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.

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(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
-----------------

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.

FM 22-100 US Army Leadership Field Manual

Review: In the introduction by Jeffrey A. Krames, Author of What the Best CEO's Know, he states The US Army Leadership Field Manual presents vital information that can help to shape leaders who inspire people, organize actions, develop strategy, and respond to uncertainty with speed and effectiveness."

As a civilian and MBA, I was startled and pleasantly surprised by the new US Army Leadership Field Manual, affectionately known as "FM 22-100." The concepts presented seem to me to be very much in line with all the recent academic papers on best practices in High-Reliablity Organizations and also Positive Organizational Scholarship.

In fact, whether for daily operations in peacetime, or for preparation for the chaos of an actual bioterrorist event, the book, and the approach of a consistent approach based on character and culture, seems indispensible. Especially since Public Health, industry, and the military will need to work together in a complete catastrophic event, whether manmade or natural, it would be a great idea to all be on the same wavelength.

The Center for Army Leadership has published just such a "wavelength" that appears to me to be suitable for public health, private health centers, private industry, and the US Army.

The burden now, I'd suggest, is for public health leadership to either accept this framework and join in advocating it, or to use it as a benchmarking standard, and evolve something at least that good but fine-tuned to the specific situation and language.

The book is not filled with images of "Rambo", recommendations of a "Kill, kill, kill!" mentality, or other short-sighted violence. In fact, the book notes that the mission of the Army is to resolve any war they are called on to fight in such a way as to build a basis for a sustainable peace afterwards. That approach is far more enlightened than many civilian approaches.

The focus of the book is on a unified, top-to-bottom leadership doctrine that is designed and tested to work in practice, with real people not superheroes, under rapidly changing conditions and great uncertainty about what is going on - a situation US businesses increasingly find familiar.

The central theme is that the crucial element is not technology, or command and control systems, but "how Army values form the basis of character."

The McGraw Hill book can be purchased for $15 at Borders or $20 at Amazon here, and viewed in a regretably ugly format on-line as html pages here, if you have a low-speed connection, since the entire manual in pdf form can be downloaded for no charge (it's 9.5 Megabytes.)

The Center for Army Leadership has created a book that is consistently approachable, accessible, practical, and grounded in examples. It is easy and pleasant to read and free of academic or military jargon. I highly recommend it.

I'll post some snippets and photos as I get time. If anyone else who reads this has used this book in practice or in a classroom, I'd like to talk to you.

Wade
(originally posted in my other weblog)

technorati tags: army,
reliability,
character,
integrity, leadership, character

Feedback cited as the core concept in Systems Dynamics

Cornell's SD site, in "Other Resources", at the bottom line, lists this:

The main concept behind system dynamics is feedback thinking. To explore the history of feedback thinking, see:

• Richardson, George P. (1991, 1999) Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory. Now available from Pegasus Communications (Click on the System Dynamics link in the “Browse Products by Subject box on the left-hand side.)

Systems thinking and health care - reflection

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Systems thinking about assembly line health care

Why are the Big Three auto companies going broke, and if their high-tech Detroit area assembly-line operation is our model for health care, is that our destiny as well?

Consider this recent news.

New York Times
August 19, 2006
Ford Is Slashing Production 20% for 4th Quarter
By MICHELINE MAYNARD

DEARBORN, Mich., Aug. 18 — The Ford Motor Company, which is struggling to keep its grip on second place in the American car market, said Friday that it would cut by one-fifth the number of vehicles it plans to build in the final three months of the year.

The slowdown represented the deepest production cuts since the industry’s crisis of the 1980’s. It also underscored the difficulty that Detroit, whose business relies on sales of sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, is having as gas prices remain around $3 a gallon. Detroit’s market share has dropped to its lowest level in history, while Asian brands, known for their fuel efficiency, are setting sales records...

On Friday, Ford officials contended that no one in the industry could have anticipated that gasoline prices would remain so high ... [emphasis added]

The mental-model of fine-tuning assembly-line clinical medicine may break down when seen through public health's wider lens, or in light of the impact on the humans whose bodies and lives provide the pixels on which this video is displayed, or be fine in both those contexts but have issues when seen in terms of globalization and the increasing ability of patients to fly to Singapore for surgical care at a total cost well less than similar care here.

The "systems thinking" approach suggests that we should spin through all those lenses on our microscope and consider whether each one makes sense, before we fixate, as Ford and GM seem to have, on activities that are perfectly sensible when removed from global context, but that look different when viewed in situ.

In clinical care systems we know that the parts do not exactly fit, and are not always well-coordinated. We take as an unexamined given that with just a little better training, a few more messages here and a new EHR message-store component there, surely this will come-together, click, and emerge as a dynamically stable and scalable system that cranks out top-notch patient care and dollars like a fine-tuned machine. Won't it?

In the 21st century, Peter Senge said, it is not enough that organizations persist well, they also must be able to change well. And Cybernetics 101 teaches us that in order to change well, a system needs to be able to see well. Perception is everything. We should confirm that those specs are reflected in the Electronic Health Record brave new world we're building nationally, before too much concrete is poured that will need to be ripped out and redone.

Like GM, we both face the twin questions of how humans fit into the assembly line model, over extended time periods, and, stepping back, whether the product those lines are producing is, viewed in global context, the product consumers will be buying next year.

We have to make sure not only that we're solving the problem right, but that we're solving the right problem. And, in the way of systems, we have to ask whether the way we're structuring humans and machines to solve the one problem doesn't create, as an "unintended side-effect", an emergent interference with our ability to see many small signs on the front lines that things are changing and the old model doesn't really fit the new reality.

Or are we somehow blinding ourselves to marketplace changes that seem obvious to the world not embedded in our own internal story? Ford executives asked who could have known that gas prices might rise? Hmm. Somehow they managed to assemble a workforce of half a million people with a resultant net organizational IQ of less than the average teenager. We need to ask where their collective common-sense-emerging process broke down, to be sure we're not following in their footsteps and mimicking their behaviors a little too closely.

Obviously, the problem is subtle. This is the way with most system problems.

There's lots of blame being spread around for "obvious" events and causes and decisions, including health care costs in another reflexive feedback loop, but we of systems thinking world know those are typically red-herrings and just symptoms of far more subtle problems in systems dynamics space. We are in desperate need of a "macroscope" that makes this almost invisible tissue stained and visible to the naked eye at last so we can see not just the microbes that we deal with daily, but the living dysfunctions that appear capable of infecting human organizations and causing Detroit blindness.

I'm not forecasting what tomorrows customer and problems will be, only that they will not be the same as yesterday's, in some really important ways. But I am saying that, based on the inexorable evidence and outcomes of the US automobile industry, there is something deeply but subtly wrong with the assembly-line model on a system dynamics basis - something that results in organizational blindness and incapacity to adapt.

It would seem the better part of valor to figure out exactly what that is, and make sure we don't inadvertently copy that into health care delivery systems as well.

Bottom line, literally: it would seem worth easily a billon dollars and a million votes to the Michigan economy to understand that answer in depth, and not just superficially. Whatever it is, there's a lot more where it came from.

Packaged simulators for Health Care insight

The Systems Dynamics Society web-pages on "Other Resources" have a link to the K-12 education SD community, and to the newsletter "The Creative Learning Exchange".
Volume 15 number 2 (Spring, 2006) issue of that has an article by Gary B. Hirsch, Consultant and Creator of Learning Environments, Wayland MA, USA, titled "Packaged Simulators and Simulation-Based Learning Environments: An Alternative to Model-Building That Can Expand the Audience for System Dynamics.

Examples shown are a driving simulator on "curve safety", a house-temperature simulator, and a Retail Store simulator game, and a Public School Reform simulator (for adults). Multiple available exploratoriums are described at the end of the article, including a "health care simulator".

MPH Curriculum Systems Thinking Competencies

ASPH Education Committee

Master's Degree in Public Health
Core Competency Development Project
Version 2.1 (June 2006)

Systems Thinking List -pdf page #25 (shown below)
Systems Thinking membership: pdf page # 40
http://www.asph.org/UserFiles/FinalVersion2.1.pdf

Systems Thinking

The ability to recognize system level properties that result from dynamic interactions among human and social systems and how they affect the relationships among individuals, groups, organizations, communities, and environments.

Competencies: Upon graduation a student with an MPH should be able to ...

1) Indentify characteristics of a system.

2) Identify unintended consequences produced by changes made to a public heatlh system.

3) Provide examples of feedback loops and "stocks and flows" within a public health system.

4) Explain how systems (e.g., individuals, social networks,organizations, and communities) may be viewed as systems within systems in the analysis of public health problems.

5) Explain how systems models can be tested and validated.

6) Explain how the contexts of gender, race, poverty, history, migration, and culture are important in the design of interventions within public health systems.

7) Illustrate how changes in public health systems (including input, processes, and output) can be measured.

8) Analyze inter-relationships among systems that influence the quality of life of people in their communities.

9) Analyze the effects of political, social, and economic policies on public health systems at the local, state, national, and international levels.

10) Analyze the impact of global trends and interdependencies on public health related problems and systems.

Lewis Thomas on interventions in complex systems

Sterman quotes Lewis Thomas in Lives of a Cell, 1974 (p90):

When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century. You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obligated to understand... the whole system.. Intervening is a way of causing trouble.

Connection of newspapers and public health

In my earlier post "Black, White, and Dead" I discuss potential changes in the way news organizations report the news, and news-reader software.

The question came up as to how this relates to public health, and the answer is important, so I'm making a whole new post on that.

Recently my wife Cheryll and I attended the Knight-Wallace Fellows Ninth Annual Conference on Journalism, focusing on Journalism and Women's Health, at the University of Michigan (November 7, 2005). (see previous post here.) There were two major take-away messages we got from that conference.

1) We were very frustrated by the lack of a way to follow up on the topics that captured our interests.

2) There was universal agreement from the panel that journalists are key players in getting public health messages out to the public, and out to government officials, but that the process was basically broken because public health issues are complex, and reporters don't have the time or space to get into that complexity. And, if they did get into that complexity, they'd lose most of their readers that wanted something easier to grasp, and a better "sound bite."

This second problem parallels a subject I've raised here before, that the complexity of problems is becoming larger than what we have to cope with them. ( Health Policy's Core Problem. )

So, Michael Kinsley's article got me thinking about news readers, and the "shape" of a news release in an abstract sense, but with some concrete conclusions.

I think what we need is to make news items more like multi-layered pyramids, with several different levels of detail and complexity available, but initially hidden.

So, like any manager, readers want something very short and sweet (the "sound bite") as an anchor for the reference. But then, when they have time to come back and pay attention to it, they are going to want to "drill down" into the story.

Journalists, authors, educators, writers have been trying to accomplish that task through structured linear text, but the truth is that just isn't very effective. First, no one today has read Mortimer Adler's classic "How to Read a Book", and we have generations that are clueless about top-down comprehension of complex topics, or how to start with the major headings and work their way down into the details. This isn't a skill we can assume.

Secondly, for many people, actual reading literacy and fluency is not very high. They simply get tired out after reading "X" words, where X is a number that's smaller each year. No one has time or mental energy, after getting the paper out of the bushes, to finish reading long articles, at least not at that time. They get put aside for "later", then discarded when "later" just doesn't seem to come any more as much as it used to.

So, we have functional specs here that say we need three changes:

1) "articles" need a top surface level that's fast and easy, but they need "drill-down" capacity to expand, or recursively expand details when the reader is "ready to copy." The details have to be hidden or re-hidable when they are just clutter. This is is classic task of "hypertext."

2) The "articles" need to persist until it's a good time to "get to" them for each reader, which may not be the day they are issued.

Readers need a "point-and-click" way to say - "save this for later, tag it this way, put it in this "inbox", where later might mean 3 weeks from now.

3) Many readers are not sufficiently organized to have their own inboxes set up and organized to support this process. It would be good, along with a "clipping service", to provide a very easy way to end up, after clipping, with more than just a heap of things to read that now looks more like a burden than a resource.

So what's the vision? Journalists, working with say researchers who have new "findings", put together a pyramid news release. There's the 100 word version, the 300 word version,
the somewhat in-depth version, and the full-version. The shortest, sweetest, sound-bite version probably is what's visibly published, where space is short - but it has a link to the drill-down versions. Maybe the deeper versions are assembled by the researchers and the research organization's public relations department, working with the journalist.

The point is that, once the news item has caught people's attention, it has to be trivial for them to find this again, get to it, and drill down into the actual complexity and details in a carefully supported way.

Maybe we could think of this as "just in time" publication of fragments of text-books, one tiny topic at a time.

Since these items will persist, they also need to be updated, annotated, and kept current by some other process. As with any classroom subject, it actually might be nice to have 20 other people say "Well, I didn't understand the teacher's explanation, but here's what brought this home to me in my own words, that might help you understand it ..."

I don't know exactly where these items would persist, but weblog space seems suited for that, as it's free, and publicly accessible globally.

Journalists could spend their effort at thetop of the pyramid, making hooks to bring these topics into the public view at the right time. Researchers could spend their time at the bottom of the pyramid, adding detailed technical content, journal articles, etc. Academic educators could spend time in the middle, cleaning up the flow-lines from the simplistic sound-bite to deeper and deeper levels of understanding the complexities of the subject matter, and making those accessible to, say, the aides to the Governor who actually are tasked with following up on something.

And schools of Public Health could adopt these public pyramids of knowledge and work to keep them current and refreshed and to find ever better ways to make each successive layer of detail more accessible to people, where the people range from students to politicians to the general public that is trying to inform itself on what is really going on in the world and why.

If anything would be worthy of federal funding, the catalyzing of this sort of public resource, as a value-added layer on top of our electronic library system, would seem to be justified as having a high impact per dollar spent. It tackles directly the problem that knowledge is increasing "over there" while the decision-makers are operating "over here", and the two never meet.

To me, that describes a powerful ecology of journalism, research, and public health that can work to slowly make even very complex topics accessible.

The pyramid can be adorned with podcasts, video-clips, tutorials, links to free on-line courseware, links to on-line discussion groups, etc. for those who want to educate themselves further on subjects.

Teen's Bold Blogs Alarm DC Area Schools

Teen's Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools
Uninhibited Online Remarks Full of Risks, Officials Warn

"after she gave a talk recently at the Lab School in the District, students raced to their computers to delete information."

By Tara Bahrampour and Lori Aratani
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 17, 2006; A01

No one under 18 would be surprised to hear that teenagers like to post their intimate thoughts and photographs online -- they've done it for years. But school administrators have begun to take notice, and some are warning students that their online activities may affect not only their safety, but also their academic and professional lives.

In recent weeks, several Washington area schools have taken action against the use of blog sites, in particular Facebook.com but also the sites MySpace.com and Xanga.com, which allow teenagers -- and sometimes younger children -- to post details of their lives for all to see.

Exclusive private schools such as these have so far been more aggressive than public schools in specifically targeting the use of blogs, but local public schools have begun to warn parents and students about the dangers of Internet use. Fairfax County will hold seminars on the subject for parents this week, and Arlington County, at the suggestion of a parent who is a computer safety consultant, plans a similar meeting next week.

...ssistant head of school ... said officials there were "shocked and amazed" to see how many students use Facebook, which began for college students in 2004 and was expanded late last year to include high school students.

Besides the most obvious danger -- adult stalkers enticing teenagers into face-to-face meetings -- Cole warned that personal information posted online can also be read by college admissions officers and future employers.

...said that the issue came to the attention of administrators only recently, when they became aware of "inappropriate material that was being posted on Facebook."

In some ways, the Web sites are the modern equivalent of diaries kept by generations of teenagers.

But lockable journals and triple-underlined threats of "PRIVATE, KEEP OUT!" have given way to instant messaging, reality shows and a cyberculture that many adults find naive at best and exhibitionist and dangerous at worst.

... rules forbid students to "use technology ...that defames individual members of any community."

In November, after a student ...posted derogatory comments about black students on a blog, printouts of the comments were circulated on campus. The student eventually left; administrators would not say whether disciplinary action was taken.

Many schools forbid the use of school computers for anything not school-related. But it is much harder to regulate what students do on home computers.

Schools are scrambling to come up with policies on the issue.

...

Ironically, many teenagers are outraged or embarrassed when parents or other adults go to their sites. "I think they see it as a violation of their personal space," said Madeira's Cole. "They feel as if their diaries are being read."

But adults do read the sites. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported 1,224 incidents last year of "online enticement" of children by adults and estimates that one in five children gets sexual solicitations online. Staff members of NetSmartz, an arm of the national center, discuss the issue with local students. Staca Urie, a NetSmartz manager, said that after she gave a talk recently at the Lab School in the District, students raced to their computers to delete information.

And yet to many teenagers, the sites are irresistible.

"I'm in seventh grade," the girl said. "It's really hard to be in seventh grade these days. It's really hard if you're shy and you're not a cheerleader or extraordinarily popular. I travel, I take pictures, I write poetry. I'm a nice kid, and if I can write a profile that will make people notice me, why shouldn't I?"

To Aftab, "It's a very sad testimonial these days that a kid has to post something on a site where potentially 700 million people can see it in order to attract the attention of a kid two seats down."

Her mother, said that she and her husband have talked to [their daughter] about smart Internet use and that she is not worried. ...[but] hasn't looked at her daughter's page., "This offers them a way to have a sense of community."

But it can also be isolating. "They do less face-to-face talking, less phone talking, less playing outside than any other generation, and because of that, the Internet is real to them, but the risks aren't," Aftab said.

Neither are some of the worlds they create. Experts, and teenagers themselves, say that much of what is on the sites is made up.

Teenagers often act online in ways they wouldn't off-line -- bullying each other, posing in underwear, using foul language or sporting guns and Ku Klux Klan hoods.

Increasingly, many teenagers feel pressured to show themselves doing more risque things, even if they are not actually doing them. Aftab cited an example of girls who had blogged about weekends of drinking and debauchery, while in reality they were coloring with their younger siblings or watching old movies with Grandma.

"Even if you weren't out drunk and partying on the weekend, you have to pretend you were," Aftab said. "Maybe parents should be relieved."

Staff writer Jamie Stockwell contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company