Zen and college admissions - Youth to the rescue

How many employees, faculty, or students, doctors, nurses, etc.  have questioned some absurdity and been told, basically,  to shut up, there's nothing that can be done about it? What a metaphor for what ails the USA today. Or maybe more than a metaphor.

( reposted from this weblog, December 23, 2010, because it still hasn't been fixed. )

Zen and College Admission Webform Flaws

 

So, it seems the widely-used on-line college admission form has a substantial flaw.  I think the real flaw is a little further upstream.    Today's New York Times describes the situation.  
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With Common Application, Many Find a Technical Difficulty in Common, Too

By JACQUES STEINBERG   (Dec 22, 2010)

The Common Application, the admission form accepted by more than 400 colleges and universities, was created in part to ease the burden on high school seniors. No longer must applicants fill out a dozen different forms to apply to a dozen schools, including the nation’s most selective.

So it was frustrating for Max Ladow, 17, a senior at the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, to discover this fall that he could not get his short essay answers to fit in the allotted 150 words on the electronic version of the application, even when he was certain he was under the limit.
When he would follow the program’s instructions to execute a “print preview” of his answers — which would show him the actual version that an admissions officer would see, as opposed to the raw work-in-progress on his screen — his responses were invariably cut off at the margin, in midsentence or even midword.

This technical glitch in the Common Application has vexed an untold number of college applicants, not to mention their parents, at a moment in their lives already freighted with tension.
Considering the stakes, Max said he was left with two head-scratchers: Why can’t the Common Application be better, technologically, given the caliber of the institutions involved? And, at the very least, why can’t the nonprofit association of colleges that produces the form fix this particular problem?

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I wrote this comment:

 >> Asked why the problem had not been fixed, Mr. Killion said, “Believe me, if there’s a way to do it, we’d do it. Maybe there’s a way out there we don’t know about.” And this has been going on a decade?

Wow. What a metaphor for what ails the USA today.  How many employees, faculty, or students, doctors, nurses, etc.  have questioned some absurdity and been told, basically,  to shut up, there's nothing that can be done about it?

First, of course there's a way to make a web-based application that doesn't have this problem.   In fact, most don't have it, which is why the students are so unprepared for it.

Second, it's trivial to find out what's wrong and find a dozen different ways to fix it or even get  volunteers to write working software for zero cost -- publish the source code and describe the problem on the web and ask for solutions.  SourceForge would be an excellent place to start looking at examples of  "open source" software that is superb.

Third, maybe students should take note that their own educations and lives will be similarly filled with absurd flaws if they don't learn successful ways to seek and obtain help when they run into a problem.

Fourth,  maybe students should note that  their own generation has already found web-based social media ways to deal with such trivial problems that are still viewed as "unsolvable" by their parents and institutional decision-makers who come from the old generation.

Fifth,  welcome to the world, students can learn that "adult" institutions are quite ready to "teach" lessons but almost incapable of being taught themselves, or turning into learning institutions.  

Essentially every person in the country will be affected by this class of problem, as so called Electronic Health Records are pushed into every health care provider's face,   despite every such system having many problems exactly like the glitch the admissions system has -- which doctors and nurses are told to put up with, because they're impossible to fix.

Enough with the "impossible to fix" song, people.  You people have a combination of institutional clinical depression and very poor self-improvement skills.

Time to move over a bit and let youth show you how it's done.

How do we make any progress resolving conflicts?

 Isn't there some tool that we could use so that our meetings always get us a little closer to where we want to go?

How do we ever get anywhere?

( Timeless, so reposted from How Do we Get Anywhere,  here,  Saturday, October 27, 2007 )

If we're going to get anywhere, we need to learn how to talk to each other. That's a conclusion I keep coming back to. With all these people, why can't we solve our own problems?

So, I come back to the side-point Professor Gary Olson made in class one day. He said that white-boards were proven to be very useful for making meetings get somewhere, but he hardly ever saw faculty or administrators use one when they met.

This is on top of arriving without a clear agenda, and working without minutes being taken of what was said.

Well, that's curious. Why is that? I mean, white-boards are really useful in removing ambiguity and bringing issues to the front where they can be seen by everyone. They help you leave the meeting with a common understanding of what was agreed to and a clear picture of what steps who is taking next.

So, I have to suppose that faculty and administrators prefer to keep issues hidden, prefer to avoid revealing conflict, and are happy to let everyone go off with their own misconceptions of what was decided and who is doing what next. And, I guess, it's OK in their minds that people who weren't at the meeting are now missing part of the picture and walking around misinformed.

So, let's start the "Five Whys" process and see if we can figure out what it would take to overcome this apparent social dysfunction.

So far we have:

• We have major social problems that aren't being dealt with, locally, at a department or corporate level, regionally, statewide, and nationally, or being dealt with way too late to be effective
• which is partly because: people don't get anywhere when they meet
• which is partly because: they don't use obvious tools like agendas, white-boards, and minutes
• which is partly because: those tools remove ambiguity which clarifies areas of conflict which is disruptive and unpleasant
• which is partly because: people aren't good at dealing with conflict so they avoid it.
• which is partly because: what?

I think part of the reason people have trouble dealing with conflict is that they don't think of it as "apparent conflict" and assume that it is "real conflict."

Because they think it's "real" conflict, they also think that the only way to survive is to "win", which means that everyone else must "lose", so they hardly want to be open and honest about their motivations. Most people also assume that everyone else is just like them, so they assume the same reasoning and motivations are behind what everyone else is doing as well.

We get some guidance from the superb book "Getting To Yes", which is about techniques that let the Soviet Union and the US negotiate during the cold war, when they hated and mistrusted each other.

The authors use the example of an orange that two kids are fighting over. Each wants the orange and "needs it" and "must have it."

On investigation of what they would do with it if they got it, one wanted to squeeze it and get the juice to drink, and the other needed the outside rind for some class project.

So, it turns out the "it" they were fighting over wasn't ever made clear enough to reveal that there were two "its" and one orange could satisfy both needs.

So, one problem the authors found is that people tend to jump to conclusions about what they think is the "only way" to do something that could "possibly" work. The conclusions are wrong, but are based on unstated or even unrealized assumptions or different life experience.

When the people can back off of their "positions" ( "I must have that orange!") and go back upstream a step to their "interests" ("I need orange juice!") new solutions suddenly appear to what was an "unsolvable problem."

If you keep on tracking back upwards one step after another, you end up coming back to basic needs, that people need to survive, to eat, to have clothing and shelter, etc. I think any negotiation has to start with the assumption that the goal in life is not the annihilation of the other party (which would be a position), but to figure out how to proceed so that the other party doesn't pose an on-going threat of annihilating me (an understandable and predictable interest.)

Many international conflicts are generated by the belief that the only way the other party will stop being a threat is if it is annihilated entirely, and that there are no other possible solutions to reducing the threat.

I'll look at other properties of rational ways to deal with conflict in other posts. Where I wanted to get in this one was to follow the chain of causality upstream far enough to see hope along one axis. So far, we've found that many of the reasons to avoid discussing conflict and actually resolving it are based in misunderstanding, unspoken assumptions, leaps of judgment about the "only way" something can happen, and perhaps hidden assumptions that the "only way" to reduce a threat to myself is to sabotage or eliminate someone else.

The humility required is being willing to accept that it is possible that somewhere you have leaped to some conclusion and leaped right past another solution you didn't see.

The belief required is being willing to accept that your own survival does not automatically require the elimination of someone else.

In other circles, maybe the realization is that your own wealth, empowerment, and happiness does not automatically demand dis-empowering everyone else. There may be other ways to survive and thrive and be legitimately happy and wealthy.

In fact, as I'll discuss in other posts, both health and wealth are bio-social constructs and if everyone else died, the wealth would be worth nothing and physiological and mental health would be impossible. And, just like our body doesn't have a "super-cell" that all the other cells bow down to and "obey", the planet doesn't need a "super-man" that all other men bow down to and obey. The whole concept of domination is fatally flawed, and has no biological or natural analog. Ecosystems can't make themselves subservient to one component, and the emergent power is so much larger than any component's individual power that subservience would make no sense. There is no "best" part of a mutually-dependent ecosystem.

(credits - photo Dances with Penguins, by Fotomom,
click on it to go to that site on Flickr., "dinner time" penguin photo by
Uploaded by c-basser on Flickr)

On whether reality or truth even exists

A friend referred me to a truly delightful website today,   the Institute for Art and Ideas and their weblog "Changing how the world thinks - an online magazine of big ideas."     I was immediately captivated by a post "The Fantasy of Reality-- Why belief in reality is a dangerous mistake", which I disagreed with entirely but found a great stimulus to examining why it was I disagreed and articulating my own viewpoint.

I made a comment - or tried to, since I can't see that the comment was actually submitted or accepted by my pushing the "Post" button.  In any case, I am cross-posting my comment below, except I added a few images for fun.  Enjoy!

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 Actually,  speaking as one who has actually taken a course in the General Theory of Relativity in graduate school in astrophysics,  Einstein dealt precisely with the question of how to deal with a world in which different diligent observers get different results.  That is the  whole POINT of the Theory of Relativity -- that it is possible,  mathematically,  to precisely, accurately, and with good effect tease apart the physical entity that is being observed from the artifacts caused by the accidental context or "reference frame" of the observer.    He demonstrated how all the apparent paradoxes in measurement went away when this was done -- all careful observers,  after correcting for the distortions caused by the accidental choice of lens on their camera,   could and would report the same results.     This message is almost universally misquoted and misunderstood as saying "everything is relative" and taken to mean "there is no truth."

I don't know whether he spent much time wondering whether the results everyone agreed upon were "real" or not, but he showed that there was a uniquely cleanest reference frame, what he called a "proper" reference frame, in which the mathematics of the observed physical phenomenon was most simply and elegantly explained, and in which it was by far easiest to compute ramifications and consequences that predicted other observations about the world that have been shown to be true.  

What he directed people to focus on were precisely those things that did not change regardless who was observing them -- the "invariants of the motion."    For a simple example, imagine one observer of a simple billiard-ball collision in a stationary reference frame and another observer in a world where all dimensions, including both space and time, have been scrunched up by traveling near the speed of light or being near a massive black hole, or even being in an accelerated reference frame such as a rocket ship or elevator.   

These two observers would have dramatically different measurements of the positions and velocities and accelerations of the two billiard balls -- BUT,  using their own numbers, they would each observe that, in this collision,  both "energy" and "momentum" were conserved, and that Newton's Law  ( F=ma,  force = mass times acceleration) was applicable and correctly predicted the results actually observed.  So, yes, they would measure different masses, different positions, different velocities, different times, different accelerations, and yet,  astonishingly,  all of those differences exactly cancelled out when they were put into an equation such as F=ma.    The skewing and stretching of space and time resulted in some quantities getting larger, and other quantities getting smaller,  in such a way that the product of the two exactly balanced out.  Which is pretty amazing. And quite "cool".    The equations that appeared to be true,  or at least something upon which all observers in different times and places agreed,  were those things called "Scientific Laws."
  

I cannot speak as to the ULTIMATE nature of reality, or consciousness, or time, or language - and maybe no one can.  We are probably demonstrably unable to determine one way or another whether we "really exist" or are simply some higher-being's video game.  Heck, I run Windows 10 on my computer, but I also run Oracle VirtualBox,  which allows me to create a world, a window,  on this same computer, but one that is running, in my case the Ubuntu version of Unix.   If I "go into" my Ubuntu window and make it "full-screen" there is absolutely no program I can run or test I can do that will be able to "see" that I am now in a virtual container in a different larger world. At least, until I hit the ESCAPE key.   Philosophers might find this mental model and example useful.   In fact, the outside Windows universe CAN provide services for, or messages to the captive Unix universe, but the flip side only occurs if the Windows universe allows it.  The Windows operating system is 100% ( integer 100%) hidden from view and indetectable by any observations the Unix programs might run. That's the whole point -- to keep some rogue and runaway Unix program from crashing my entire Windows computer.  It's a security feature, not a bug.    Modelers of "God" and "man" take note.

On a more practical basis, while there may be no ultimate truth,  I think there are two take-away lessons from all this:  (1)  What we observe is, and what will always be,  a conflation of whatever is out there, and the mechanism by which we observe it -- the very active, very impactful lens and active filters of our perceptual system's "camera",  and the impact of biases, stereotypes, nearby-mental-models, etc. by which that fire-hose of data is resolved into a "mental impression and understanding",  and the Procrustean process which attempts to project that 4-Dimensional living understanding into or onto a 1-dimensional string of words whereby we try to "convey" it to another person or record it in our lab notebook.

But (2)  once we gain the intrinsic intellectual humility of realizing that such distortion is not a personal failing, we can get on with the process of actually comparing notes with each other to try to figure out what underlying "facts" or "local truth" could possibly explain the observations we make.

There are other physical processes that actually seem to "work" that could suggest further applicability to this discussion.  Maybe we do not NEED to sort out all the differences between people's perspectives and biases and histories -- maybe we can leap past that into where we really wanted to go,  which is to ask whether there is some way to aggregate, to assemble, to "add up" all these very tangled and messy individual observations, and by some magic like the Central Limit Theorem,   reach a collective realization that is vastly superior ( pick your criteria ) to any individuals noisy data-point.   If we can do that, then it doesn't matter to figure out who is "right" or who is "wrong". 

Well,  radio-astronomers came up with the mathematics, and then the electronics and computational super-computer required to take the separate observations of the sky, taken by different receivers and arrays and "dishes",   and to do what is called "aperture synthesis" and to input all these different 'observations" and produce at the output end a single, unified,  image of what is out there that is demonstrably better than any of the individual observations that went into it, by every criteria they care about. The result has less noise, counters local atmospheric distortions,  has better sensitivity to low-power ( faint ) signals,  and has immensely higher ability to resolve two nearby objects into two distinct objects, not a single larger blurrier fuzzier object as any individual radio-telescope sees it.

We might get somewhere constructive by trying to take heart from that result, and ponder how it might be applicable to the question of thousands or millions or billions of us humans trying to make sense of the world.     Maybe it's not "ultimate truth" we will be able to computer or resolve but it seems very likely to be "better" than what any one of us could accomplish.        

In aperture synthesis by the way,  it is extremely desirable to have the dishes as far apart as possible -- so we use telescopes in Sweden and combine signals with those in Chile and Australia to simulate a radio telescope the size of the Earth.     My final point is this -- it is diversity that provides high resolution.   God (?) forbid that we should all have similar views or be clustered all in one homogeneous context.   

We just need to find the secret of accomplishing the type of "unity with diversity" that maximizes the signal and minimizes the noise.    It's almost certainly not "optimal" or "true" but it's also almost certainly a way to find some common ground and avoid blowing each other to bits while arguing who is right.

Why aren't we all dead? A clue to SETI - the search for extra-terrestrial life

I was thinking today about SETI -- the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,"   I think SETI has it all wrong and that's why it's not finding anything or anyone out there despite an enormous search effort.

It's not that there's no one besides us to find -- it's that the entire premise, the mental model of the world, on which SETI is based is wrong.

Because we are talking about a civilization that is a billion years more advanced than we are,    not something like 200 years more advanced than us,  there is no reason I can think of to assume that we would even recognize what an artifact of such a civilization would look like. 

Well, golly,   if we cannot find signs of an advanced civilization that way how should we look? 

Maybe to them we are a diversion, a garden,   a pretty thing to watch grow.

Or maybe, they are doing more than just watching -- maybe like good gardeners the world round, the are actively intervening in Life here to assist it reaching some sort of completion.

If they were hostile, we'd already be dead.  But we're not, so they're not. But maybe they're not neutral either -- maybe they actually are more like loving gardeners, tending to the evolving Earth.

That's just speculation but it leads to a good solid Scientific question --

If they were intervening here,  would we know it? 

There are two reasons we might not see it:

(1)     US anthropologists visiting old cultures try to take great care not to mess them  up by studying them.   It may be they are watching but not intervening because they are careful.

(2)    There are perfectly functional  devices, which I described before such as siphons and magnetrons, that do the job but have zero moving parts.    See my post "Amazing devices to impress your friends". Maybe they are advanced enough to know how to steer without pushing.  And we tend to believe that managing and manipulating something must involve pushing on it. On the other hand we are a clumsy and primitive race -- and our "art of management" and "art of government" leaves a lot to be desired.

Just as an example -- Say Joe drives his car into a ditch and needs help getting it out.  How would ET help without force?  Well,  they could see this coming, and back when Joe was deciding which route to take, they could nudge him slightly into feeling frisky and taking a different route today.  It violates no law of Physics, but it gets the car out of the ditch -- by seeing it coming and avoiding it.

The semi-miracle is that the event is dealt with by causing it to un-happen-in-the-first-place.

Actually, on a smaller scale, packets of light called photons have a similar creepy behavior where they seem to see something coming and react to it to avoid it coming.  There is the famous Young experiment -- light comes up to a wall with 2 slits in it, and has to pick a slit.  If it were a wave, it would generate an interference pattern on the far side ( see picture below ) but as a particle it can only go through one slit.  It does that, and yet only picks a direction to go that it would if it had gone through both slits, which it hasn't and yet which it sort of has.

So the revisited SETI question isn't how to detect radio waves from them -- it's to figure out where to look to find unmistakable and unambiguous signs that someone not from here is, in fact here now, messing about with things but in a very low key fashion.  Near zero, but not zero.

You see, it's relatively easy to design an experiment to notice unexpected forces lifting Joe's car out of a ditch, and we would have noticed those by now, but it's quite another matter, and a tricky one, to detect something causing mild nudges from time to time in Joe's mood or preferences, even though the physical result is the same.

This brings to mind an old Chinese story about how the best doctors use the least visible intervention. This is from Thomas Cleary's introduction to the ancient book The Art of War

 A Chinese lord once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them was the most skilled in the art.

The physician, whose name was such that his name became synonymous with medical science in China, replied, "My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house.

My elder brother cures sickness when it is still minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood."

"As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords."

So how could we tease such an effect out of the ambiguous zone??   What I'm looking for here is the right question to ask, a simple question like the the question asked by the astronomer Olber once upon a time, namely,

Why is the sky dark at night?

Well, duh,  because the sun has set dummy!  No, it turns out in an infinite universe,  regardless which direction you point, in that direction sooner or later there will be a star. And together, they should all add up so that the sky should be as bright, in any direction, as the surface of the sun.

Here's a better full description of what turned out to be a great question:  Olber's Paradox.
The paradox resulted in Astronomers realizing that the universe must be expanding, so that the red-shift from stars moving faster and faster away from us in the distance cancelled out the fact that the volume of space for stars got larger and larger as you drew a larger sphere around the earth.

Well in our observation of life on Earth, I'm asking my echo of Olber's Paradox, namely

Why are we not all dead?

This seems like a neutral, fair, scientific question.

It's of interest because it might turn out to be an indicator that there is some kind of outside intervention in outcomes occurring here.  Here's my reasoning.

We are in a battle with microbes and viruses, right? They are perfectly capable of killing us, at least on an individual basis.   Heck, the Spanish Flu in 1918 killed more people than the number who died in all of World War I.   Wikipedia describes The Black Death in Europe

The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence, the Great Plague or the Plague, or less commonly the Black Plague, was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia and peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351...The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population.

Deadly viruses today have the huge advantage over 1350 of more cities on Earth densely packed with tens of millions of vulnerable poor people with no health care to act as sort of gasoline-soaked rags in the basement just looking for a spark,  idiot scientists experimenting with recombinant-DNA,  and lately, jet aircraft travel world-wide.

And, all of our magical antibiotics are running out of steam.   This is a huge known problem.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is worried about pandemics. Shouldn't we?

But back to our larger time scale and the question I asked above. Why haven't viruses already won? Why aren't we all dead?  If viruses can mutate far faster than Drug Companies can generate vaccines,and if we are in a life-or-death race against them, then it seems the outcome is a certainty that we will lose, or should have already lost.  It's like opening the faucet wide into a bath to fill it with water ( the viruses ) while we also open a much smaller drain ( the Drug Companies ).  The outcome is clear, sooner or later that tub is going to overflow.

 It seems like something we should build a simulation model of and try to tweak it to fit the reality we see around us.

One possibility is that there is some mathematical law that determines such outcomes and, if i understood that law, I'd see that out of 100,000 simulation runs,  almost all don't die: maybe death is statistically very unlikely.  Ok, that's one.

Another  possibility is that by modeling this we would discover that yes, with 99% certainty we can state that there must be some other factor in play because given all the empirical parameter we have, and our model of how things work ( basic pandemic model, etc.) we should indeed all be dead.   This is pretty important to address because it might be some factor that industry in its insatiable greed,   is at the current time undermining and destroying.   It would be good to know that.

In my mind this is the kind of question that Computational Public Health could and should be asking.

Unlike the risk of planetary extinction by being hit by an asteroid,  the death by virus risk is one that isn't stable over time, but one that is growing rapidly in our time,  aided by the trends of urbanization and growing inequality that are generating larger and larger dense pools of vulnerable people. 

This trend cannot continue.  It's like putting more and more people on a bridge.  Sooner or later the bridge will simply collapse.  Unless -- there is something else going on to make that not happen,

Sidebar -- Don't get me wrong.  Rich people are just as vulnerable.  A pandemic anywhere is a pandemic everywhere.   There is no safe place to hide.   In the US, with a huge hospital system, for example, there is also no "slack" -- there are essentially no empty beds in which to put a sudden rush of new sick people.   I used to work at a Hospital and we did a desk-top simulation of how the hospital would respond to a sudden influx of patients, and it was not pretty.   All the lobbies and corridors and then the parking lots would fill up with patients or those afraid they might be sick, and all new admissions would cease.   Your odds of seeing a doctor would be slim to none.  If you did manage to see one they would have no drugs left for you anyway.

Anyway, that's my thought for the day.  Your thoughts? Comment below!

God is here now, ready to help us -- a reason for Hope!

As a Scientist I believe in GOD, and a GOD who is right here ready to help us all if we simply turn and tune in and ask for help.   There, I said it, and put my career in Science on the line.

But, I put the word GOD in all capitals because I'm using that word in an uncommon sense, and need to keep reminding my readers that I am doing that.   In today's language,  I am talking about God-2.0,  a new version of God, like a new, improved version of a video game or App.   And there, I said it, so now I have also offended and outraged most Religious communities.

I'm losing friends and "Likes" and followers pretty fast here.    But I press onward, undaunted.

I want to address this post to the people who made it this far in reading it -- those who are willing to believe that our context, our universe on Earth,   is alive, awake, aware of us,  and at least partially responsive to our behaviors, actions, and words.   Maybe it's not Jupiter, or Thor, or some old white guy with a long beard on a throne in the sky, but there is definitely something going on here that rises above simply nature or even a larger term "Nature". 

And this is important because whatever is going on here, I believe,  interacts with us heavily in everything we do and to ignore it is to completely misunderstand why some things we do fail and why others succeed,  and to miss out on opportunities to succeed with way less effort and much greater impact in our daily lives.     We are immersed in and swimming in a sea of "tough love" -- it is not our servant to tap into and order about like some Genie in a bottle or some mystical loving parent, though it can "come through for us" and give us things that we would never achieve unaided.  It also is "tough" because there are some facts, rules, guidelines, restrictions on what sort of things we can get assistance on. 

We have to live by its rules, not expect it to live by ours.  This is no different from learning to live with the Law of Gravity -- it just is a fact we can like, hate, believe in, deny it, but regardless it will "rule" our lives all the same.    We all understand Gravity.   There is no "magic" involved,  just higher mathematics which, fortunately, we can be content to let other people understand.  This is just the way things are.   It is no big deal.    We can adjust to it and live with it.

So we all accept that there are things-like-Gravity,   part of the structural design of the world we live in, that we just have to live with.   A good question, and one that we never really articulate and ask out loud in school is

"How many more things like Gravity are there that we need to know about?"

Very much like the "Artificial Life" that I described in my last post here,  the definition of the term keeps changing as we learn more and more,  as it should.  After all we started with a very weak notion of what Artificial Life could be, and it truly needed updating over time.

Sadly,  just suggesting that we raise the question of whether we have this concept,  the meaning of the word "God" as correct and nuanced as possible, and as helpfully defined as possible,  raises a firestorm of heated outrage from all sides - Science, Religion,  and Atheism!   It is discouraging and I must digress for a moment to reflect upon why that is.

In fact, this digression takes up the rest of this post and I have to defer what I was actually trying to point to to my next post in order to keep this reasonably short and coherent.

Over the last 5000 years, as society has evolved, we learned more about the world around us. We added new concepts to our thinking, and refined old ones.   That is a normal and natural process,  which continues at a dizzying pace today, and we need more of it. 

It seems there are three distinct kinds of "facts" that behave quite differently when we try to update them in our minds and in society.  

There are neutral facts that no one cares if we change;  there are socially-connected facts that rock the boat somewhat if changed, but in a tolerable way;  and there are deeply-rooted-beliefs that set the boat on fire and overturn it if changed, and which trigger violent response, even death,  if even challenged, let alone changed.

No one ever seems to mention this or teach it, but it's a very useful distinction to learn.

So long as Scientists retreated from society and focused on neutral facts, like "momentum" they could play happily and no one really noticed or cared, unless maybe a cool documentary on the Discovery Channel came along to share.  Most of the so-called STEM subjects are in this category, and it is also termed "hard science" ,  a misnomer if there ever was one.

Socially-connected-facts are things like Psychology or Sociology or Economics or, surprise,  Geology and Astronomy.    Groups of people have set up camp around certain exact meanings of these facts,  and become agitated if someone rocks the boat.   The camps take on shape and names and become things like the "Chicago School of Economics".    Groups argue often heatedly about who has the better understanding and meaning of the same words.  But in general no one actually dies.

Deeply-rooted-beliefs, as I mentioned above, set the boat on fire and capsize it if challenged or changed.   Not just small camps, but entire nations or cultures argue heatedly over who is right and often are quite willing to go to war, killing or being killed in great numbers, to protect their own understanding of certain words and concepts.    Protestants go to war with Catholics in Ireland.  Sunni Muslims go to war with Shiites in most of the Middle East.   Christian Crusaders invade and attack all of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages.    Scientists like Galileo, suggesting the Earth is not in fact the center of the solar system,  risked death if they did not recant.

But these deeply-rooted-beliefs are not just about religion, or culture, or the role of women in society, or differences between races and racial identity.    So called Scientists also become emotionally attached to and even ardent defenders of certain understandings.    Revolutions and changes in "paradigms" such as Quantum Mechanics,  Plate Tectonics, or the nature of "disease" ( invisible tiny organisms living inside us? Really?!!!) were fiercely denounced and resisted and proponents of new ideas excluded from funding or mocked and shunned.

Heck, even the guy Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that women were dying in childbirth in the hospital because surgeons were not washing their hands, and tried to tell them that,  was driven out of practice and put in a mental institution where he quickly died. 

There are things that some people do not want to hear.

Anyway,  where all this was going is that the subject of the nature of GOD is one of those live-wire, hot-button topics that typically causes much heat and no light to emerge from a discussion or attempt to study and grasp the kernel of truth out of the shell of attached meanings of old.

I've spent most of my life believing that there is, indeed, something, some kernel of Truth that matters to me,   buried in and tangled up inside this bundle of meanings attached to the word GOD.  Yes, most of the simplistic meanings are just laughable and can be dismissed out of hand.  There is no dude in a white robe sitting on a throne running or ruining our lives.

But on the other hand, there are some aspects of reality that are as important as the Law of Gravity,  but equally invisible, that still change the outcome of what we try to do as surely as they change the trajectory of a ball we throw upwards.

It is just plain wrong not to try to investigate, in a clear-headed, skeptical but curious manner,  what those structural laws and design features of the world around us might be.  In my book, that is precisely what Science is all about and we should not be deterred by skulls on stakes and big signs that say "Forbidden territory -- all hope abandon ye who enter here!"

Heck with that.  Let's go see what is over there on the other side of the police tape.

To be continued in my next post!

Thoughts on Artificial Life

Wikipedia tells us:  Artificial life (often abbreviated ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry.

There was an interesting post in the Artificial Intelligence forum on StackExchange about where the field of Artificial Life has gone.  Why don't we read much about it.  See

Is Artificial Life a dying field?

I felt inspired to respond and here's what I said:
=====================================================
 

Thank you for the very thorough analysis of what is going on in the field of Artificial Life. I read a lot about this when I was in graduate school in AI in the late 90's and it seemed promising. I had noticed very few articles about AL in the main-stream media.

One possible reason for a low public profile is that the very concept of AL is seen as threatening by many religious groups who believe strongly in strong "creation" that occurred in "a day". There are, of course, also religious groups that believe in weak "creation" which could involve many years of "directed intervention" by a Creator, and an even weaker version of creation of life similar to baking a cake -- that is, only the starting conditions are specified by a Creator, and then the whole thing "evolves spontaneously" but still ends up where the Creator intended.

Of course at the time society made distinctions between creation and evolution, programmers created code by hand-crafting each line, and "evolution" was hands-off, and there was clear white-space margins between them. Then, with the advent of genetic algorithms, etc, programmers sometimes solved problems by "evolving" solutions, so the distinction became quite blurred in the mind of thoughtful observers.

In my mind, looking at Artificial Life as the study of all possible pathways of evolution, the field of self-reproducing machines, such as used for remote mining colonies, barely scratches the surface.
I think using AL modeling to try to figure out what we can say for sure, or at least bracket, for extraterrestrial life is an important topic, but I have no idea where the frontier is. It seems a topic that will abruptly become relevant on first contact when there is no time to do a good analysis. It seems a topic of military significance in the same vein. For that matter, it could suggest where efforts to contact -- or detect -- other life forms might be focused, besides looking at serial-string messages coded onto electromagnetic waves.

To me, however, even more pressing and imminent are questions that AL might illuminate about the nature of multi-level, emergent, entities that may not be "alive" in the classical biological sense, but that certainly behave as if they are alive in a practical sense. Examples are groups, cultures, religions, polarized mutually-hating communities in society today, nation-states, and of course "corporations". In the US, the entities called "corporations" have many of the rights and responsibilities of "persons" under US law.

All of those larger entities are what I have termed MAWBA - for "Might as Well Be Alive". For all practical purposes they are alive. In fact in one Biology 101 text I consulted, they satisfied every one of the listed properties of "Life". They seek food. The are self-protective. They sense their environments and respond to changes in their environment. They can reproduce ( split ) although unlike most biological life,they can also "merge" and, Borg-like, "acquire". In fact, since they are "composed" of people, and people are composed of cells, one could argue a nit-picking point that corporations are in fact composed of cells, and therefore satisfy the last requirement of the definition of life in biology.

So what? So understanding and modeling how hierarchical swarms of composite life forms could possibly evolve can lead to insights and great questions about what possible pathways society and government on earth might take in the very near future.

Understanding regulatory-feedback systems in pure form could lead to vast improvements in the design of regulatory systems on a national scale, such as laws and regulations. What should be regulated or centrally mandated? what must be regulated in order to survive? What must never be micro-managed in order to survive? What are the theoretical limits, based on such totally general models, to "freedom"? Can you demonstrate, versus wave your hands, that dictatorships are bad ideas? Can you demonstrate, versus hand-wave, that diversity is crucial to long-term survival because mono-culture is vulnerable to sudden-death? The last question could suggest looking at a vulnerability the USA has today of having such a large fraction of business carried out using one product, Microsoft Windows, because if that suddenly becomes unworkable, there are just not enough Linux and Mac users out there for us to recover gracefully, if at all.

So in that light Artificial Life could inform a solid theoretical framework to the rather important and hotly debated issue of what the proper role is of government in our lives. What are the pros and cons of too much and too little central control? Can we prove, at least to our satisfaction, that China is doomed, despite remarkable economic success lately, and that centralized control cannot, in a theoretical sense, possibly ever work, period? And here is where it is unstable? And here is where to intervene with a crowbar if one wanted to exploit that vulnerability? And most importantly, are these thoughts opinions, based on whim, or on God's revealed Word, or are they demonstrable in an Artificial Life Lab?

As we approach "the Singularity" (2030 as Ray Kurzweil predicted, I think) we should indeed care about whether human-computer merged life-forms could exist, and if they should, could they exist in a form other than the dreaded Star-Trek "Borg"?

In fact, a good deal of thinking in the USA is centered on personal freedom, or more lately corporate freedom of action, and the very words "collective" or "one world government" are calls to violent retaliation. Can that extreme bias be supported by theoretical models of all possible higher life forms, or is it more legacy hand-waving? Are there solutions to "becoming one" and "unity" that preserve diversity and as much local freedom of action as possible while still maintaining social stability against all threats, foreign and domestic, including extreme polarization, civil war, rise of fascism, or corruption in high places?

I think the questions that could be asked and modeled in Artificial Life are really interesting, timely, and urgent. I wish we'd see more about it in the press.

Why is math so hard?

Why is math so hard?   What can we do about it?  Answer - give up!

More precisely,  when the approach we're using keeps on not working,  instead of doing more of it, maybe we should rethink the whole approach and give up the way that keeps not working.

I had four years of math beyond calculus and tutored many students, so I feel qualified to present an opinion on the subject.

I love math and science.  I'm very pro math.

But, I'm also pro reality.  Reality is good, even when it's inconvenient.

Most people don't like math. That's also reality.

Why is that?

I think the main reason math is so hard is that you can't get by being "mostly correct" - you have to be entirely correct.

An English paper with a grammatical error can still be excellent.  A math equation with an error is completely wrong.

Surprisingly,  if you are compulsively neat and organized,  math itself is easy, and, I love it because problems have correct answers that don't depend on what the teacher thinks.    On the other hand, I can't stand problems like "What did Hemmingway really mean by the image of the fish?" because the answer depends on the instructor.

The reason math is difficult is that most students today have no experience being the type of compulsively neat detail-obsessive workers that it demands in order to work at all.   Unless you get 100% of an solution's steps correct, the answer isn't "mostly right", it's totally wrong.

It is as if we are trying to lay precise rail-road tracks across a thinly-encrusted swamp of sloppy behavior, and, frankly,  that simply does not work, and cannot be made to work.

So, the implications of that strong assertion are enormous.  So everyone is playing "Let's pretend."

Either we bite the bullet and figure out what it takes to accomplish "self-discipline", or we should abandon all pretense that we can "teach math and science" without it.  It cannot be made to work.

There is no point trying to teach concepts to students who don't have sufficient self-control to keep a column of numbers straight on a page.   It may in fact be possible to teach the concepts, but it won't by itself result in them being able to ever "do" math or science in any socially useful sense.

If my analysis is correct, then to get STEM education to work,  we need to have wide-spread specialized remedial courses in structured work and self-discipline.   It's absurd to expect our math and science teachers to have to do that on top of teaching math and science. 

To not damage Johnny's weak self-esteem,  we keep telling him in school that 85% is "just fine" until he manages to get out in the job market, which is now international in scope,  and discovers that "85% good" doesn't even make it into the "C" pile of candidates, let alone the "A" pile, let alone land a job, let alone allow him to do the job.

In mathematics,  the passing score for any concept should be 100% - - the only exceptions being questions that were poorly designed. "Sort of knowing" something will not cut it.  Getting "most of the equation right" except for that one term there will not get most of the answer right.

This seems to come as a surprise to people, students and teachers alike.

But our concepts of discipline,  structure,  order,  routine, rigorousness are the weak spot with the approach we've been using of "national power through individual genius capacity and creativity."

OK.  Then let's be creative about this framing of the problem.   Let's stop pretending most students in K-12 today are ever going to be very good at STEM skills.    Period.  They are not.

Yes, in the long run, we should improve things, but in the short run,  don't bet on it working.

Working separately, as competing individuals,   we are very unlikely to win or even catch up and break even with the Chinese.

Isn't there ANY way to build a reliable system out of semi-reliable parts?

Yes, is the answer.   Creative redundancy.   There is a whole engineering discipline of making reliable "systems" out of unreliable and flaky components.

If we cannot make our individuals reliable,   that doesn't mean we are unable to make combinations of individuals reliable.   

If we're going  to go that direction, then the dollars, priorities, and emphasis in education needs to change from attempting to maximize individual skills and reliability to maximizing combined skills and reliability of small treams of people working on problems together.

And, just like SEAL teams in the military,  maybe these teams should persist across years, learn to work well with each other, and then go apply for jobs as a team, not as an individual, and stay together on the job.

On the job front, one way to handle the logistics would be to incorporate the team as, say, an LLC and have the LLC take a job slot as a "consultant."  That can be done with today's technology.

The problem is the educational system, oriented almost entirely around work-units of size 1, that is, "individuals."

I'll argue that it is obvious ("without proof" ) that two people, working together,  and cross-checking each other's work,  should be able to produce a math homework paper that has fewer errors on it than one person working alone.

Not only should that be "fair", it should be encouraged.

From the point of view of "business" or "commerce",    the only thing that is needed in a particular "slot" or "job" is some agent (person or company) who can take a problem and solve it in the time available. 

Already we see this in the concept "pair programming", where two people sit side by side at one computer, and together attempt to solve programming problems.    It turns out, if done correctly, this is something like 5 to 10 times more effective at generating workable programs than "dividing up the work" and having each person work in isolation on "their own piece of it."

So, here's the trade off.  To catch up to the Chinese in productivity in problem solving in math or science in the real world,  which has, in fact, no constraint of "do your own work separately",     we have two possible approaches:

• We could try to back-fill remedial high-quality self-discipline into our students and culture and also "learn math",  or
• We could try to remove the "do your own work separately" constraint and start tackling problems as pairs of somewhat-sloppy but cooperating individuals. 

Neither of these is trivial or a cake-walk, but, of the two, the second seems more likely to succeed than the first.  At a mimimum, since we're that kind of place, we should explore some of each, have some schools try to go for structure, and others go for true-pairwork.

Both of these require a cultural shift to support them.

At the current time discipline is not popular.   On the other hand "groupwork" is a dreaded four-letter work in academia as well, as in "Oh God, ... I just found out this course requires group-work. I wonder if it's too late to drop it!"

My point is, if we want to be sloppy about our personal work habits, and we appear to take that as a cultural norm,  and if we HAVE to be concerned about product reliability, which is demanded by the mission or a competitive marketplace,  then we have no choice that I have seen so far besides figuring out how cancel out that sloppiness by working together.

And,  we need to start trying to figure out how to treat a work-dyad as an acceptable filler for a "job" that currently is intended for a work-singlet. (a.k.a. employee.)

How do you pay a dyad? What about health care? Do both people always have to show up for work or can only one show up on a given day? Who cares?   If they both work "from home" does anyone even need to know it's a dyad not a singlet? If we gave the dyad a "name" and a "social security number" would that help?

That's where the problems rotate into with the dyad approach.  

Again, I didn't say it was easy -- I suggested it was easier than the alternative,  given where we're starting. 

The dyad needs a name, and a resume, just like a singlet-employee.    Presumably, the dyad needs a single paycheck.   Desk space is a problem unless the dyad works "at home."

While we're at it, let's say the dyad should be allowed to have permanent full-time access to the internet during any portion of training, education, examination, or activity during the actual job. That's realistic these days.

Here's a crucial point:  if we demand students perform amazingly well as individuals and graduate high-school and college as "singlets" before considering them for inclusion in a work team, there are two guaranteed results:

• People who would make great team members and totally boost team energy and morale, say, but are mediocre working alone will never get a chance, as they'll drop out early as "failures". 
• The people who do succeed as singlets are then supposed to do a u-turn and work as team members, which they just spent 12 or 16 years learning to avoid.

After 16 years of socializing people as fiercely competitive individuals, expecting them to make good team members is, frankly,  unrealistic.   It's as unrealistic as expecting tenured faculty members, after 7 more years of "doing their own work" in the tenure process,  to end up being "collegial."


So now the question is,  can  dyads of Americans,  with access to the world wide web, working just with each other and learning over time how to operate as a team,  trained as a team,  operating as a team,  outperform Chinese singlets working with what they learned and stuffed in their heads, without access to web?

My thought is,  yes.  

I guess, when you're coming from behind, "whatever works" is a good philosophy.  We have a lot of sports where doubling-up on your opponent is a winning strategy, don't we?

Besides .. it sure beats having to learn algebra for real.

A question that Science and Religion can come together around

As the war between sects of Islam heats up again, it becomes ever more important to find a common ground we can all move to while preserving our most crucial interests.

Sunni versus Shia,  Catholic versus Protestant,  Christian versus Muslim, Muslim versus Hindu,  it's pretty much the same old battle we've had for tens of centuries, but with frighteningly more and more advanced weaponry.

Then we have the battle heating up between all of the above and the institution of Science,  which may be losing ground far faster than it realizes.

This is not good, given that passions are high and willingness to destroy entire countries and cultures is already on the table.

So let me present an alternative.   A middle ground.   A place in which, as in the Harvard Negotiation Project's book  Getting to Yes, we can each protect our interests even if we have to relax our "positions" somewhat.

 If we take science's numbers and Drake's Law, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, there have been "billions and billions" of civilizations others than ours that not only made it to this point of technology, but did so before the Earth was even born.

Even if most of those self-destruct, at least ONE probably survived and has therefore been around for over 5 billion years. One is all it takes.

If we assume that (a) faster than light travel is possible and (b) they have the same tendency to put sensors everywhere as we do, then "they" have not only already been "here", but their sensors and probably their intervention agents are still here, busy at work around us.

For reasons of pure hubris, humans seem to want to avoid counting "1, 2, 3, ..." to get to infinity ("God"), but prefer to count "1, infinity" as if God is only one short step above mankind. That's unsupportable logic.

The far more scientific question, rather than investigating infinity with theologians, is to investigate the nature of "2", i.e., what's right here, all around us, that's higher than us but still way way lower than God?

You in the back row? No, "Congress" doesn't count as an answer.

The burden of proof, it seems to me, is on proving that we are NOT surrounded by a consciously managed framework, no more mysterious than our interventions to sustain the coral reefs.

In scientific terms, religion becomes mostly people sensing that framework and adding fanciful details.

A task on which both Science and Religion, as institutions, could and should agree on is figuring out what the shape and nature is of the real but non-mystical active and adaptive framework that surrounds us.

In fact, documenting such a framework might, in fact,  be a major step in defusing the perpetual and very destructive wars of different religions, or even different sects of different religions, over what are essentially minor cosmetic details compared to the massive framework we will find if we simply stop fighting,  develop and calibrate suitable tools for "looking" for such a framework, and take the time to look.

If nothing else,  good tools should prove their capacity by revealing a number of places where external, but very real, human agencies are messing with affairs we always suspected but couldn't prove.

* The image above is from Harvard's Kennedy School

Spiritual Solutions to Economic Problems - Baha'i Consultation

Spiritual Solutions to Economic Problems - through Baha'i consultation

( Picture from The Consultation Institute )

The Great Being saith: The heaven of divine wisdom is illumined with the two luminaries of consultation and compassion. Take ye counsel together in all matters, inasmuch as consultation is the lamp of guidance which leadeth the way, and is the bestower of understanding.
("Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh Revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas" [rev. ed.], (Haifa: Bahá'í World  1982), p. 168)

All Baha'is are directed to use "consultation",  in matters great and small.  But what exactly is consultation?   Why does it work? 

Below I give my own understanding of these questions, along with some references to other sources of information about Baha'i Consultation.

Consultation is at the other end of the spectrum from the classic, legacy, Western concept of a business meeting, where each person comes with their own agenda and attempts to outmaneuver and outvote each other and their goal is to "win" the meeting and get their way on some issue.   In a typical meeting the boss runs the meeting and presents his idea first, then asks for comments and opinions.  Generally people know what's good for them and all agree.  Afterwards no one has any idea why they just spent an hour when the outcome was known before they went into the room.   Communication is very one-way, top-down.  The idea identified as the Boss's idea wins.   Opposition may be brutally hammered down, and hard feelings or resentment carried over for years after the "decision" is reached. For the most part disagreement is self-censored.  The objective is a "win", even if the "losers" are totally outraged and outmaneuvered by trickery or power.

On the other hand, Consultation involves people assembling hoping to discover what is right, not who is right.      A wide range of views and opinions is actively sought from each person in the room,  even the quiet ones, and listened to attentively and politely.   The behavior is civil if not exemplary.   One goal is that, regardless of the "outcome" of the matter under question, everyone will leave the meeting at least as good friends, and preferably stronger friends, than they were when they arrived.    Members who disagree with the views presented by others have an obligation to speak their piece as they see it.    The objective is a heartfelt unanimous realization of the right course of action, with everyone behind it.

What's interesting is that the literature of management has done a complete U-turn in the last 100 years,   from advocating very tight top-down management to advocating multidisciplinary groups given discretion to find their own pathway.

The reason for this change in industrial practices is that the problems have changed.  In 1900 it was common for the top management to be experts in everything they needed to know, and the workers simply had to follow instructions to produce good output.    As the century progressed, the competition increased dramatically,   the complexity of problems increased enormously,  the speed required for solutions shortened, and no single person could possibly know enough to solve the problem by himself.    

Companies that tried to continue the "old way" of top-down decision-making, like the auto makers General Motors and Ford,   just couldn't believe they were being outrun by participatory decision-making companies like Toyota and Honda. 

Auto companies were not unique however.   A large number of large-scale disasters of management or operation were traced back to the suppression of dissenting views or lack of diverse opinions, including such things as the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion,  Three-Mile Island meltdown,  and most airline "accidents" that resulted in loss of life.   Further investigation showed that similar problems were occurring in Hospitals, where suppression of dissenting opinions was resulting in patient harm,  amputation of the wrong arm or leg, etc. where someone knew the situation was going wrong, but was unwilling to speak up.

Current best thinking in the field is in a book titled Teaming by Amy Edmondson,  a faculty member at Harvard Business School, who discusses the key concept of "psychological safety" required for a dissenter, especially of lower rank, to speak up when they see a problem.  It turns out it is not enough to get the right people with a diverse set of knowledge and viewpoints into the room, they must feel safe from retaliation if they share their opinion.

All of which brings us back to Baha'i Consultation,  which predates the current management wisdom by 150 years and gives clear instructions as to what is required.

 The prime requisites for them that take counsel together are purity of motive, radiance of spirit, detachment from all else save God, attraction to His Divine Fragrances, humility and lowliness amongst His loved ones, patience and long-suffering in difficulties and servitude to His exalted Threshold. Should they be graciously aided to acquire these attributes, victory from the unseen Kingdom of Bahá shall be vouchsafed to them.... The members thereof must take counsel together in such wise that no occasion for ill-feeling or discord may arise. This can be attained when every member expresseth with absolute freedom his own opinion and setteth forth his argument. Should any one oppose, he must on no account feel hurt for not until matters are fully discussed can the right way be revealed. The shining spark of truth cometh forth only after the clash of differing opinions. If after discussion, a decision be carried unanimously, well and good; but if the Lord forbid, differences of opinion should arise, a majority of voices must prevail.

(`Abdu'l-Bahá, cited in a letter dated 5 March 1922 written by Shoghi Effendi to the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada, published in "Bahá'í Administration: Selected Messages 1922-1932", p. 21-22)

So we here get the message that "intention matters."    Rather than suppressing human emotion and the role of the heart,  as in a legacy "business meeting" that should be purely rational,   consultation should include the full emotional and spiritual human capacity in a search for a pathway that looks right, feels right, and is right.

Trustworthiness,  scrupulous honesty,   and loving civility are virtues that are not just nice to have,  they are absolutely required for consultation to work successfully.     Even the famous "Toyota Way" is very clear that at the core is a a change of heart, not a change of tools.

There is a spiritual dimension as well to a perfect consultation.   While the persons consulting are present, they also need to be, effectively,  polished mirrors or hollow reeds,  reflecting the love of God into and among the persons present, to illuminate the dark corners and allow a solution to emerge.    The solution discovered is as likely to be along a totally unexpected dimension that allows a win-win-win to occur between "sides",  revealing the pathway to "unity above diversity" which more "dissolves" the problem than "solving" it.    The solution comes through the firebox of the hearts reflecting love, and not through some sort of mental or fully-rational process of mathematically ranking options or other such computations.

As Daniel Goleman's books Emotional Intelligence, and more recent Social Intelligence have documented scientifically,  humans are not really poorly functioning rational engines, but highly tuned beings hard-wired to operate in emotional synchrony with tremendous shared insight.
If there is no shared love,  there will be no solution revealed.

If there is shared love, love of God and love for each other in a shared destiny on this one planet we all inhabit,   then true miracles can be revealed through the most unlikely members,  and we can move towards the Most Great Peace.

A  summary of quotations from the Baha'i Sacred Writings can be found here:
http://bahai-library.com/compilation_consultation  and a brief informal video introduction to consultation for those who prefer video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VH-4qHd3OQ . 

A classic Baha'i book is John Kolstoe's Consultation: A Universal Lamp of Guidance.

A Baha'i inspired book of techniques for handling logistics of meetings is Trip Barthel's Transforming Conflict into Concensus - 9 keys to Synergy.

Although the emotional and spiritual qualities are required for truly finding Spiritual Solutions to Economic Problems,    valuable approaches for group dynamics can be found in
 Getting To Yes (Fisher, Ury, and Patton) and
The Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (3rd Edition) by  Sam Kaner.

I discovered in writing this that there is a group called The Consultation Institute in the UK,  which is somewhat interesting since I was considering starting my own non-profit  501(c)(3) in the USA to do just that.     I don't know anything else about them, but here's a link to them and I do like their charter!

The Consultation Institute