effect" where the more public success one has had with a model, the harder it becomes in the future to challenge that model. People tend to get locked into a model, with a huge accumulation of supportive evidence and a very weak accumulation of contrary evidence.

Fourth, there is a conflict between how knowledge is accessed. I discussed this before in a post on the difference between academics and businessmen, but it's largely true as well for the difference between scientists and theologists. Academics typically are oriented around small-scale open-loop symbol-structures, and can battle for years over tiny discrepancies; businessmen and theologists are oriented around large-scale, closed-loop massively-parallel image structures, where pointwise problems are insignificant, what matters is the overall diagnostic impression and the action taken based on that. Academics, in general, care about details they call "facts." Religion cares primarily (aside from extremists) about activities in the real world called "actions."

The relationship between the two is not some linear translation or rotation or other affine transformation - it is more like a fourier transform or hologram. There is no reason that qualified observers making accurate observations using the two systems would agree on overlays of their measurements.

For the scientific readers of this post, that whole conflict, essentially between Newtonian calculus and Laplacian calculus, needs to be teased out of the equation first to see what remains.
In the one, we define a function by a whole series of pointwise values of y(x). In the other, we define a function by its components, somewhat akin to hierarchical jpegs - so the first fact is not to nail down say, the value of y at x=zero, but to nail-down "what is the average value of y over the range in question?" The Newtonian crowd (scientists) start screaming because the value of y(zero) 's Fourier component number one is clearly "wrong", ignoring the fact that they haven't even defined y(most points) which is also "wrong."

For example, a theoretical scientist may develop a nuclear weapon, or restore the smallpox DNA sequence, or reconstitute the 1918 avian flue virus, but disclaim responsibility for how that technology is used from that point forward. A non-scientist might ask, responsibly, "What the did you do that for?" The scientist might say "To advance science" and the non-scientist might say "We have too much of your science already."

This is not to advocate a Luddite approach. It's to note that "science" does not operate in a vacuum, isolated from other effects or events. Science, and scientists operate in society and have very real social impacts with their actions. The fact that so many scientists wash their hands of these clearly related downstream effects of their actions is very disturbing to other very rational people, some of whom are scientists, some of whom are in the "religion" camp.
We get "How can you live with a wrong fact!" versus "How can you live with a wrong action?!"

In fact, the battle over "facts" in the stories religions have as part of their belief systems is a red-herring. Within religions, and I've wasted a thousand hours on this pitfal, some people just spend all their time arguing over minor semantic distinctions, and avoiding dealing with the crux of the matter, namely the social irresponsibility of their own behavior.

It appears that "science" is seen by some people as a reprieve, a liberty, a license to be "free" of any accountability or responsiblity for their own actions. This message may not be intended by most scientists, but it is the way their work is taken by many, including many business and political leaders. In reality, as science advances to non-linear complex systems adequate to start grappling with social issues, the feedback loops that humans have with society and each other will become very clear and, ultimately, normative. We may be within a decade of that realization.

At that point, there may be much more realization of convergence, regarding how humans "should" behave towards each other, if we want, say, to survive as a species at all.

In the meantime, be respectful.

The journey begins

Pathways to Peace

Click Here

International Media show multiple viewpoints

Nothing shows the multiplicity of perspectives, viewpoints, and mental models as much as the international media. Here's yet another area where substantial funding and research need to go into figuring out how a story in one cultural reference frame will appear when reported in a different cultural reference frame.

-------------------------------------------------

(IHT, Nov 19, 2006)
America's media bubble
Lawrence Pintak

The Boston Globe ...There used to be a time when the U.S. media wrote the global narrative. The world saw itself through a largely American camera lens. No more. The launch last week of Al Jazeera International, the English-speaking cousin to the channel the Bush administration loves to hate, is just the latest reminder of that.

...Here in the Middle East, we can watch more than 300 channels...

The perspective of these channels is different. So is the spin...

Journalistic bias? Like terrorism, it's in the eye of the beholder. After five years of Sturm und Drang from the Bush administration about the evils of the Arab media, American officials still don't really get it. The genie is out of the lamp. News people abroad - whether Arabs, Irish, or Zimbabweans - do see the world, and U.S. policy, differently than their American counterparts. Their news organizations will report differently. It's a fact.

Even more important , every statement, every offhand comment is reported instantly. Live. 24/7. There is no place to hide. No such thing as Davos rules. Just ask the pope. Like politics, all policy is local. It's no longer just about how it plays in Peoria. There's also Peshawar and Pretoria.

American officials can no longer say one thing and do another.

Yet American officials who should know better still don't get it. A U.S. public diplomacy official involved in communicating with the Muslim world recently asked me if there were Arab blogs. Only hundreds - and they are changing the face of Arab politics.

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e pluribus unum

The latin phrase "e pluribus unum", part of the Great Seal of the United States, is on every dollar bill. (It's written in about 5 point font on the ribbon in the eagle's beak.)

This phrase translates to "from many, one" and refers to the uniting of the 13 separate states into a single organization that acted as one.

According to Wikipedia,

In 1956,E pluribus unum was superseded by "In God We Trust" as the national motto by United States Code, Title 36, Subtitle I, Part A, Chapter 3, Section 302. Both mottos are imprinted on all US coinage

It is interesting that these two phrases are chosen, as if to remind everyone daily that the on-going problem of sustaining unity within diversity is as important today as it was in 1776.

A little reflection reveals that all living organisms, as well as meta-life (such as corporations, cultures, and nations) all have major systems doing work daily in trying to reaffirm unity and undo the destructive effects that tend to rip organisms apart or even simply "lose the center" that holds them together.

This also means that, over a billion years of evolution, organisms may have internalized properties that actually help sustain the larger organism of which they're part. Othere posts here an on the prior weblog discuss how "depression" of people who have broken bonds with society may have value in disabling their ability to carry on effective action, or even commit suicide in an analog of apoptosis (programmed cell death), thus reducing their ability to spread their disaffection to others.

The identification of "bad people" and removal from circulation seems to be as important to states as the identification of pathogens and removal from circulation by our own bodies.

The big problem in all this is that the "one" that is being preserved has to change over time to adapt to changing circumstances. It has to be dynamically stable, not static and stable. The organism has to be capable of learning (short term) and evolving (long term) to incorporate new behaviors that are adapative to the new environment.

And, in essentially all life and meta-life, this dynamic stability at a large size or scale has to occur despite the fact that the lower-level cells (for bodies) or people (for corporations, nations, or cultures) are constantly dying and being replaced. Essentially every 7 years, every cell in our bodies is new. Essentially every 100 years, every person in society is new. Yet, the larger entity has to continue in an unbroken form despite this turmoil below the covers.

Another group that is very familiar with this kind of problem are the information technology (IT) people who manage enterprise computer networks and systems for corporations. Despite a continual turnover of the hardware, the operating systems, the database systems, and the applications being used, the emergent whole has to evolve smoothly and seamlessly to support the business. And, as with bodies or nations, the whole entitity may be remarkably unaware of the turmoil at the lower-scale level.

So, the "e pluribus unum" concept, the core of multi-cellular organisms (meta-life), is actually quite a profound and far-reaching concept. To be understood properly, it has to be viewed over a time-scale that covers the entire lifespan of the component entities, the larger entity, and the next larger contextual entity (perhaps a nation). The role of some preserved genes or functions will make no sense unless seen in this perspective.

So, also, it's not just "unity in diversity" that matters, but that very special kind of dynamic unity that allows learning and evolution to occur over time, with evolution of the overall being, to adapt to ever-changing environments.

Do religions have common ground?

The Washington Post had this forum topic this week:

THE QUESTION

If some religious people believe they have a monopoly on truth, then are conversation and common ground possible? If so, what would be the difficulties and benefits of such a conversation?

Posted by Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham on November 10, 2006 8:34 AM

I posted this comment:

This is a great question, but the answer may require a few years of preparation. We may find it helpful to learn how to carry on such conversations on less-loaded topics first.

For example, people have studied recent disasters at nuclear power plants, space shuttles, airplane accidents, etc., to see how on earth these things happen, despite our best efforts to make them safe. The answers reveal a lot about how humans form beliefs, carry on conversations, and change beliefs. The stakes keep getting higher.

The keys to what's called "high reliability organizations" are honesty, trust, and ability to speak out respectfully and safely when you see something that doesn't seem to fit the story that everyone is treating as truth. And that means sometimes not only questioning the fact, but also questioning the framework or model or story-line.

The costs of mistakes keep getting higher, so this is a type of social learning that gets more important with time. This kind of problem occurs at home, at work, and at a national and cultural level.

It's hard, but not impossible, to build such a "safety culture" on purpose. All high-risk businesses are working on that problem, including nuclear power plants, airlines, hospitals.. It's made doubly-hard because we tangle up questioning facts, questioning assumptions, and challenging-authority or "stepping out of line." So, those who raise honest questions in a loving way are often perceived as opponents or enemies.

Some people still assert that dissent and open questioning are not compatible with the necessary authority and control to maintain law, order, and public safety. The facts disagree. In aircraft cockpits, co-pilots are learning how to challenge the pilot's facts without challenging her authority. In hospitals, nurses are learning how to challenge the surgeon's assumptions without being out of line. Even the US Army has a program of learning how those on "the bottom" can question the facts and assumptions of those above them without being insubordinate. If these questions can't be raised, overall safety goes down, not up, and that's been demonstrated over and over.

And, particularly, the hardest thing to do is to challenge unspoken, shared assumptions.

But, until we learn how to carry on these conversations, about the "truth" of much simpler things such as what's going on inside the reactor, or on that left wing, or inside the patient, or in the middle east, it seems doubly hard to talk about differing assumptions regarding religious questions.

So it's a really good sign that people are learning how to carry on serious conversations, and that a lot of funding is going into that activity. Those skills should help give us the experience and skills we need to tackle even harder questions about apparent discrepancies between religions, and between religion and science.

On the other hand, if we can't even carry on productive conversations about relatively simple matters, we shouldn't be surprised that the harder ones defy us.

November 19, 2006 6:39 AM

References
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Threat and Error Management - Airline safety that also works for hospitals

Organizational Learning From Experience in High-Hazard Industries (Carroll, 2002, MIT)

Health care risk analysis and Culture of Safety (IOM)

US Army Leadership Field Manual ( FM 22-100 )

High Reliability Organizations (Web site with extensive bibliography)

Effects of adaptive behaviors and shared mental models on control crew performance.

Unity with Diversity is the central problem

Across all scales of life, a pivotal feature is "unity with diversity."

This problem is a recognized central problem in health care systems, for example, where there is a visible tendency for specialization to break the world up into "silos" of expertise and common world-views. The silo form is critical to establishing a small context within which a huge amount of information is shared and doesn't need to be explicitly stated, making terse conversation possible within the team.

Unfortunately, exactly the same words fall on deaf ears, or are totally misunderstood outside the silo, because the unstated assumptions and world-view are different.

A common response is something like "We need to get rid of silos!" followed by an attempt to "standardize" or, effectively, homogenize conversations - which only works where it can reduce conversations to the least common denominator.

The problem needs to be framed instead as "We need a way to allow silos to continue to exist, but for people within them to still be able to communicate across silos." In other words, we need the benefits of detailed specialization and the benefits of larger-scale coordination, both.

The exact same problem occurs in machine-vision, or processing of, say, microscope images of histopathology slides of cross section of a blood vessel. We need very high resolution to see enough of the important details, but we also need a high width field-of-view to be sure we're not looking at some statistical anomaly. For images, this can be solved by collecting the images, matching up the edges, and pasting them together to form a huge mosaic that has both the field of view and the necessary detail.

We haven't been able to do the analogy with health care organizations yet, but we need to.

Should this be possible? Well, we all walk around with a living example - our own bodies. Our bodies have trillions of cells, with great specialization in different areas for different purposes, and yet with a common identity and purpose. Our bodies exhibit the type of "unity with diversity" I'm referring to.

On a scale larger than cells, or organisms, or corporations, we have national and global needs as well to accomplish "unity with diversity." We need to treasure our global diversity, as it is rich with information and value, not to ignore a great variety of music and food. It is rich as well in different perspectives and world-views.

A bad strategy to accomplish "world peace" or conflict elimination is to attempt to homogenize the world into any one framework or cultural system. This strategy is effectively "the Borg", and the same as "eliminating silos." It won't give us the differing perspectives we need to survive. It removes the necessary ecological complexity. For species, simplification and homogeneity turn fatal at the next turning of the road, and change of conditions. It's like having all elm trees in a country, then catching Dutch elm disease. It's a very bad strategy.

What we need instead is the same type of "diversity within unity" that our own bodies exhibit, mathematically. ( I don't mean we should paste people together into a global sized blob of protoplasm!)

What I'm talking about here is really the key issue behind multi-cellular organisms, and why those are successful models for our bodies and our corporations. Nobody wants "the Borg", but nobody wants World War III either. As the world gets smaller at a visible rate, we are forced to confront these hard issues.

To accomplish that, as discussed in my prior post, we need to learn how to communicate between silos, across world-views. Then, we need to move up the scale to learning how to coordinate across them. Then we need to move up to collaboration across silos, as in "Getting to Yes." Finally, we need to move up to coherence of spirit across silos, where we all finally realize that we need to work together to survive here, and the solutions do not consist of killing off each other and trying to impose homogeneity and false-unity.

We need a healthy, organic unity of shared purpose and identity, but one that is above and crosses over different organizations and specializations and local world views, and still allows them to exist largely independently.

It can work. It does work in our bodies. In my mind, this is the challenge of the "life sciences" and what is the key ingredient in accomplishing the social cohesion necessary for health, both individually and economically of the nation.

This is one area where specialists from across the spectrum of science and business can get together in a true interdisciplinary effort, because the problem is, effectively, fractal or self-similar in nature. We see the same problem at every level of the totality of life-on-earth.
That's great, because it means we do have common ground there to compare notes and cross-fertilize the search for solutions. It's also great because the need for economic survival and large sources of funding are aligned with a need for global survival of that context in which we compete for resources. If the lifeboat we share goes down, we all lose.

So, we do have a common ground, and a common problem to solve together. The interdisciplinary value of that solution can structure and give meaning to our efforts
to find this "win-win" strategy. And we better, because the alternative is a "lose-lose" one.