Closing feedback - learning Chinese

This is a multi-level post, so I'm going to post this particular post here on newbricks.blogspot.com, a weblog dealing heavily with feedback and social intelligence, and also on my weblog for learning Chinese, whatseas.blogspot.com.

In particular, this is a perfect case in point of how to use social intelligence and feedback to reshape and create behaviors, in this case, to help new students learn a new language. It is crucial to recognize that learning a new language for a new student is not primarily a COGNITIVE activity, but a social one, which requires bringing new expectations, new hopes, and new motivating energy to the task.

Here's my mental model, my understanding, of the key variables:

While advanced students and faculty may find comfort in grammar and rules and cognitive techniques for learning, they are already assuming that a basis of confidence, optimism, and hope of success is in place. They know they can master this material, from experience. Short term difficulties are minor obstacles, which they know they will overcome. They have, in short, a kind of psychological momentum that carries them across stumbling points. And they have a social role that includes skill in this new language as part of their accepted and acceptable identity. Their lives have assurance from experience, and optimism about the future.

NEW students, on the other hand, come with none of that. They are very UNsure about their ability to complete this task. The skills and knowledge have no home in their head and lives at this point. Every obstacle seems like one more argument that this was the WRONG course to pick this semester, that they are NEVER going to learn this, and maybe they should drop the course now before it becomes a complete disaster. Their lives are filled with anxiety and depression. They do not yet know for sure that society and their peer group will find this action, learning Chinese, an acceptable activity. Maybe they will be hounded and punished by their friends for even trying this.

Given the above, here is a proposed activity, and then a discussion as to why this activity meets the emotional and psychosocial needs of the students in an efficient way, as well as teaching them Chinese.
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You can use the flashcard memory game for FREE. They have the character sets for all the major textbooks. The character set for our own book, Intergrated Chinese, Version3,
level 1, part 1, is here.

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/mtch-options.php?deck=ic3-1-1



Use SHIFT + CLICK to highlight more than one chapter to pull characters from.

If you select "Novice", you have 2 minutes and 30 seconds to find every match per page. I think my first effort at this I got 5 pairs (out of the 32 pairs) in that time. It gets much easier all by itself if you play it every day.

"Effortless learning!"

I was trying to think of ways to get the class more excited about helping each other.

What do you think of this?

We could divide into two teams, and compete to see who can complete the YellowBridge memory game for Chapter 2 in fewer seconds.

We could use the projector to show the grid on the large screen.

We would have to do all of the grid for one team, and record the time, then scramble it and pick a new grid for the second team, and record the time.

Each team would have a "batting order" and the team players would have to take turns in that order.

As each person "comes up to bat" they can pick any two squares they think match and point to them on the screen,and the person running the computer would click those two. If they match, or not, that completes that person's "turn at bat".

We could tell everyone that the best strategy is for each person to pick the HARDEST MATCH they are sure of. It would be silly foran advanced student to pick a really easy match, leaving only hard matches for the next players. Each person could find their own level. Be sure to leave some easy ones for the weakest team member to be able to pick from, or you will lose time as that person tries to find what might be a match.

I think it would be fun, and it would make people realize that their TEAM IS DEPENDING ON THEM to know these characters!

We could do this once or twice every Friday, say, and keep a running score for the rest of the term (9 more weeks / innings.)

The winning team gets... something. Some small prize.

What do you think?
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Ok, so here's how that activity meets the psychosocial needs of the beginning students.

First, successfully finding a match is a relatively easy task. The odds of success are high, so it is possible to do SOMETHING that wins social approval of a peer-group, your team. Peer-group approval is at least as powerful, if not more powerful, for this effect, than approval of an authority figure, the teacher.

Second, the rest of the team has to focus emotional energy on helping, urging, boosting, pressuring each member to successfully find a match, and rewarding them with a pulse of social approval when the match is found. For at least some time, they have to take on a nurturing, supportive, encouraging role to each other. This has a persistent lingering effect on both parties, those having that role, and those being held by it.

Third, these effects compound, in a closed feedback system, because the people you are boosting and adding morale to and encouraging to be stronger are, in fact, the same people who will turn around and be boosting you -- but now they will be boosting you in a stronger, more encouraged way.

Fourth, a clear message is sent to the brain's wiring that this type of associative recall has some time-pressure on it. It has to not just be recalled, it has to be recalled QUICKLY. In an era of school systems that don't teach mastery learning, this is a hard lesson to find a way to teach, that the recall needs to get faster, faster, faster, until it becomes effectively instantaneous and effortless.

Fifth, even experiencing this on a regular basis in class, such as once every friday, for all of 5 minutes (2.5 minutes per team), is sufficient to keep it "hot" in the brain, making it much easier to practice this exact same skill off-line, out of class, but now in a virtual social context where, with every successful "hit" or match, the brain is ALSO adding the psychosocial FLAVOR element that "AHH, THAT will make me more attractive to my peer group and make them happier with me as a team member!"

So the lessons that are being laid down are not just that this character has this meaning and this sound, but that knowing this character boosts my social standing in a tangible way, more so ever week, so the brain should keep on working on it in background mode even when the conscious attention goes off to work on other things. We expect to find, and I'm sure we will, that a great deal of BETWEEN-LESSON learning takes place. A grid that takes an average of 4.5 minutes to do today, revisited tomorrow, with no conscious work inbetween, will amost certainly take LESS THAN 4.5 minutes tomorrow, possibly 20% less time.

For me, the same grid took about 8 minutes the first day, 5 minutes the second day, 4 minutes for two days, and suddenly dropped to 2 minutes after two days off.

Also, this is just a satisfying activity -- the ratio of pulses of success to failure pulses is high. Not only that, but due to the nature of the game, removing some characters makes the remaining ones MORE EASY to match up, because there is less and less competition. So, again, there is a compounding effect, in that success leads to even MORE success.

So we have multiple, compounding, socially validated, socially encouraged feedback loops pushing on an associative-link formation in the brain, which is exquisitely wired to make exactly such links. The better the OTHER people on the team get, by the way, the higher the bar is raised, gradually, raising expectations on each of the team members to get faster and faster as well.

All of the mathematics works. This forms a grid that attracts, holds, persists, and evolves a stronger and stronger sense of certainty, confidence, and socially approved recall behavior.

Fluency at character and phrase recognition then takes that burden OFF the part of the brain needed to deal with grammar and other cognitive portions of language, and puts those into a socially supportive soup of confidence where THEY, in turn, can take root and find a home, which then releases further confidence and energy back into vocabulary building and fluency acquisition.


Oh, yeah, -- I included the picture of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, mmm mmm good,
just to demonstrate the power of associative context to change the mood and feeling around a subject. It works! Your "rational" self may not see the difference, but the social animal host you are riding around it surely does.

global emotional climate change

You can say that again!

Here's a simple change that will improve all the relationships in your life.

When someone around you does something that is worth a compliment, don't settle for just one. Give them a complement, wait a day, and then give it to them again.

If everyone does this, it will double the power of these words to shape and recreate behaviors around you in a way that justifies the compliments. Positive thoughts will persist longer than negative ones.

It seems so simple.
It is so powerful.

The basic lessons from computer science and neural networks is that you can get whatever behavior you want to train out of the network without ever requiring "negative" feedback. Negative feedback is inefficient, in that it says " Picture X -- now don't do that!" It gives no clue as to what to do instead, and it brings back into mind the wrong picture while doing it.

In fact, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) would say that the brain processes the "not" in a different place than the X, so you are basically refocusing the person on X, with a distant "not" in there. The result is to hit the emotional brakes, remove energy, and suspend operations.

Alternatively, praising the correct behavior, or even an GLIMMER or GLIMPSE of the correct (or desired) behavior focuses energy on THAT track, and at the same time BOOSTS energy and morale.

Also, even if it did succeed, negative feedback would get less and less frequent, and therefore less and less powerful, as behavior shifted to the desired course. On the other hand, positive feedback would get more and more frequent, and therefore more and more powerful and effective, as behavior shifts.

Again, the conclusion is -- expect and reward any trace of behavior you are looking for, and do that consistently, and you will in fact create and generate the behaviors you are looking for.

Roger Cohen on hope (for a Nobel Prize)

Roger Cohen writes in his column today in the NT Times of his hope for humanity, and for his column to win a Nobel Prize. :)

There are a few snippets I want to grab out of his Chex-party-mix-like posting today. (As if I'm in any position to complain about such writing! Or about anyone who can STAY INSIDE the 820 word limit!)

To wit:

NEW YORK — I want this column to be good. I want it to be so good, it wins a prize. One of those big prizes, like the ones they hand out every year in Stockholm and Oslo.

I want it to be subtle and full of goodness and infuse all humankind with hope. Let me be clear: I want it to be uplifting, conciliatory and bold. In fact I want it to carry some miraculous quality.

I’ve traveled the world, seen the forgotten silos on the plains, the rusting railroad cars, the forbidding watchtowers, the scavengers in the garbage, the fatigue-smudged faces, the refugees sprawled on the school room floor, the lonely lingerers, the freighters hardening the horizon, the beautiful and the damned.

Along the way I’ve learned this: We deny our connectedness at our peril. Let me be clear: ...As children of Abraham we are all responsible for one another. This is the age of responsibility.

... And I want there to be no doubt: The problems we face can only be solved together.

...May the spirit of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad — peace be upon them too — spread in the Holy Land.

Some will say I’m a dreamer. Some might find themselves unable to engage with these engaging aspirations even if this is the age of engagement. But there is no alternative to engagement except, perhaps, divorce, alienation, separation, enmity, competition, rivalry, envy, misunderstanding, threats, intimidation and rage — all of which I reject on principle.

...The hopeful will inherit the earth.


... But, well, I’ve lost my train of thought.

In conclusion, I know this column has fallen short. I am aware of its shortcomings, its banality and its immodesty. I am humbled by all the great practitioners of this 820-word craft — “art” would be going too far — in whose illustrious footsteps I tread. But I know this: If I’ve given momentum to some global fantasy, my time has not been wasted.

...Hope trumps experience every time.

Finally, let me be clear: All prize money is payable to me.

end wit.

To which I can only add, "AMEN!"
As well as a resonating quote from T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets	70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!	75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?	80
...
	85
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,	90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—	95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

Still, the truth is that "hope" matters. "Faith" matters. They matter because reality has a wonderful capacity for helping us become prosperous and surrounded by beauty, regardless where we are now, but that endpoint requires that we climb a path that curves upwards, which our primitive intuition and primary sight cannot grasp as we extrapolate it out linearly, and say, "No, that won't work. That is not what I meant at all, at all. "

Nor is it what we the hopeful are pointing at. We are referring to the place we can end up if we get into mutually supportive feedback loop shape and let that lifting-body shape attract energy and lift us up in the resulting "thermal" updraft.

And, even that hope is a second-order bounce-shot in pool, because we cannot simply "get into a different shape" or "adopt a different culture" -- those actions, in turn, ALSO require us to reach them through a slow, patient, evolutionary feedback process that starts off ever so slowly on the spiral path upwards.

So slowly, that no politician, speaking to an untrained audience or set of voters, could say, "See, look what I did, I set us on this path forward!"

Here we need faith, hope, trust, belief. Somethings we need to believe in order to see, and this is one of them. ( Well, we can also SIMULATE the behavior in computer simulations and virtual reality, which is what I'm up to today, so that we can lay down a template, a signature in otherwise unprepared minds, of what a climbing, energy-attracting feedback loop lifting-body shape looks like, and behaves like. And then, I hope, we can say "Yes, I can see how that might work!" And then we can dare to look for ways to accomplish exactly that, and if we look, we will find them, because they are all around us and easily within reach.)

Incidentally, the most POWERFUL engines we use in the world of physical technology have the same property -- they compound their power in a feedback loop so that, the faster they go, the easier it is for them to go even faster. On the other hand, what this also means is at the very start of that journey, the first step on the "yellow brick road", they go agonizingly slowly. It is precisely here that our WISDOM (and experience with simulations and new insightful-eyes) has to assure us that we should continue this path, because it is succeeding.

Example -- jet airliners, and even jet fighters, require runways that are over two miles long. The first second when they hit the throttle, there is a lot of noise, but very little motion. If we looked at that and said "nope, this doesn't work!" and cut the throttle and budget, we'd be wrong.

At the start they are very very ponderous and slow. Don't be misled by that. Some kinds of "small progress" are huge. This is one of them.

I need to teach you how to RECOGNIZE and DISTINGUISH between small things that are actually small, and small things that are actually huge.

Then, we need to teach that to policy makers, and to the public, so they too can recognize the tiny steps, well within our budget, that we CAN do, that have more power than all the LARGE steps combined.

Meanwhile, remember jet fighters. They start very slowly. There's a physical reason for this, and in that reason, and that feedback loop process, is the hope for our future. The road curves upwards, so trying to "look down it" we miss the curve and say "That can't possibly work!" We are wrong. It can work. It does work. It will work.

But first, we need new glasses, so that we can see the sucker.



Wade

Social Neuroscience

There was an op-ed piece by David Brooks in theTimes,which apparently you now need to be a member of the NY Times to read, on the new booming field of "social neuroscience" -- or, put differently, how society turns around, closes the loop, and alters our biology and our genes.

These people study the way biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior. But they’re also trying to understand the complementary process of how social behavior changes biology.

As I've written elsewhere, there is an enormous difference in creative power and abilty to act as a sort of "receiver" for cosmic life energy between interactions and interactions that form a loop, let alone a self-aware and self-regulating loop.

Brooks notes that the average age of these researchers is in their 20's. The field requires letting go of legacy constraints on fields with linear causality, which I've advocated here since the beginnning.

As these researchers move into areas their older faculty colleagues shun, they will need to develop the mathematics to deal with closed, interacting, nested loops of interaction.



(I'll flesh this out with links to original sources later.) Brooks says:

All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as ultrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that.

The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.

Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.

It is "feedback" for example that makes the difference between a rain shower and a tornado. Feedback is what allows a truly great team of people or sports players to discover their socially-empowered selves as they help each other discover each other's vitality and socially empowered selves -- versus the deadwood, mechanical non-discovery operation of a tight-disciplined-hierarchy -- which has the dead power of a drill-press or a circular saw, and the dead order of a crystal of rock-salt.

Closed feedback systems don't just do the same thing that open-feedback (or no feedback) systems do --- they open up entire new dimensions of possibilities that cannot even be conceived of by dead non-feedback systems. (For math lovers, see the difference between IIR and FIR feedback systems.)

We create and recreate the world around us every day. With the power of compounded, closed feedback interactions, the entire social planet could be recreated in a few weeks. The entire psychology of inner city Detroit could be rewritten, out of the box, outside the limits we've written it off into. It is only our imaginations, or lack of them, that hold us back.

Closed feedback loops are the primary receivers of life-energy, the leaves of our tree of life that capture the solar energy of Nature or God or whatever it its, and convert it into revitalizing, rejuvenating power for us all to use.

Conversely, it is precisely the LACK of a feedback loop that destroys the vitality of a strict-hierarchical workplace, where the BOSS commands but never listens, or a centrally-planned government, where the government officials decree and dictate but don't really listen, or a failing automobile company, where management keeps trying to TELL customers what customers want, but doesn't really listen to the response.

The same effect is why, say, an electronic medical records system that affects social behavior and collaboration has to be responsive and adapative, in order to form a closed feedback loop and pick up ACTUAL wisdom about the ACTUAL world. The alternative that we almost always see is a sort of death-warmed-over scenario where the dead mental image of some dead programming team shows up and is imposed on a living, breathing, health system, dragging it downwards like cement blocks on a swimmer. A few, expensive, "prioritized" change requests a year does not constitute "feedback". The system has to LISTEN at least as well as it DICTATES, and THEN it will take on the shape that is completely surprising and unpredicted by the process designers, the shape that ACTUaLLY works and ACTUALLY helps.

It doesn't matter how perfect the STATIC portion of the system is, whatever that means in practice. That just sets an operating point. What matters is the DYNAMIC FEEDBACK capacity of the system. A great system continually debriefs the users and says "how about this? does THIS work for you?" and listens for, hears, accepts and adjusts to the response in a nurturing and supportive way.

Versus a dead system where users are monitored for "bad" behavior,which is anything that is not aligned with the dead system that someone is trying to impose upon them.

Brooks ends with these thoughts, that are worth repeating over and over, and which, of course, I I enjoy since it's what I've been saying all along in this weblog:

I... it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.

Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.

Wade


T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

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

Why discipline destroys creativity

If you believe that the best you can do, as in the last post, is to get people all in line with you, as a manager, I think the math works out that you have made the "cosine" term as large as it can get, namely 1.0, between each of the staff members and the boss. AS far as that goes, it's good.

However, this typically comes at the cost of people so interested in pleasing the boss that they no longer independently measure or evaluate the worth of activities, so their interaction term with the outside world goes to zero. Typically also, tight hierarchical authoritarian organizations typically, but not always, pit employees against each other to see who can please the boss MORE. So the interaction terms between individuals all go negative.

The best this structure can achieve is an almost perfect synchrony with the boss's view of the world, which is one person's view, and limited by that. These kinds of organizations destroy creativity, destroy initiative, destroy camaraderie and trust, and tend to do a perfect lockstep job at carrying out the wrong solution to the wrong problem in perfect cadence. They are EASY to evaluate however -- just as "How much did each employee do exactly what I told them to do?"

Over time, they do worse because the retention rate in such organizations tends to be poor, lacking teamwork or a sense of team, or a sense of progress or awareness of the outside world. Over time they also tend to degrade since the boss, as one person, is missing a lot of facts about the world and inevitably pursuing sub-optimal goals with sub-optimal means.

The highly ordered group has the same KIND of order that, say, a crystal of salt does -- perfectly organized, perfectly passive, perfectly inert, and perfectly dead.

Even worse than that, the employees tend to become all "yes-men", telling the boss exactly what the boss wants to hear, and stifling any type of dissent. This makes the boss completely blind to indications that the plans are not working the way everyone says they are. Success in such organizations is typically an illusion, as things seem to work fine until is becomes one day suddenly clear that there is no success, and in fact, hasn't been success for a long time -- there is only the fiction of success.

So long as the boss knows and can see clearly what needs to get done, this type of organization converts people into a kind of blind machine or amplifier, that gets that job the boss THINKS is the right job done. The completion is flawed because the thousand other small ways that the task might have been done that would have increased its fit with the outside world, or with future teamwork, are missing.

As soon as a novel situation comes along, however, the flaw in this organizational structure becomes visible. It is non-adapative. The boss cannot issue orders like "Be creative!" or "Solve this!" or "Figure this out!" because the staff have all been trained to be helpless and blind servant slaves, and have systematically quenched all internal systems that could have provided assistance at solving NOVEL problems.

So, the tight-hierarchy is often good at mechanically reproducing an old solution to an old problem -- but is a visible disaster when it has to come up with new solutions, suddenly, to new problems. Sadly, for it, the world we are in is dominated by NEW problems, new types of problems, whole new dimensions of problems, coming at a faster speed than any one boss can possibly track.

So, organizations with such structures typically attempt to cope by "prioritizing", which seems to make sense to them, as focusing all attention on the two or three BIGGEST problems which management or the management team can conceive of or get its head around.

Hopefully, my readers can by now see how this kind of approach will fail.

First, since each level of management in such organizations is being lied to consistently by underlings that are trying to please them instead of tell the truth, each level of management is increasingly blind to reality. At the very top of the organization, what is reported in by lower management is probably completely disconnected from reality. This doesn't result in good decisions being made, regardless how otherwise bright, well-intentioned, and competent central management or the central team or joint chiefs or whatever might be. ("garbage in, garbage out.")

Having a "war room" and using high-technology to speed up the process does nothing to improve it, and, in fact, tends to make it worse, because the simulations of reality generated by underlings and vendors, being very high tech, tend to look extremely realistic. IN addition, the subtle parts of reality, the nuances, that might give clues that something is seriously wrong with this picture, are typically trimmed off as "noise" because they don't fit into the categories conceived of by the person who did the computer programming. That person, some systems team manager 12 levels below the joint chiefs, say, makes bad decisions about what does and what does not matter, based on their OWN level of strategic wisdom, which is typically not very well developed (or they'd have a better job!). THAT person, in total absence of any dissenting voice from his (typically) paranoid and terrorized team, effectively decides what KIND of information to forward to the joint chiefs, and what to simply discard.

IN fact, at each level, the manager if presented with reality, would cringe and complain that they are getting "too much data" and "too much complexity of data" and will demand that underlings "cut through all that complexity" and "simplify it." So, yes, the underlings remove the crucial fragments of discrepant facts, and rearrange the remainder to make a pretty picture with cartoon-type simplicity, which the manager CAN get his head around.

The process is repeated at each level, as the parts of complexity that don't fit are pruned off and the gaps covered over by rearranging the parts that are left, to make an even simpler picture.

FINALLY, at the very top, the few people who ARE capable of coping with tremendous complexity and uncertainty, the Joint Chief types, are presented totally sterilized and systematically "simplified" data that has removed all of the important content that requires 30 years experience to make sense of.

This is way, way too late in the process to bring in expertise.

The US Army, at least in part, has become aware of this problem, both the "group think" at the top, and the problem that people on the ground, even if privates, seem to have a better handle on reality than the people with the "big" [and completely oversimplified] "picture".

Army field manuals, such as the last generation FM-22 Leadership Manual, and the new FM-6, and whatever has replaced that, are starting to recognize that LEADERS are not defined by those who TALK LOUDLY and give orders ("are bossy"), but those who are capable of LISTENING to their men and women, and who are capable of giving sensible orders that still allow those staff to have initiative and creativity at how they approach the solution as a team.

The same situation is true in health care. A few years ago Doctor Peter Pronovost, from Johns Hopkins, made the discovery that doctors in intensive care units were suppressing dissent from nurses and not actually open to listening to what the nurses saw or had to say. The doctors measured "teamwork" as the ability of the nurses to follow orders, and certainly teamwork did NOT include ever questioning an order. When told to jump, or remove a kidney, the only acceptable response was "how high?" not "Didn't we do that to this patient yesterday already?"

Dr. Pronovost won a very prestigious award from the Joint Commission for this insight, which apparently the other doctors found to be surprising, if not astonishing. A process was created to have a "time out" just before a surgical incision, a window in which nurses could speak. After that, for the most part, things went back to business as usual. The rate of totally wrong operations went down, and everyone was happy.

What is missing in this picture, of course, is the thousand other ways in which staff can see things that doctors, or hospital administrators are doing wrong, that are being suppressed by the current tightly hierarchical "Shut up if you know what's good for you and do as I say" system.

Oh yeah, the other thing wrong with the "prioritize" model is that the boat we are afloat in doesn't HAVE two huge holes and 7 tiny ones, in which case it makes sense to prioritize. The boat essentially has 300 medium size holes, some slightly larger than others. In order to fit the problems onto the very small brainsize and to-do list that the highest management works from, 294 of these problems are down-played, so that say the top 6 get visibility and attention. No matter how well those 6 are addressed over the next year, the damage from teh 294 ones that were not priorities this year will exceed the benefits from the 6 that were addressed. And, sadly, since all these problems interact, fixing the six prioritized ones will have created 25 NEW problems elsewhere, out of sight, and worsened 100 OLD problems.

THERE IS IN FACT NO SEQUENCE OF PRIORITIZING this kind of problem, and dealing with them in serial order, that will work. These are what are known as "complex adaptive systems".
Unless you understand ALL of the system, you are almost certain that anything you do to "fix" a problem over here, under the little light you have, will worsen at least as many problems over there, in the dark where you can't see.

The mental bandwidth and the total intellectual capacity of the central planning team is far below what is required to deal effectively with such problems. It doesn't do any good to have "good discipline" and have everyone follow the broken orders more efficiently and more "cost-effectively." The ship is still continuing to sink.

The ship WILL continue to sink until the creative power of the entire staff is awakened and empowered to become aware of the situation, to become aware of each other, and to act accordingly. This almost NEVER happens, as the central planning group does not want to be "second guessed" by others reviewing the same data, and, in their infinite ego, also feels that exposure to real data, especially bad data, would discourage, demoralize, or "confuse" the troops. The highest form of deception comes when feedback arrives that, despite putting the best foot forward, makes it clear that the wonderful plans by the central committee have failed to stop the bleeding, and in fact, in some areas, made things worse. That's the kind of information that gets stamped "Classified" and "Top Secret" and suppressed entirely from being redistributed to the troops.

So, data from the troops doesn't make it up the hierarchical pyramid, because of the filtering and sucking up involved, and the simplfication so complexity of life is removed and the situation fits on Powerpoint slides. Data from the top does not make it back downwards, because, not too surprisingly, a lot of what's seen at the top is that things are actually getting worse.

Again and again, the "solution" presented for this failure to deliver the goods is to make the process "more efficient", to concentrate more and more power at the top, to attempt to get faster and faster response time and better and better "war rooms" with better visual effects and more simplified views of the world that are "easier to understand." The concurrent rise in dissent that results from people at the front pushing back when they see the orders from above are disconnected from reality is met with swift and terrible force, to get these "impediments to progress" or "enemies of the people" out of the way.

What we end up with instead is exemplified by the auto company General Motors. We have here a company where the top management levels are undoubtedly staffed with the "best and the brightest" that money can buy, operating in a manner that, to any normal person on the street, appears to be completely blind to reality. The more management "manages", the worse things seem to get. Management's attempted solutions, to lay off more and more workers, also don't seem to get anywhere.

Undoubtedly, what will follow will be the same classical "solution" consisting of blaming a variety of external and enemy factors and calling totally predictable events that have been going on "unpredictable." Who could have foreseen, they asked, literally, that the price of oil might go up? Or who could have foreseen (since they didn't) that, WHEN the price of gasoline went up to $4 / gallon, people might respond by driving less, and being less interested in huge cars that only got 12 miles a gallon. They literally seem to be shocked and surprised by these events, and I'll take them at their word that they were and are. Undoubtedly, the facts that are obvious to us do not fit the carefully sanitized picture of the world THEY are working from in their high-tech war room offices. These facts "can't possibly be correct, so fix them." Change the facts till they fit the preconception.

My point is that it doesn't MATTER who is the President and CEO of GM. It doesn't matter how bring their think tank is. It doesn't matter how rapidly they "prioritize" problems. More and "leaner" management is not the solution, it is the PROBLEM. It doesn't matter how many workers they lay off, or how many products they trim. Their underlying model of how to manage is broken, and that fact is evident to almost everyone except them.

And where they are meeting, almost certainly questions about how to improve how well management listens are NOT on the agenda, or welcomed on it as last minute additions. What is on the agenda will be cost-cutting and faster, more efficient ways to do the same old things that don't work. Maybe if they can just do them FASTER they'll work. Right.

Meanwhile, I know without even looking that the GM car dealerships near me are closed today, because it's Sunday. It doesn't matter that for essentially any other product or service, customers want and can get them on Sunday, when they have a day off from the 2 jobs apiece mom and dad both have. Car dealers are closed in the Detroit area on Sundays, whether its the only day you can go shopping for a new car or not.

Talk about detached from reality. GM goes to the government for billions in bail out money, but can't hear the complaint that people would like to shop on their day off, instead of having to take off a work day to shop for a car. They only hear what they want to hear, and discount the rest to the point of non-existence.

I feel bad for the people who are suffering and the jobs that are lost, the lost plants and tax revenues, and the general destruction of social services that used to depend on that whole automobile empire. But I don't feel bad for management that continues with the "More of the same" approach to a solution. OF COURSE they are overwhelmed and overworked -- no human being can comprehend all of the issues involved, let alone how they interact.

So, duh, let's stop trying approaches that expect or required some small cadre of human beings to grasp problems, to prioritize them, and to come up with solutions for the rest of us, who passively sit by while this occurs.

If anything has been shown by this financial disaster to be bankrupt, it is that approach to problem solving and to making a society that will prosper and thrive into the future.

Heck, they can't even create jobs, let alone successful innovative industries that are enough in touch with world markets and local resources that they can find new ways to meet the new needs and survive at home, in a win win fashion.

IN "The Toyota Way", Jeff Liker discusses early days at Toyota, two decades ago, when the question came up of whether to allow the Americans to come by and make site visits, and whether to reveal to the Americans the secrets of high-productivity.

The Chairman of Toyota considered this question very seriously, and finally concluded that it wasn't a problem at all. Let the Americans come, he said, because they won't be able to accept what their eyes see. The Americans will attempt to implement the visible, technical portions of what Toyota does, and will ignore and dismiss entirely the philosophical and human portion of what Toyota does to achieve greatness.

He was correct, from all I've seen. American management gets to the part where management is told it has to listen to workers, and culture has to be changed, and management loses its interest in going any further. We did the same with what W. Edwards Deming told us, trying to implement statistical quality control but at the same time to avoid changing the way evaluation of employees was done. And of course, anything involving questioning or changing the way management managed was obviously just noise and could be ignored or left for (decades) later.

So, Toyota and Honda are taking over the American market, while GM is bouncing and will continue bouncing in and out of bankruptcy.

Wisdom is realizing that it's not the technology that is being tested here, it's the philosophy of how human beings and management relate to each other and to themselves.

So far the score seems to be, Toyota 1, GM zero.

Why academia can destroy good thinking

The key point I get to below is that it is SYSTEM EFFECTS which are the hope our business teams should have for unboundedly great performance, not INDIVIDUAL EFFECTS. And, sadly, this is exactly the opposite of what is tacitly taught by example in our educational system.

Cheryll and I were just talking about our personal experiences in very-high-performance groups, and how it is impossible to tell which person was "responsible" for which of the ideas that the group, as a whole, surfaces and gives form to.

This merging or loss of individual identity seems to be an indispensible part of the activity of a very-high performance group. As is well known in sports like basketball, it is not the individual super-stars that are responsible for the victory, it is the TEAM as a whole that wins or loses.

It is not surprising that the academic community of college professors writes very little about this type of work, or that they are baffled by requests from above to "teach group work."

The reason is that their entire socialization and formative period, working up towards tenure, and for that matter their educational experience before that, all focus attention and behavior on doing things that can be CLEARLY ATTRIBUTED TO EXACTLY ONE PERSON, ie, "their work". They are trained, repeatedly, to shun and shy away from work where it is not clear who did what part of the intellectual heavy lifting.

After six years of forcing themselves to behave this way, and dragging their belief systems around to support how "reasonable" that is, when they finally achieve "tenure" and are certified by the University as qualified to teach on their own recognizance, as it were, as "full professors", they are simultaneously essentially blind to and unable to see how to work as true collaborative group members, where exactly the opposite is valued, where it is best if ideas belong to the group, not to individuals.

Similarly in industrial settings, in business, compensation and reward systems are typically set up to reward only those behaviors that can clearly and unambiguously be attributed to that one person. Regardless how much the Human Resources (HR) department, and Organizatational Development people lecture and give moving Powerpoint presentations of the importance of "team work" and "working together", when it comes to deciding who gets a raise, or promotion, or who gets laid off, what goes into the equation is JUST the actions that can be clearly and unambiguously attributed to each person.

The quality guru W. Edward Deming noted this problem, and thought that our entire educational system was wrong-headed, training us to think exactly the wrong way about how to approach problems, as individuals, not as collective supra-identity-groups. (my new term, but I like it.) True collaboration demands that ideas be detached from their personal source, so that the group can own them and run with them, without creating "winners and losers".

Here are a few quotes from Deming, by the way, directly related to this subject, taken from the Wikipedia article on Deming (emphasis added).

The Appreciation of a system involves understanding how interactions (i.e. feedback) between the elements of a system can result in internal restrictions that force the system to behave as a single organism that automatically seeks a steady state. It is this steady state that determines the output of the system rather than the individual elements. Thus it is the structure of the organization rather than the employees, alone, which holds the key to improving the quality of output.

and

• Drive out fear , so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (See Ch. 3 of "Out of the Crisis")
• Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

and

• Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

and

S

even Deadly Diseases

The "Seven Deadly Diseases" include

1. Lack of constancy of purpose
2. Emphasis on short-term profits
3. Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
4. Mobility of management
5. Running a company on visible figures alone
6. Excessive medical costs
7. Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees

"A Lesser Category of Obstacles" includes

1. Neglecting long-range planning
2. Relying on technology to solve problems
3. Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions
4. Excuses, such as "Our problems are different"

xand

(Deming on Quality Circles) "That's all window dressing. That's not fundamental. That's not getting at change and the transformation that must take place. Sure we have to solve problems. Certainly stamp out the fire. Stamp out the fire and get nowhere. Stamp out the fires puts us back to where we were in the first place. Taking action on the basis of results without theory of knowledge, without theory of variation, without knowledge about a system. Anything goes wrong, do something about it, overreacting; acting without knowledge, the effect is to make things worse. With the best of intentions and best efforts, managing by results is, in effect, exactly the same, as Dr. Myron Tribus put it, while driving your automobile, keeping your eye on the rear view mirror, what would happen? And that's what management by results is, keeping your eye on results." ^[2]

^{AND THIS GEM}

Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

That last gem of "profound knowledge" is worth a great deal of study.

First note that it includes the concept that, "adversarial relationships" are noted as contrary to good results, not something that produces good results. COMPETING to produce good NUMBERS is exactly the WRONG thing to do, is what Deming is saying.

But a more important gem is in that last phrase so let me repeat it:

...The bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

He is saying one of the key teachings of "systems thinking" here, namely, that the output of "a system" is NOT primarily the result of the parts of the system, so much as it is the result of the RELATIONSHIPS AMONG the parts of the system.

Our language lacks the correct words to pick up and hold this thought, so let's at least hit it from several different directions.

Maybe one way to think of it is this -- the quality of great music does not depend on how superb single notes are on the piano, but on how well the notes are combined together, where almost imperceptible changes in timing of that synchronization make or break the desired effect.

The way to climb up the exponential ramp is to get into a world that has a complete LOOP in it, which has a beneficial impact, and then repeatedly go around that loop, over and over, each time increasing the impact by another FACTOR, say, of a few percent. This process, if carried out 100 times, compounds the effect to be huge. This is the sort of thing that goes on, for example, in a tornado -- each cycle of the loop releases a little bit of energy, and primes the loop to release even more energy on the next pass. It doesn't matter actually, how much energy is released on the first pass, or any pass, because that can be made up by a sufficient number of passes of ANY non-zero positive value.

IF we judged whether this process is "worth it" by looking at the improvement available by a single pass of the loop, perhaps 1 percent, by classical management thinking, this would probably be discarded as not worth the effort.

That is the wrong question to ask. The right question is, CAN WE REPEAT the process and COMPOUND the effect? Next time we go around that loop, can we get a 1 percent increase on the 101 % we ended with last time, to get us up to 102.1 percent? Again, this difference between 2 percent and 2.1 percent looks meaningless, but it is the clue we have that we are getting synergy, which we can increase without limit by repeating the loop again and again.

It is as if we had a bank account that paid 1% interest PER PERIOD, and we get to determine how long the period is. The faster we run around the loop, the more "periods" we get per day, the more interest we get. This tiny one percent, if compounded that way 200 times, amounts to over a factor of 700%. or seven times our original investment. (If you don't believe this, get an excel worksheet and enter "=1.01 ^200" where that character before the 200 is usually obtained by SHIFT-6 on the keyboard. It means, take 1.01 and compound it 200 times, or take it to the 200th power.

Suppose instead of a 1 percent gain each day on what we have at the start of each day, we have a 1 percent loss. The equation in Excel is "=(0.99)^200", and the result is 13%. We end up at the end of a working year, 200 days, with about a 7th of what we started with.

The difference between ending the year with SEVEN TIMES what we started with, and ending the year with ONE SEVENTH of what we started with, is the difference between a 1 % gain and a 1% loss each day, compounded.

Wow. (the math is correct.)

This is a HINT of the power of getting people to work together better by an additional multiplicative factor of 1% each day.
Don't look at the 1%. Look at what it translates into at the end of the year.

It is my asserition, and I think Deming would agree, that if we can get the SYSTEM EFFECTS working for us, if we can get the PEOPLE working with each other by 1% better each day, it will have a FAR more profound effect on the output at the end of the year than ANY other training, educational program, or new technology we can bring into the picture.

This is not magic. This is very straight forward behavior of "systems" which include feedback loops, in the real world.

The correct job of "management" or "leadership", in this model, is to keep on helping, urging, pushing, expecting the people to learn how to work together, and to make even TINY-SEEMING incremental improvements each day. The wrong thing to seek, locally, is HUGE IMPACTS. There probably aren't any. Don't set up a system that focuses attention on and rewards LARGE impacts. Set up a system that rewards TINY-BUT-SUSTAINABLE-INCREMENTAL improvements in the OVERALL SYSTEM, which means focus on improving all the relationships in the syste, which means focus on SYNCHRONIZING and HARMONIZING the TIMING of the activities of each of the diverse component parts.

You don't even need to CHANGE what people do, or even, to untrained eyes, HOW they do it-- you only need to attend to changing WHEN they do it. And you need to change that "phase" angle by getting people increasingly TUNED INTO EACH OTHER and AWARE of each other and slightly more SUPPORTIVE of each other in the belief that, in the medium run, this will pay off handsomely.

THAT's it. THAT's all it takes. THAT's what gets our stockholder's investment up by a factor of seven not down by a factor of seven, at the end of the year.

And it is NOT what we are taught in school, although it WILL be what we are taught in the new "systems thinking" classes that are springing up around the world.













=========== BEGIN MATHEMATICAL DIGRESSION
mathematical digression - skip the next few paragraphs if you don't enjoy math.

Again, from a mathematical point of view, the "inner product" of two vectors A and B, with an angle Theta between them is generally written as A*B , or read "A dot B", or perhaps as (A,B),
and has a magnitude given by |A| * |B| * cosine(theta) -- that is, the product of three terms -- the absolute magnitude of A, the absolute magnitude of B, and a term "cosine(theta)" which is typically considered to be equal to 1 if And B are aligned perfectly, ZERO if A and B are at right angles to each other, and minus 1 if A and B are exactly opposite directions.

Since this model restricts cosine(theta) to be at most a value of "1.0", then the only way to increase this product, after more or less aligning A and B, is to increase A separately, or increase B. It focuses our attention and energies on increasing the TERMS of the equation, and severely limits the effect of the relation to mostly the elimination of contrariness.

I think the correct way to restate this, which includes the above as a special case, is that the CORRECT innner product of A and B, in general, is the real part of A*B*C where
C(z) = (0.5) * ( exp(iz) + exp(-iz) )
That is, in very general terms the cosine of an "z", is equal to the half the sum of two terms, one the eponential function of the product i times z, the other the exponential function value of minus i times z, where i = the square root of minus one.

(references:



http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/10/its-actually-infinite-pie-if-we-let-it.html
)



In this much more general world, the cosine function is unbounded upwards or downwards.

The key point is, correctly understood, if we let "C" stand for "cosine(theta)", the term which can go towards infinity the m ost easily in A*B*C is NOT A and NOT B, it is "C". That is, if we want to increase the result of A working with B, we are immediately focused not on increasing what A does, or what B does, but on IMPROVING THE ALIGNMENT, in multiple dimensions of what A and B do together.

This is just critical. If we're going to let mathematics control our lives and policies, we should at least be using the correct math in the general case!!! The answer of where to focus that we get in correct math is exactly the OPPOSITE of what we get using the wrong math subcase.

================ END DIGRESSION

Spiritual solutions - how we can become like termites

Note -This is a continuation of the prior post, on termites, lasers, and solutions to our social problems an unemployment and failing businesses and failing solutions to global problems like pollution, water supply, global warming, etc.

OK, where are we? We know that:

• Incoherent solutions to fragments of our social problems seem to be consistently making the totality of problems we face simply get worse.
• Coherent solutions can deliver a thousand times the power of incoherent solutions, for the same amount of individual effort. (example, lasers.)
• Coherent solutions can solve social problems that cannot be solved by ANY amount of individual solving-efforts, because the problems are LARGER and MORE COMPLEX than any individual, regardless how bright, can possibly understand.
• Efforts at "education" to make individuals even smarter are doomed to fail, because we can't reach even our current level of required wisdom if the problems stood still, and because our very efforts to get to that level will make the problems even worse than that.
• WE have some models of coherent action (lasers, termites, very high performance teams.) We need to look for solutions that don't involve making each PERSON smarter, but that involve making the TEAM smarter, which is an entirely different thing.
• This is WONDERFUL news, because we already have headaches from trying to get ourselves individually smarter. Besides, as our 20% dropout rate should be telling us, the process is too hard to do and even if we do it, it won't deliver jobs, or business solutions, regardless how much we do it or how successfully we do it.
• We're barking up the wrong tree, in the wrong ball-park. "Rugged individualism" has had it's run, done it's thing, and has grown old on us. We need a new theme for the new season.

OK. So say we wish we had the coherence property that termites or very high performance teams do. How do we get there?

Well, duh, how did termites get there? Hint - it did not involve commissioning groups to study the nest-building problem.

One thing we are NOT looking for, in other words, is a "top-down solution" where a select few of the "best of the best" of us put their heads together and devise a plan that they then share with and, frankly, attempt to impose on the rest of us.

Where does that lead? We've all seen it. As soon as they start to implement THE PLAN, a billion "small things" that the elite group didn't know about will surface as problems in implementation, and, in totalitarian states or the usual business situation, those who see these problems will be branded trouble-makers and told to shut up or leave the group to those who continue to have faith in "THE PLAN". After a few more years as it become apparent taht "THE PLAN" is not working, a huge campaign will show up instead pouring blame on some group of enemies of THE PLAN that, surely, if those people were eliminated, the PLAN would have worked. So a NEW 5-year plan will be developed, and the cycle started again. We've tried that for a hundred years or so, and it got us where we are today, very deep in a hole and getting deeper.

So TOTALITARIAN centrally-conceived PLANS do not work, cannot work, will never work, cannot be made to work. Scratch that idea. Nothing created at the top and then imposed over sincere opposition based on ground-truth-that's-invisible-to-those-at-the-top will work.

We also know that incoherent plans, letting everyone simply do their own thing to survive locally, does NOT, magically, sorry Adam Smith, produce a workable solution. The issue is not that the market-based solutions are not free enough -- they ALSO fail because they lack an overriding context of coherence.

What we NEED is a combination approach, that includes an overarching coherence that we can all detect and live with and tap into, WITHIN WHICH individual and group action can take place that now ADDS UP to something that not only solves local problems, it ALSO solves global problems, and not only works NOW, but works FOREVER going forward, so we don't need to solve THAT problem, socially, ever again, and the net sum of solutions starts accumulating to a global solution.


We need, in other words, a BETTER invisible hand than the free market, so that people can within that context, continue, like dumb termites, to act locally, but that will result in the overall actions to SOLVE issues globally.

This does NOT require, thank God, that each of us "comprehend" the "big picture". None of us can comprehend the big picture, and won't ever be able to grasp it. BUT we can develop a way to SENSE the big picture, and SENSE whether an individual action we are contemplating FITS or does NOT FIT with it.

We CAN tap into a kind of signal that gives us a response that is more or less simply "yes or no", or actually "better here or here?" iterated over and over, times 6 billion people, times a hundred times a day.

We can tap into that signal because, again, thank God, that signal ALREADY EXISTS.

Whether it exists because in some theological sense GOD made it, or in some scientific sense nature made it, or in some practical sense the very existence of life on earth creates its own coherent signal, is not the question for us here. Probably, all three answers are simultaneously correct, by the way.

In any case, it's my observation, conclusion, realization, and hypothesis for you to consider and us to evaluate, that this coherence signal ALREADY EXISTS -- we just need to figure out how to locate it and tap into it and harvest the creative power it releases as we do the VERY SAME THINGS we used to, except, now they work out , and before they didn't.

The pathway to finding that signal, a sort of global WIFI that our own bodies and hearts and minds are receivers for, is what all my prior discussion of "intimacy" is about.

INTIMACY, in the correct sense of the term, involves letting go of preconceived notions, letting go of selfish and self-centered constraints, opening up to outside life, becoming sensitive, becoming vulnerable, letting go and allowing one's whole identity to receive the MESSAGE by altering our internal DNA, our program for life, our values, our sense of meaning.

This is not pie-in-the-sky. This is a strong assertion that, by learning how to LISTEN to what our HEARTS are telling us, individually and in groups, and by learning how to RESPOND to and INTERNALIZE those messages, we can indirectly achieve the coherence we need, socially, that our very same puny, local efforts transform THEIR OUTPUT into socially powerful solutions that actually work. (Unlike the plans made by small groups of men, which always fail.)

Back to the WIFI model -- what is being broadcast here, and what we are swimming in a sea of, are a different KIND of proto-message-stubs. LIFE is far more efficient than we are, for one thing, and doesn't broadcast high-value signals into the void, where most of them are simply lost forever. (That is more like bleeding than transmission.) LIFE only puts out there the initial stub of a signal, a tiny signpost and link to a slightly larger and more powerful link to an even stronger link, etc. We need to follow the chain to get to the meat of the signal.

Follow does not mean walk along. It means, at each step, that we ACCEPT the torque the signal puts on us and asks us to change in our own lives and sense of meaning. WE can't save up the parts of signals and say, no, wait, let me see where this goes before I say yes to any part of it. These are not that kind of man-made signals.

ALSO, I've discussed before, there are, physics tells us, THREE kinds of signals that can be sent. Our radios in our cars have TWO of the three -- we can transmit our signal by changing or modulating the AMPLITUDE of the signal, which is called "Amplitude Modulation" or AM. That's type one of three.

We can bury our signal in changes in the FREQUENCY of the carrier wave, which is called "Frequency Modulation" or FM. That's type two of three.

And finally, the one we've missed and should have started with, we can bury our message and signal in the PHASE of the carrier wave, which is called "Phase Modulation" or PM.

Note -there is effectively an error on the first page, in figure one which tells us PART of the truth, but not the WHOLE Truth, when it says "Fig 1: An audio signal (top) may be carried by an AM or FM radio wave." Yes, it can. But it can ALSO be carried by a PM wave.


An example from the internal world of computers. Way below what computers DO, or applications, are programs of software. Way below the software, there are levels of HARDWARE. It is inside that hardware that a VERY SUBTLE and ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL dance takes place, or must take place, for the applications to work.

All computers have internal clocks or synchronizers. Often there are in fact THREE different signals, sometimes called by their greek letters as phi-1, phi-2, and phi-3. These are, in fact phase signals generated by "clock pulses." The different parts of the computer only work in the outside world as "a computer", instead of a pile of junk, if all of the parts of the computer cooperate in listening for and aligning themselves with these PHASE-LOCK LOOP SIGNALS.

The parts can still do their individual tasks, and have, essentially free will, in that sense, but they ALSO all agree to operate IN STEP, in some ways, by accepting the additional small burden of TIMING their action to be "on the beat" as it were, instead of whenever they feel like starting.

SUMMARY

For large collections of active thingies to work together as "one", and make a living active "one" not a heap of incoherent rubble, each of the active thingies has to give up a tiny part of its freedom of action, and agree to TIME its actions in a way that FITS INTO the way everyone else is timing THEIR actions, so that, together, the actions all ADD UP.

This is what atoms do in releasing their light in a laser. They achieve "phase lock" by an iterative process of looking at each other and basically beings sensitive to "now? now? AHH, NOW!!!!".

Atoms don't have to become electrical engineers to accomplish this. They just need to "get with the program" and "stay on the beat."

Termites don't need to become industrial engineers to accomplish great industrial engineering feats. They just need to stay sensitive to whether what they are doing, in some sense, FITS with what else is going on around them, and "go with the flow" on that "fit" thing. Sometimes they surely must think this lump of mud they are carrying would look best if it went THERE instead of HERE, but if HERE is what the concensus opinion is, hey,all the same, fine, I'll add my lump HERE.

HUMANS do not need to become super brilliant to solve their problems, and they don't need endless study commissions and central planners. What they DO need is to learn how to be sensitive to EACH OTHER, because THAT simple small seemingly insignificant change will transform the COLLECTION of us from an incoherent pile of protoplasm into a SINGLE HUGE RECEIVER AND SOLVER OF PROBLEMS, which, then, in turn, can figure out how to deal with pollution, water supplies, global climate change, corruption in high places, and, not the least, full employment and whatever it takes to keep us all healthy.

AND, this can be done without central planning, without giving up personal freedom of action to any small group of people who want to "run the world". No one can run the world any more than a small group of cells could "take over" our brain and "run our body". We're past that stage in industrial and social evolution where problems can be "solved" that way. We need a new way. We have a roadmap and models.

My next posts will share the vision of how we can use the power of social networking tools on the internet, and virtual reality, to build the amplifiers and synchro-nizers and sensitive-izers and other exotic tools we need so that we can learn how to be intimate, how to learn to actually hear each other, and how to learn to actually "hear" (by accepting and adopting as our own) the "word of God" as it were.

This is a small burden, a small price to pay, for the benefit it brings. No body needs to take over anyone else's land, property, wealth, or freedom of action, or listen to some central planning committee that will do a terrible job of trying to run things based on misinformation available at the top that doesn't fit reality on the ground.

This is something we can DO. It can be IMPLEMENTED in our lifetimes. EVERYONE has a chance to participate and learn how to do it together, and share what they learn.

It can be fun. It should be fun. Life should be fun, and revitalizing, and rejuvenating and inspiring. Sensing that one is already part of a much larger, and even more beautiful LIFE, and synchronizing with it, is a pleasure. We're driven to it, and drawn to it.

Go with it, Obi-wan. It IS our only hope. (A reference to Star Wars for those who miss that.)
or maybe, the right thought is "Trust the Force, Luke!" Victory is not in the "cognitive" world, not something we can plan in detail.

There is a component of synchronizing with the universe that is absolutely required if our efforts are to amount to anything.

It's within our reach. We just need to use our existing technology to assist us in each turning a few degrees towards each other, followed by repeating that action, and repeating it again, and again, and again. The solution is "unbounded upwards". Prepare to join the rest of the visible universe. Prepare to be astonished and what that seemingly trivial change reveals all around us.

Spiritual solution to our current economic problems

One metaphor keeps raising its hand in my consciousness and asking for attention, so I'll go with the flow and give that one some life and flesh it out this morning with you, dear reader.

The image in my head describing humans is basically a termite nest where the termites each have iPhones with GPS service, but the point of the entire structure is to be a huge sort of cosmic receiver. Each termite forms a part of the receiver array, just as each separate radio telescope ("steerable dish with receiver") forms part of the "Very Large Array" (VLA) in New Mexico shown here:

I've discussed before in some other post
[ link?]
the key difference between some number "N" of individual receivers working in parallel in a sort of heap, and the same number "N" of receivers working with their "phase synchronized" which mathematically (and actually) transforms them into a "synthetic aperture" of area N-squared and of diameter equal to the largest dimension of the group. Dimension matters, because any receiver of any kind what-so-ever can, at best, receive a distorted signal, due to its relatively small size. The resolving power (akin to 20/20 vision or whatever) of a single "dish", TAKEN-BY-ITSELF, is limited by laws of physics to an angle in space exactly equal to the diameter of the dish divided by the wavelength of the signal it is attempting to receive.

For those into math, resolution (working alone) = wavelength / Diameter.

This is true of any receiver, optical, radio, etc. A hawk, for example, can see things much tinier than a human, because the Diameter of the hawks eye is ten times the size of a human's eye, so the best resolved angle, by that equation, is separated by only one tenth of the smallest object a human eye can resolve.

The term "working alone" is just absolutely critical to this discussion. The reason is that there is the equivalent of LASER power available. In a laser, some number of atoms "N" stop radiating light incoherently, or independently of each other, and start radiating EXACTLY the same light, on an individual basis, but coherently, or exactly synchronized with each other.

The effect of this is astounding, and suddenly we go from a dim glow to a beam that can cut steel. The ONLY difference is that the very same atoms, doing the very same thing, are now doing it TOGETHER instead of separately. The are doing it in full awareness of each other and are timing their moves exactly to be precisely in harmony with each other. Suddenly the effective output power goes from N to N-squared. Now they can cut steel or light up a visible spot on the moon.

It is my point, one of my points, that the VERY SAME PHENOMENON is available to human beings. We are currently operating in the unsynchronized, chaotic, incoherent range of action, or worse. The net output productive power of N humans, working in a heap, is typically less than N times the number of humans. In fact, a committee of size 10 may only have the effective motive power of one person, and a committee of size 100 may be more like one-tenth person in total output power.

On the other hand, we keep seeing very brief flickers, or instances, where a sports team, say, suddenly 'gets it together" and "starts acting coherently" and suddenly has tremendous capacity released that is such a huge joy to watch that it's worth the $100 per ticket to be there when it happens, for those brief moments. It restores our faith in the ability of human teams and coaches to make "it" work.

It's my point that we all have the capacity to tap into that kind of power. It's mathematically and physically built into the world around us. We don't need to buy it, or find it -- it's here already, it comes with the package, we're born with it. WE just need to figure out what this little gizmo is for, and how it works, and plug it in, and turn it on. That's where I'm trying to go -- to paraphrase the Macintosh guides, this is the "missing manual that should have come in the box". This is the "user guide" to being human in a very powerful sense.

Back to termites. Termite nests or colonies have been studied extensively, and written about in books like "Sociobiology". Termites individually are exquisitely dumb animals. A given termite has something like 20 neurons in its brain (perhaps exaggerating), and couldn't solve a math equation if its life depended on it. A termite is dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

BUT, put termites together, and let them loose to "work", and, collectively, they are smart, smart smart. They can build a nest that reflects superb architecture, load-supporting columns, tunnels aligned so as to maximize the airflow and automatic air-conditioning effect so that the nest doesn't overheat, etc.

If you haven't pondered how that works, you should grab a cup of coffee and sit down and stop whatever else you're doing and think about it. If dumb TERMITES can tap into this kind of laser-beam force, and build great nests that are way better than any individual termite could ever understand, why can't HUMANS tap into it, and build solutions to human problems that are way better than the best human could possibly ever understand? My point is, we CAN do that, and we SHOULD be doing it, and we MUST learn how to do it, if we're going to get out of the mess we've created for ourselves by our bumbling, incoherent actions on this planet as a species-amplified-with-technology.

We've amplified our MUSCLE power and can now transform the world. Sadly, we have not ALSO amplified our WISDOM power so that the transformations add up to a survivable nest with air conditioning, as it were, instead of a heap of mud we're dying in.

I have to say this again if the point isn't clear. Termites do not achieve great results by making the individual termites SMARTER. They don't start termite schools and work at termite literacy, and go on to graduate a small fraction of bright termites to become industrial engineer termites who solve problems on paper and then get marketing termites to sell these solutions to politically savvy termites who sell the rest of the population of termites on the ideas.

The idea of educating an individual termite is ludicrous. (a) it's not possible to make them very much smarter than they are, and (b) it wouldn't do much good, and (c) it's a waste of time and energy and opportunity because they termites don't NEED to be smarter to accomplish their goal.

Now consider Michigan, or the USA, and the job problem. Not understanding termites, we are trying to get "education" and "reeducation" programs to make individual workers "smarter" so that they can join up into corporation-shaped heaps and produce products that, in our dreams, will add up to a social nest that supports everyone's needs. Right. Ain't happening. Ain't going to happen in our lifetimes. This is the WRONG way to tackle this size problem. Not only is the problem too large and complex to solve that way, but also our very efforts to get smarter and address individual, incoherent tiny PARTS of the problems that we CAN get our hands around seem to keep on making small progress over HERE at the expense of much larger NEW problems over THERE, where there is distant in space and time.

The harder we try to solve our social problems with this approach, the WORSE the totality of problems becomes. Our social response to that situation is, not surprisingly, to try even HARDER to apply the wrong solution, which makes things even WORSE.

Now, some are looking for trillions of US dollars in subsidies and start-up funds to try the same failed approach even HARDER!!!! They are thining "SURELY THAT WILL WORK! The problem is that we haven't tried HARD ENOUGH! MORE WILL SURELY BE BETTER!!!"

No it won't. More will continue to only dig us into a deeper pit. As they say, if you've dug yourself into a hole --- the first thing to do is "stop digging.!"

Put down the shovel. Step away from the vehicle with your hands in the air.

Consider the termites.

How can we be MORE like termites?

My wife says my posts are too long, so I'll cut this one here and continue in the next one.

Why should intimacy be healing?

If we're going to learn enough about the way intimacy can produce a defense against influenza, say, it might help to have a clear mental model of how that mechanism operates. Models don't have to be "right", by the way, they only need to be useful at leading to asking the right questions. Still, a model that we could run simulations on would be nice to have when we're trying to get a handle on how strong an interaction effect we might actually see in practice.

So, we might start by gathering some stories or narratives about situations that appear on the surface to be similar to the effect we're looking for. One place to look for such things is in standard idioms or folk wisdom /common sense.

For example, the phrase "I get by with a little help from my friends" makes perfect sense to us, and seems reasonable. People are motivated to join groups, associations, cults, clubs, gangs, etc. because then they can and do "take care of each other." Also, due to our particular physical design, we NEED someone else to "watch our back", because we can only see in front of us. And even if we got really clever and used mirrors, we still have a non-negotiable need for sleep, during which time we're far more vulnerable than when we're awake and on guard.

Also we know "there is strength in numbers." If nothing else, there is sheer raw muscle power in numbers. Get enough people to help, and you can lift a car and move it. Get ten thousand people to help, and you can build a rock-dam across a river. Try to answer some trivia question, with some rare fact, and odds are if you have enough people working with you that at least ONE of them knows the answer.

Also people sleep at different times, and have their "bad days" on different days, and they bring different skills to the mix.

All in all there are many reasons why having a lot of friends is helpful and empowering and strengthening. But none of these mentioned so far requires going into metaphysics to understand or model. These are all simply common sense.

The real research question is how intense this kind of friendship can become. For purposes of this discussion, let's leave sexuality out of the equation entirely, because that's a whole different set of things going on. Again, for purposes of this discussion, let's say the question is how deep, how intense a level of intimacy could possibly be achieved, on some kind of scale.

It seems to me, anecdotally, that women are far more likely than men to complain that men are mostly interested in sex, whereas women are interested as well in "intimacy", whatever that is. What it is is what this post is about.

Some words similar to intimacy are closeness, warmth, empathy, communion, affection, confidentiality, affinity, friendship, understanding, awareness, grasp, touching, and particularly "oneness" or 'being one with".

Often, in early romantic relationships at least, dancing is a prelude to intimacy, and dancing involves moving as one, being aware of one's partner, predicting one's partner's moves, focus, concentration, being entirely present in the here and now.

The "oneness" part is crucial. The Christian Bible Old Testament describes marriage as two people "becoming one flesh". Pillow talk sometimes includes awareness that each person no longer is aware where their own body ends and where the other person's body begins. It would not be unusual for breathing and even heartbeats to be synchronized, running as one.

Intimacy occurs so commonly within a sexual context that the two may be confused, but they are very separate phenomena. The same kind of intimate mutual awareness and acting in a perfectly synched way as if moved by one spirit is something that also occurs in a sports context, with very high performance teams, if only briefly. It occurs in choirs and orchestras sometimes, as everyone comes together around the music and the separateness of the instruments seems to go away.

I don't believe that this sensation of becoming "one" is a fabrication, an illusion, a false perception based on hormones -- I believe it is a physiologically real phenomenon that could, in fact, be detected by scientific equipment. There actually is a synchrony and a synergy.

BAck to the original question then, which is to ask what the upper limit is of this kind of synergy. Some people would report that this type of interaction is tremendously powerful, and rather than being exhausting, is exhilarating and liberating and empowering and nurturing, all at the same time. People speak of "making energy".

To pick up on the energy metaphor, this would be some kind of energy of fusion (bringing together) , not of fission (breaking apart.)

In physics, fusion is much harder to obtain than fission, but is also tremendously more powerful. Thus the "hydrogen bomb", a fusion device, releases far more energy by creating bonds between tiny hydrogen atoms than the "plutonium" bomb, a fission device, which releases energy by breaking heavy atoms apart into pieces. Fusion is a clean process, leaving no ugly residue. Fission is a dirty process, leaving pollution around for 50, 000 years.

• Exploring the analogy or metaphor a little more, can we gain some insight or raise some interesting questions by looking at what exactly happens when two hydrogen atoms are squished together to the point where they give up their individual identities as hydrogen and turn to become "one" "helium atom, from that point on?

First, this union is initially resisted. In fact, it is quite hard to get the two hydrogen nuclei to get anywhere near each other. The harder you push, and the closer they get, the harder they push back. This is interesting, because intimacy between two people is not "automatic" either, and is often resisted and difficult to achieve.

But if we look at the human body, we find cells that have given up their initial identity as separate cells and taken on a much more intimate relationship with each other as "part" of the "same body". This wholeness or one-ness is in fact what the word "health" refers to.

Health care, if we strictly looked at the word, should be primarily about achieving or re-achieving wholeness, or oneness of the parts of the body and the parts of subsystems of the body. They should become harmonized, unified -- which is not the same as homogenized and uniform. A body composed of all big-toe cells would not work. There is no "best" cell, only a best working arrangement and harmony for many different and disparate cells.

Cutting through all that, then, maybe we can say that there are natural processes that work as follows. If WE, through our puny human efforts, can take down barriers and walls and get CLOSE to someone else, then natural processes will be activated and kick in that do more than get close, followed by separating again (something a near-miss bullet might achieve).. they actually bond and bind and link the physiological, mental, and spiritual identities of the two people into something that can be described with one equation as "one" being.

Or, if we believe as I do that relationships have a life of their own, then a new living being or entity has been created by the transient closeness of the two people, a "living vital relationship", that both people participate in, but is not the same as the people -- it goes beyond the people.

That process is, I believe, "unbounded upwards". It has the same limit as the complex exponential equation governing the "vector product" of two vectors -- which is finite in the usual world, but is unbounded upwards in a world with "imaginary" components to the angle between the vectors. Imaginary in this sense does not mean "pretend" -- the components are completely as tangible as "real" angles -- but in a different dimension that unfortunately has been called "imaginary."

So, an intimate encounter, or an intimate-and-sexual encounter, between two people can create a persistent living entity in its wake, which continues after the encounter is "over." Interestingly enough, the sexual encounter can also create a persistent living BIOLOGICAL
entity in it's wake, a child. I think it's no accident that these events, the creative power of intimacy and the sexual creation of a child, are related. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all if scientists one day discover that the degree of intimacy in the sexual activity has a very strong effect on WHICH matching up of DNA of a billion billion possible combinations ends up being created as a child.

Children produced by an intimate union, and surrounded by an intimate relationship during pregnancy, are almost certainly different from children produced by a neutral, hostile, or violent union (rape), taking shape in similarly neutral or hostile context during fetal development.

I suspect that the children of intimacy have far better health during their lifetimes, and longer lives, than children of rage. I suspect the shadow of the event of conception extends all the way to their death, if not continued on in THEIR children to some nth generation.

I need to make a comment that people who are not professional programmers will find baffling. It is my experience, and the experience of other life-time professional computer programmers, that the computer systems developed by a person or team have similar traits -- they seem to embed and carry within them either a persistent grace of operation from a healthy conception and birth, or a persistent flaw and almost original sin, continued flaky operation for their entire computer program lifetimes, if they were developed at haste in a climate of fear and violence.

I feel the same way in fact about certain cars I've owned, specifically an early Volkswagen "beetle" and a recent Honda CRV -- the cars seem to have a supportive grace that held them together when you would have expected them to fail and fall apart.

I suspect, and now think it would be interesting to dig out track records on this, looking at software systems developed by very-high-performance teams operating in the intimate range of intense emotional support for each other, that these systems not only work well when released, but that they continue to work well, better than expected, in fact, almost impossibly better than expected, for a very long time after they have been released.

It is as if the team has achieved not only unity with each other, but unity and oneness with the nature of Nature, and created a beloved offspring which even the world can read the signature on and nurtures instead of breaking.

I'd love to hear other people's experience in this regard. Do you have any stories of products of work efforts that seem to take on a grace and life of their own that lets them continue to live on a healthy life long after less-graceful products have all died off and been replaced?

Wade

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