Technology in the classroom -- how NOT to do it!

This is painfully recognizable in some cases!
Warning - dark humor, akin to The Office.
Worth watching at least weekly and asking .."Is this me?! "

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6svk_R_rVhA

Wade

On evaluating teachers by how they teach to the test

(picture by "Editor B" on Flickr)

From today's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/education/01teacher.html

Formula to Grade Teachers’ Skill Gains in Use, and Critics

"

A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles — with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers’ work.
The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.
People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.
Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. "

(etc)


My comment to it was as follows:

Your Submitted Comment

Display Name

Wade Schuette

Location

Ann Arbor

Comment

OK, I had 6 years of post-calculus math and did very well, but I cannot for the life of me grasp why the average person needs to be able to factor polynomials to be a better human or worker or friend or parent or citizen.

If the students' reaction to what we are feeding them is to vomit and flee, maybe that should tell us something about the food, not the students.

From what I can see students do NOT need way more math and science in order to thrive in later life and contribute to the world. They need to learn to work together, resolve conflict, surface issues, and dare to care and take action on the issues they see.

Seriously. If every person in the US Government at all levels had twin PhD's in science and math, would things be better for us? How? Hey, in fact, didn't those "Quants" who demolished our banks and retirement funds HAVE PhD's in math?

Teachers need the ability and power to look UPWARD and say, "You know, I don't see how any of this stuff you ask me to do is helping." Students need the ability to look UPWARD and say, "Tell me again, after 8 more years of this, I become unemployed and then ... then ... what?"

Judging by the state of the USA today, our educational system has failed to produce people who are individually or collectively healthy, wealthy, or wise.

I'll speak for the students. "OK, grown up people. Please show me how another 8 years of THIS kind of schooling will guarantee me a good job in a great community, for me and for my children and their children. Because, doh, we look at the Social Value Added (SVA) to the community, state, country, and planet by the school system as a whole over the last few decades, and have to rate it as a total failure. Why should we even LISTEN to you? We don't believe this \"school\" is much besides a thinly disguised warehouse or prison system that even YOU can't see the point of anymore, except that it's what we've always done so SURELY, all evidence aside, it MUST be the right thing to do."

Surely. Oh, and fire all the teachers who question that narrative.

Tackling bad nursing management effectively from below

Here's a post from Those Emergency Blues,
and two comments, on it, one of them mine.

Your comments would be welcome as well! This is an important issue!

Unbearably Unhappy

Any experienced nurse can walk in to any particular unit and tell almost immediately if it’s a happy place to work. There’s something about the body language, maybe, or the lack of laughter, or how the nurses present themselves. Like pornography or good art, you can’t exactly put you finger on defining it, but nevertheless, you know it when you see it. I like to think (for all of my moaning and biting) my own little corner of nursedom is a fairly happy place to work, or at least, it’s far, far better than most of the places I’ve worked.
My father has a chronic condition which requires fairly regular if infrequent visits to a particular Toronto-area hospital for consultation. So today I spent the day with him and his wife at this hospital while he was getting treatment. While my father was in the procedure room, I remarked to his wife (who incidentally is a retired nurse, and a pretty sharp observer, to boot) that the nurses working in the short stay unit seemed particularly unhappy.
“Oh yes,” she replied. “I’ve talked to a few of them and they’ve all said it isn’t a pleasant place to work.” She lowered he voice. “In fact, I’ve seen the manager come on the floor and ream out a few of them here in front of patients and families. Totally, totally inappropriate.”
At that moment the manager came out. She was short and pale, and looked like she ate nursing licences for breakfast. Hell, she scared even me. There was an immediate stiffening amongst the nurses, and a couple of them, I noticed, surreptitiously left the unit through a back exit. Definitely an authoritarian, then. I felt sorry for this gem’s staff.
If I were a manager, and my staff were avoiding me like the Ebola virus, I might think I may have a problem. She probably thinks she’s doing a good job, and has mastered the voo-doo arts of human resources management.
I emphatically would not work that particular unit, nor would I work in a hospital that supports that management style. It’s bad nursing and bad for nursing.
I wondered though: in choosing between a happy work place and an unhappy one, wouldn’t you choose the former and eschew the latter as being unfavourable for morale and a quality nursing work-life environment, and therefore poor inducement for retention and recruitment, and more importantly, an indicator for poor patient outcomes?

This entry was posted on 23/08/2010 at 1921 and is filed under Battered Nurse Syndrome, Health Care Policy That Matters to Nursing with tags Nurses, Nursing, nursing management, Nursing stupidity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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   Diana Says:
   23/08/2010 at 2057

   That unit sounds a lot like mine. I’ve only been there 2 1/2 years, and morale seems to be at an all time low. Weekends are the least stressful as our manager isn’t present to micromanage the trivial while ignoring the relevant. Something’s got to give. I’ve definitely been thinking of what I’ll do when my initial contract is up. For now I’m simply encouraging our unit nurses to utilize existing councils to exercise autonomy in the day-to-day running of our unit. We’re up for magnet re-certification next year. Now’s the time to force administration to take the councils seriously.

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   Wade Says:
   24/08/2010 at 0657

   I’d say it’s more than an “indicator of poor patient outcomes” … it’s a direct cause.
   It’s fascinating, in a morbid way, that a unit with a leak in the ceiling and wet floor would be cited by JCAHO as a patient risk, but a unit with a manager who clearly damages the psychological-safety and open feedback teamwork required to catch errors and deliver safe care is allowed to continue without comment.
   So stick a red flag and GPS-location-transmitter on that problem and let’s group think about how to do something more powerful than notice it, complain, and dismiss it. This is a clear and present danger to patient’s lives, and should be a clear duty to address, but in some more effective way than whistleblow-and-be-fired-for-life.
   Pondering. As W. Edwards Deming noted, management is generally not interested in hearing about the fact that management IS the problem. Retaliation for even THINKING such a think seems common. So, the direct approach of presenting credible peer-reviewed studies and evidence is off the table.
   Similarly, going over management’s head outside the chain of command has a pretty dismal track-record of success.
   So, for this effort, to fix a hazard to patient care, is going to need to come from higher, such as JCAHO or better CMS – now that Don Berwick is in charge, bringing IHI’s focus on quality. HE certainly understands the direct cause-effect relationships here.
   So, assembing the fragments of thought here, it would seem that (1) nurses (or anyone) could substantially improve patient care if they could take effective action that would remove rattlesnakes, wet floors, and dangerous managers from the system.
   (2) For anyone to try this alone, unaided, by pushing UPWARDS is a proven no-win approach.
   (3) Don Berwick is the right guy to lead an effort to put teeth in a move to deal with such managers, and CMS certainly has the clout to threaten to cut off all medicare funding for a hospital that refuses to listen. So that part is in place, finally.
   (4) So how can individual nurses contribute to this nascent action coming to fruition. Probably, that’s what professional organizations are about and for.
   Conclusion — it’s within nurse’s professional duty to lean on and assist their collective professional organizations to put pressure on Berwick to “do the right thing”, and to rally other nurses to join them in this move to improve patient care AND, as a side effect, to improve working conditions, retention, cost-effective care, hospital survival, etc.
   Is that logic solid?

 

The oil next time - lessons from Deepwater Horizon incident

Deepwater Horizon official web site:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/

http://www.facebook.com/DeepwaterHorizonResponse


For the latest information visit  www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com
Twitter at http://twitter.com/Oil_Spill_2010 or on
Facebook at Deepwater Horizon Response.

Powerpoint on the role cementing can play in release of undersea gas
http://www.aade.org/houston/study/Fluids/11182009/F%20Tahmourpour%20Deepwater%20Cementing.pdf
=======================

Friday, April 30, 2010
Blowout preventer failed on Gulf rig
New York Times:

As cleanup crews struggled Friday to cope with the massive oil slick from a leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, dozens of engineers and technicians ensconced in a Houston office building were still trying to solve the mystery of how to shut down the well after a week of brainstorming and failed efforts.

They have continued to focus their attention on a 40-foot stack of heavy equipment 5,000 feet below the surface of the gulf — and several hundred miles from Houston. Known as a blowout preventer, or B.O.P., the steel-framed stack of valves, rams, housings, tanks and hydraulic tubing, painted industrial yellow and sitting atop the well in the murky water, is at the root of the disaster.

When an explosion and fire crippled the deepwater drilling rig on April 20, workers threw a switch to activate the blowout preventer, which is designed to seal the well quickly in the event of a burst of pressure. It did not work, and a failsafe switch on the device also failed to function.

Since then, the group of experts in deep-sea oil operations has been working out of a BP office, grappling with the intractable puzzle of how to activate the device.

“It’s a mystery, a huge Apollo 13-type mystery,” as to why the blowout preventer did not work, said a person familiar with the efforts to activate it, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject.

Like Apollo-program engineers, who 40 years ago (and also in Houston) cobbled together a long-distance fix to save the crippled spacecraft and its crew, these experts are trying something far beyond routine: shutting down an underwater out-of-control well by remote control. And at a mile below the surface, the work site might as well be halfway to the moon.

The effort involves a half-dozen remotely operated robotic submersibles hovering around the blowout preventer, along with surface support ships. The submersibles, designed for drilling work, are equipped with video cameras and tools like wire cutters and “hot stabs,” metal connectors that can plug into hydraulic systems in an effort to operate them.

So far the efforts have not been successful. “They seem to be having hydraulic issues,” said the person familiar with the effort.

In computing, when a "bug" surfaces in a program,   it is always a good idea to not only fix the bug, but to try to understand which barn door was left open that this bug could have ever made it into production code without being caught.   There is usually a "failure of imagination" or a "failure of the mental model" that is vulnerable to factors that from now forward, at least, should be taken into account.

It is, in that sense, not so much the "code" that has failed, as the process which produced and tested the code which has failed, and which needs to be fixed.  

Almost always, this ultimately points to both management and culture that have contributed to the problem's very existence.

Consider the case of the Blowout Preventer ("BOP") in the Deepwater Horizon oil well.  What does this failure to operate tell us about the management and culture that produced it.

"The work of the hands always reveals the true nature of the heart."

Facts:

• The BOP was triggered ( told to close the well) by the surface crew when there was a burst of pressure,  the type which is undesired and unintended, but which is the whole point of having a BOP in the first place.     The triggering failed to close the well.
• Underwater submersible remotely operated vehicles (ROV's) went down to the BOP and manually activated various emergency fall-back triggers,  which also did not function.
• BOP's have failed before.

Analysis -- or "What were you thinking?!!"

• Apparently, there were multiple ways to trigger the BOP to close, but all of them relied on a single hydraulic system to operate, making a single point of failure.
• The design of the BOP did not utilize the design feature of airbrakes on trains and trucks and busses, namely, that when the pressure fails, the brakes LOCK.   The pressure holds the brakes UNLOCKED.  So, a predictable failure in hydraulics results in a known safe condition.
• The design of the BOP did not utilize the wisdom of airplanes with hydraulic systems or electrical systems to lower the landing gear,   in having a fall-back manual crank system, when all else fails, to lower the landing gear.  

In other words, there are at least three major, obvious design flaws in the BOP's that are currently in use. The design, if submitted to a sophomore engineering class as a project, would probably get at best a grade of "C".

If you add to the equation that the cost of a failure is the ecosystem of the Gulf, and well over a billion dollars out of pocket,  the best grade it would get would be "F" = unacceptable for that purpose.

META-Analysis -- How could this have happened? 

What structure of management, motivations, mental-models, and culture allowed such a "bug" to pass through to production, and aside from fixing the instance that failed,  how do we "close that barn door" so this "kind of thing" won't recur?   Can we learn enough from this?

It's hard to imagine that the design engineers on the project of BOP design did not raise the issues above. This is Halliburton, not some back woods shop with inexperienced people.  That would be simple standard engineering practice.     We have to conclude that the engineers at the bottom of the food chain saw these problems, but their design recommendations were rejected by their management.

Apparently, to middle management,  assuming a 5% failure rate of the equipment,  a failure to keep pumping was something to avoid at all costs, but a failure to stop a a blowout was and "acceptable cost of doing business."

It's not clear that the math is correct, and, in the whole, by the time the lawsuits are done for this blowout, it will almost certainly have cost the company far more in profits that it would have cost to redesign the BOP's to be closer to failsafe.

So, we may have the same old story of short-run profits dominating the decision making over long run profits. It's not clear why investors put up with that, which is a whole branch of investigation in itself.

What can be done in the future?

It would be interesting if proposed safety mechanisms, such as the BOP,   were posted on-line and open for comments by the public, early in the design phase.     All of the above issues would surely have surfaced.

Regulatory agencies may be hard-pressed to issue regulations about the myriad of features of millions of safety issues, but they might be able to simply demand that such designs be posted on-line early in the design state,  so that public wisdom could be incorporated in the design.    We could leave it to the legal system to pursue questions of why, since issues X were raised,  they were never addressed, in cases such as the current one.
===============
Also

Huffington Post on oil industry objections to new safety regulations
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/26/big-oil-fought-off-new-sa_n_552575.html


Boston Herald Coverage

Lawsuits name Halliburton, cementing procedure in oil rig disaster

By Associated Press
Friday, April 30, 2010 - Added 1d 12h ago

 

HOUSTON — Although no cause has been determined, oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. says it finished a cementing operation 20 hours before a Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames.
Halliburton is named as a defendant in most of the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Gulf Coast people and businesses claiming the oil spill could ruin them financially. In one lawsuit, two Louisiana shrimpers claim cementing contributed to the explosion.
Halliburton said Friday it had four workers stationed on the rig, performing several tasks, including cementing — a process of applying cement and water to a pipe used to prevent the wall of the hole from caving in during drilling.
According to a 2007 study by Minerals Management Service, cementing was a factor 18 of 39 rig blowouts in the gulf between 1992 and 2006.

 =====
Halliburton declined to return a detailed request for comment from Huffington Post.
The company did issue a press release responding to reports about its work on the rig:

As one of several service providers on the rig, Halliburton can confirm the following:

-- Halliburton performed a variety of services on the rig, including cementing, and had four employees stationed on the rig at the time of the accident. Halliburton's employees returned to shore safely, due, in part, to the brave rescue efforts by the U.S. Coast Guard and other organizations.

-- Halliburton had completed the cementing of the final production casing string in accordance with the well design approximately 20 hours prior to the incident. The cement slurry design was consistent with that utilized in other similar applications.
-- In accordance with accepted industry practice approved by our customers, tests demonstrating the integrity of the production casing string were completed.
-- At the time of the incident, well operations had not yet reached the point requiring the placement of the final cement plug which would enable the planned temporary abandonment of the well, consistent with normal oilfield practice.
-- We are assisting with planning and engineering support for a wide range of options designed to secure the well, including a potential relief well.
Halliburton continues to assist in efforts to identify the factors that may have lead up to the disaster, but it is premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues.
Halliburton originated oilfield cementing and leads the world in effective, efficient delivery of zonal isolation and engineering for the life of the well, conducting thousands of successful well cementing jobs each year. The company views safety as critical to its success and is committed to continuously improve performance.

 ====
 http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/44349

By: Scarecrow Friday April 30, 2010 1:53 pm

What More Can Halliburton Tell Us About the Horizon Oil Blowout and Its Risks?

A publicly available Halliburton PowerPoint presentation from last November might tell us a lot about what could have caused the oil blowout, fire and massive oil gushing at the Horizon rig.
Suppose you’re that division of Halliburton that has the dangerous job of "cementing" the drilling hole and the gaps between the hole and pipe. You’ve done this lots of times in shallow water wells, but you’ve learned through previous experience in deep water there’s a particularly difficult problem having to do with the presence of gas that has seeped to the ocean floor and been captured in essentially "frozen" crystallized formations.
The problem is that when you drill into these formations, and then try to inject cement into the hole/gaps to prevent leakage, the curing process for that creates heat. That heat can, if not controlled, cause the gas to escape the frozen crystals. If a lot of gas is released all at once, as could happen during the cement/curing process, it can cause a blowout where the cementing is occurring, or force gas and/or oil up the pipeline to the drilling rig on the surface. And the heat created by the process may be just enough to ignite the gas, causing the explosion and fire.
Did this happen at the Horizon rig? And if Halliburton already knew about this problem months (years) ago, and knew the risks it might create, why are we just now learning about this?
From Halliburton’s presentation (large pdf), page 10, last November (my bold):

Challenges
• Shallow water flow may occur during or after cement job
• Under water blow out has happened
• Gas flow may occur after a cement job in deepwater environments that contain major hydrate zones.
• Destabilization of hydrates after the cement job is confirmed by downhole cameras.
• The gas flow could slow down in hours to days if the de- stabilization is not severe.
• However, the consequences could be more severe in worse cases.

Page 13 lists the design objectives but then concedes they can’t all be met at once:

Deepwater Well Objectives
• Cement slurry should be placed in the entire annulus with no losses
• Temperature increase during slurry hydration should not destabilize hydrates
• There should be no influx of shallow water or gas into the annulus
• The cement slurry should develop strength in the shortest time after placement
Conditions in deepwater wells are not
conducive to achieving all of these
objectives simultaneously

The presentation goes on to explain various options for dealing with the risks and assess the relative merits and costs. What’s interesting is that Halliburton appears to have been working at the edge of the technology and was not certain what would happen. Most experience was in shallower waters and no one was certain what would happen in deep waters. It conducted tests, but it’s not clear how complete or realistic those tests were or how costs factored into the choice of techniques. From page 23:

Destabilization of hydrates during cementing and production in deepwater environments is a challenge to the safety and economics

I think we’re about to learn a lot more about how cement cures and interacts with gas-locked crystaline formations in deep water drilling.
h/t to Cynthia Kouril who seems to know about how cement cures underwater — tunnels into New York — and found the presentation.

======

Doctors that don't really listen to patients reporting symptoms

 This is a response to "In reporting symptoms, do patients know best?", a piece in the New York Times April 13, 2010.

Note: Of course, I don't even discuss the fact that "symptoms", as opposed to "signs" are by definition the subjective experiences of the patients, regardless what factual or biomedical basis they have. 

My comments

The two most egregious incidents I can recall were these. (1)  my wife and I,  after several years of being very healthy, got Swine Flu shots in 1976.   We both got violently ill, but when we reported this to the doctor, his reply was "That's never been reported as an effect, it must be a coincidence."   We asked, then, was he going to report our case?  No, of course not, because... it's not a reported effect.  

Once, my wife, a field biologist and excellent observer, went to see the doctor of the day at our health system, and reported that "this is what I experience..." and described her symptoms.  The doctor's dismissive response was "No you don't."

That said, and anecdotes aside,  solid data show that doctors report an abysmally low fraction of diseases they are required by law to report,  so it's not too surprising that they report few of ones they are not required to report.

The reasons, as described in so many posts are many, ranging from abusive arrogance to lack of motivation to a rational decision not  to do something that detracts from time with the next patient,   etc.   Some are good reasons, some not so good.

The kernel of truth that matters is that doctors in the US "health" system, by and large,  are simply not a good detection mechanism for mindful detection and reporting of issues that seem minor locally, but statistically, in an broad overview,  have serious public health consequences.  It's not one's "fault", it's how that "system" functions, and will continue to function.

Drug companies have little motivation to encourage a change in the system.   Hospitals are not motivated to detect downstream problems in patients that have been treated and released.

All of this presents a very serious risk, not only to individual patients, but to the length of time it takes "Homeland Security" to detect a silent attack with biomedical consequences.     While DHS is spending billions of dollars, literally, to create high-tech biosensors to put on rooftops in all major cities,   they are spending, um,  zero? dollars on figuring out how to simply ASK people to report unexpected conditions into some national database, bypassing hospitals, doctors, etc., and figuring out how to make sense of the result flood of noisy data, including those who intentionally try to "game the system" or use it to create its own panic.

Still,  if you want to know what safety issues are with doctors in hospitals,  it would make sense to simply ask the nurses.   You think they don't know?

Similarly,  if you really want to know that the actual side-effects are of medications and procedures,  ask the patients.    Individual anecdotes will appear as variable as UFO reports, but collectively,  patterns will emerge to solid statistical analysis that will find problems long, long before they are found by our current "don't ask, don't tell" patient safety "system".

Stanley Fish (NYT) raises work by Jürgen Habermas on religion and science

My response:


A basic principle of scientific cosmology is that "we are not special." In other words, Earth is not at the center of the universe, man (or woman) is not the greatest creation of God (er ... of nature), etc.

While the first premise, about Earth's location, has achieved wide acceptance, the second premise has lagged behind, even in the most scientific of circles.

I perceive in the justifiable rational reflexive rejection of "religion" and of an infinite, omnipotent God a tad too much of convenient and unjustified rejection as well of a much more finite and not necessarily powerful or wise level of consciousness and life above that of individual human beings. This must be addressed and fixed if rationality is to achieve its potential.

The arguments against doing so strike me more as "we wouldn't give those idiots an inch of pleasure or encouragement" than anything else. By basic scientific cosmology, the assumption must be that there ARE life forms "higher" (in any and every sense) than humans and humanity, and the burden of proof on anyone who wishes to assert, instead, that "Humans are the greatest accepted creation of ... er... humans."

This subject is timely, because for the first time there is a growing and incontrovertible evidence that humans are not the fragmented, discrete, separated pieces our rationality and medicine and justice systems have assumed, rising above the unmentionable and inconvenient "body" as well as the body of the unclean "others", but that we are instead connected in powerful ways to each other's moods, health, and mental models, among other things.

This would, by a purely rational science, call into question our definitions of "life" and "beings" and consider such entities as "corporations" or "cultures" as potentially living beings of their own, were it not for a huge but mostly invisible bias against acceptance of their being "higher" forms that we are embedded within. The resistance strikes me as irrational but similar to the resistance at Pasteur's time to believing that our "body" had within it millions of "other organisms" that were not "us". it challenges our implicit world view of being unitary, self-contained, self-sufficient, and "whole".

Now we find instead, whether in social intelligence or behavior of bacteria, that group cohesive behavior is the norm, that human "decisions" and "actions" are almost entirely predictable based on the social context in which they are made, etc. We are way, WAY more akin to "slime mold" than billiard balls in that regard. Inconveniently akin. Emotionally frighteningly akin. Unacceptably akin.

Unacceptably to what? To the egoistic conceit that humans are the greatest life form that exists in this immediate location in space and time. That, even though, our cells are alive and happy (I presume) to find their life within and amid a much larger life form (namely US), that SURELY symmetry is broken here, at this apex of existence, and we are not, in turn, small parts of a much larger life form, such as Gaia, or a corporation, or a culture.

Yet, if you look in any biology textbook, a corporation or culture satisfies every condition ascribed to something that is "alive."

This, to me is the frontier, the unspeakable horror that rational scientists must face, that, despite our best efforts, white males are not the supreme beings of the universe.

Forget carrying that principle forward additional scales in space and time, for now, and just let's all focus on this stage. IS a corporation "alive" and "conscious"? IS a culture, or a, gasp, "religion" "alive" and "conscious", in the same sense (but not necessarily the same way) that humans are conscious at a level above and beyond yet encompassing the lives of their constituent cells. ?

Why is THAT not the core questions of the search for life in the universe? This is my challenge to Science, to explain why this is not more central to good scientific research.

Or is it pure ego, and envy, and anxiety that religions might, in fact, despite having the details wrong, have the big picture right?

If rational scientists were to discover that each galaxy in the universe was, in fact "alive" and "conscious",   would they be ecstatic or somehow saddened by the news?

And, to be fair,  would the average religious person be in new awe at the scope of life and the universe, or would they also be saddened by the news, and possible explanation of the phenomena that their collective social intelligence had dimly perceived and attempted to give shape and form to?

Isn't that interesting?   Perhaps Science and Religion have more in common than either side of the family feud would care to admit, lest they make up and join hands in exploring the universe that is, not the one that they wish would be.

Comment on "Where do atheists come from?" in New Scientist

For Understanding, Look At Belief Dynamics

Tue Mar 16 10:16:45 GMT 2010 by Wade Schuette
http://newbricks.blogspot.com

"All models are wrong, but some models are useful." (George Box, statistician).

In assessing belief systems I suspect it would be useful to look less at what belief system a person holds and more at how that belief system behaves when presented with dissonant or contrary evidence.

If everyone could stop mud-slinging between "religion" and "science" for a moment, and look at the camps "mind is closed to contrary data" and "mind is open to contrary data" I think we'd find much more common ground and the social value sought in the term "logical" or "sensible" or "rational" or "defensible" thinking.

Also, I think that the "open mind" and "closed mind" categories are not the sole rights of any given camp. We have only to look at the history of "paradigm shifts" and the huge battles over "plate tectonics" or "jumping genes" or "epigenetic inheritance" to see that there are a great many "scientists" who are "closed minded".

The work of Professor Karl Weick and others in "mindfulness" and the whole field of safety engineering has a vast literature on how hard it is for some people to hear contrary data or give it a "fair hearing". Pilots discount copilot's dissenting view on clearnaces, surgeons discount nurses dissenting view on which kidney we're removing today, governmental and corporate leaders discount pretty much everything besides their own pet mental models.

One stable test in psychology, the "Wisconsin Card Sorting" test, measures how well people, once they have learned a set of rules, can adjust to changed circumstances and different rules.

Having studied both religion and science for the last 4 decades, I am astounded how tightly scientists cling to arbitrary oversimplification guidelines, such as "if you can't express it in mathematics it isn't real." Solid qualitative reasoning until the development of powerful computer modeling seems to have been left to the theologians and social scientists who deal with far more complex systems than the so called "hard sciences" and don't have the joy of reducing complexity to things that can be easily measured or disconnected from context non-destructively.

That said, beliefs and perceptions and even "biological health" are increasingly understood to be a function not just of "a person" but also of their living social context of other people. The edges of this "person" abstraction are not nearly as solid and clean as the classic machine-based scientific model posited. (or should I say, closed-mindedly assumed as so obvious that anyone not demented could see it.)

Does a belief system have room for "uncertainty?" Can a person, or manager, or political leader say "I just don't know" or are there huge social forces that reinforce training to pretend they do?

Science and religion each have their share of closed-minded bigots of particular mental models. THAT is our common enemy, not "science" and not "religion".

Social media and implications for work and education

 The millenial generation (Generation Y / "digital natives")  has arrived, with their tools,  and this has profound implications for education and the nature of the workplace.

Introduction:

Goleman and others have written about "social intelligence" or "group intelligence." [cite]   I want to look at a single more directly observable impact of this infrastructure on the nature of "one's own work" or what it means to be "a worker."      That then has implications for how we should be socializing, training, and educating these people.



The new generation of people and their tools

Wikipedia:

Characteristics of the generation vary by region, depending on social and economic conditions. However, it is generally marked by an increased use and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies. 

 With them they bring "social media" -- bi-directional web-2 initially, such as Facebook (tm),  then PDA/"cell-phone" enabled technologies = Twitter (tw),  "texting",  real-time clients to web-2 applications (google maps, web log posts from a phone, etc.)

The trend is clear, and huge:   faster communication (measured in seconds or less),  more reliable infrastructure, more widely-deployed access ("wi-fi hot-spots"),  higher bandwidth (youTube(tm) video or small-screen television live),   far wider active user-base and user-literacy [close to 100% of this generation, cite Pew...], and a greater willingness to be a social-being, with documents, mail, photos, preferences, and details of one's life immediately visible and searchable over the web by anyone from anywhere.

Furthermore, the latest trend [cite?] is to "always-on" connection,  where people simply live with their communications device 24/7,  and may exchange several or even hundreds of messages per hour, often multiplexing and being actively involved in multiple simultaneous conversations in different compartmented windows.

This has profound implications for education and the nature of the workplace.

Goleman and others have written about "social intelligence" or "group intelligence."   I want to look at a single more directly observable impact of this infrastructure on the nature of "one's own work" or what it means to be "a worker."      That then has implications for how we should be socializing, training, and educating these people.


Pair-programming in computing

[ details about the nature and amazing effectiveness of pair-programming, personal experiences.  cites]


Safety, reliability, quality, and economics of pair-programming

[ huge benefit, cites]


Theoretical basis for this situation

[ literature on team-based decision models;   aperture-synthesis in astronomy, etc.]



The big question - chair-turning consultation

On the one hand, people can in many settings, from universities to hospitals to most service businesses,  be always-connected to each other. Such connections provide a way for real-time, very short-term, immediate collaboration, equivalent to spinning in one's chair and asking one's office mate a question.

 On the other hand, the quantity of information in any field is increasing faster than any human can keep up with, as well as changing and being updated too rapidly to track.    There is no way to know everything, or even to be sure anything you "know" is still the current best-wisdom or current policy.  We can be certain of only one thing -- our mental picture of things, in particular and general,  has gaps, and has out-dated fragments that we haven't yet realized are outdated.

Many studies [ critical cites ] show that consultation while making decisions may appear, in the very short run to slow things down, but in terms of its astounding impact on the quality of the decisions, in the medium to long term dramatically speeds things up by reducing or eliminating rework caused by bad mental models, bad data, "guessing", or a "good-enough" attitude that would not be supportable if working along side a second person who was watching.

All of this says that people SHOULD be working this way, openly, in constant contact and short-term consultation about anything they are uncertain about, and even (or especially) things they feel certain about.
As various wags including Donald Rumsfield have pointed out, what causes our defeats is "the things we don't know that we don't know, or things we know that aren't so."

I had the experience of managing a team of sophisticated programmers working on a mission-critical, life-safety medical system.    It was still a challenge to get people to work with each other and to immediately seek consultation when they weren't sure about something, rather than "punting" or "guessing" or "covering up" the weak spots in their own work.

The reason for this was clear -- these people had been raised in an educational system that stressed that they should be "doing their own work."       Despite clueless instructors assigning "group work" to equally clueless students, who hated it,   when it got down to real grades,  what mattered was "your own work."  On an exam that really mattered,  you were rewarded for "doing your own work" and failed in disgrace if you "cheated" by consulting with others about something you were unsure of.

Then, thrown into the workplace,  after a decade or two of such competitive, fragmenting, corrosive, education, these people have trouble "working as a team" and seeking help when they need it, and not covering up in shame anything they are not certain about, so they "look better."

College and university faculty are given 6 years to achieve tenure, during which time the total emphasis is on doing their own work.   Then,   they are supposed to help teach ways to deal with "interdisciplinary teams."

The new models of work and education

A worker (and a person) should be seen as someone who is plugged into "the cloud",  who has the experience, attitudes, and technological savvy and tools to be able to ask for and get advice about anything in a few seconds, or look up and evaluate web-based data about facts, policies, or status of projects in a few moments with sufficient ease that they do it when they should with no big deal about it.

When a worker, or programmer, or analyst, or nurse, or doctor, or nurses-aide runs into a situation they are unsure about, or feel they should consult on, it should be fast and easy for them to do so, it should be habitual for them to do so, and they should be encouraged to do so and rewarded to do so, in public.

It should be like washing hands -- you should be seen by the patient doing it, because it's the right thing to do. It should not be something done secretly, furtively, with some guilt or shame in the back room -- or worse, not done when it should have been because there was no standard way to do so, or because someone was watching.

This is a complete reversal of our culture and educational standards.

It is also a trend that appears, to me, to be unstoppable.   There is little question that decisions made by constant consultation are better, safer, more-reliable and more cost-effective than other decisions.  There are far fewer disasters caused by ignorance or isolated islands of mis-information.

Those who do so will have better results, better bottom lines, etc. than those who don't -- once we are past the white-water turbulence of work and educational infrastructures that punish people for acting this way.

Our educational experience, by this model and in this light, should be more one of socialization to work this way, and getting used to the tools and practices of instant consulting,  evaluating and resolving conflicting viewpoints and data obtained over the web,  etc.

Our exams should be much harder, to the point of realistic, in terms of the types of problems asked and the time-frame in which an answer is expected -- but should be open-book, open-notes, open cell-phone, open-pda,  with unlimited options of calling friends or experts for advice.

What matters that the individual student be able to do is to swim in that ocean easily.  It does not matter that they be a storehouse of facts,  because facts become quickly stale.   Things they use a lot will become familiar, and things they never use will have no time wasted on them.

The concept of "mentoring" or "parenting" or what a college-degree would focus more on pair-wise traveling into that ocean and helping the student become familiar with what to do and how to do it to become a functioning and valued member of "the cloud", both giving help and getting it on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis.

Such "cloud-enabled" people, who knew how to know their own limits, would be vastly more employable and re-employable in different fields as times changed, because their skill-base is largely independent of the particular field they are working in.

Business owners and managers in general could care less whether an employee "does his own work" or consults with others or experts, so long as the work gets done, rapidly, correctly the first time.

Counter-forces

Aside from centuries of legacy momentum in the opposite direction, and all the problems of paradigm-shifts,  an additional roadblock is evident in the area of power and redistribution of power.

In classic organizations, knowledge is power. Compartmentalization and fragmentation and competition between workers to "look good" is the classic Machiavellian method of keeping the lords balancing each other out, so none of them ever gets strong enough to challenge the Prince or King.

The new cloud-enabled group consciousness and comparing notes will, in fact, allow workers the ability to "get organized", with all that means to those who abuse, exploit, or lead-with-falsehood.   Such groups may not even articulate or realize the reasons for their gut-based aversion to social media, but this doesn't stop the vengeance and venom with which this social-media is treated as a threat to their power.

Wrapped in language of "efficiency" and "not wasting company time with gossip" and "protecting corporate secrets",   many consulting companies specialize, today, in helping management shut down, snuff out, and totally suppress the use of social media in the workplace.

Such is typical of any paradigm shift.  This is by no means a "self-working" transition, and many small efforts to change will be shot down, shut down,  with intense punitive action far beyond what would seem called for.

Anyone "pushing" these new technologies and social media should be prepared to be treated as a heretic, trouble-maker, labor-organizer,  etc.,   and to trigger the most intense organizational "immune response" that can be delivered to cleanse the system of something it recognizes as "not me."

Employees who consult widely and regularly with a wide range of advisors will not just "think outside the box", they will simply have no "box" anymore.  The social media gets rid of the "box" entirely.

They will not only question legacy policies, and management decisions, they will show up with an armful of supporting documentation and, worse (to management) supporters.  

For this to work,  management has to transition as well to an open-style, where it is not THEIR job to "be right" but their job to "ask the right questions".  Literature abounds these days on such leadership styles. It should be used. [cites go here]

If the United States Army,  one of the most hierarchical and mission-oriented organizations in the world,  is going this direction,  there must be no problem in it interfering with accomplishing the mission -- in fact, it must be viewed as helping accomplish the mission.

And, in my opinion, it is invaluable at getting out of the mess we're in and the boxed-in legacy mis-thinking and wrong mental-models that hold us back.

Three white-papers I wrote are directly related to this topic:

Spectacular teams through active strength, not more SOP's   [ powerpoint ]

The Case of the Crash of Comair 5191 - Lexington Kentucky August 2006 [MS Word document]

Disaster Preparedness Tools for Public Health staff and Civilians  [ MS Word Document,  on use of social media for making dyadic-pairs for working in high-stress unstructured disaster situations.]

Wade

On resistance to "social media"

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/military-announces-new-social-media-policy/

February 26, 2010, 5:29 pm

Military Announces New Social Media Policy

By JAMES DAO

Many months behind schedule, the Department of Defense on Friday issued a new policy that, on the surface, seems likely to expand access to popular social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter by troops using military computers. ...

The development is considered a step forward by advocates of social networking in the military. Those advocates have complained for years that local commanders, sometimes for vague or arbitrary reasons, have shut down personal blogs or restricted access to social networking sites that an increasing number of troops use to maintain contact with friends and families. A growing number of deployed units have also begun using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other networking sites to share photographs, release official information and disseminate newsletters.

US army and social media

February 26, 2010, 5:29 pm

Military Announces New Social Media Policy

By JAMES DAO

Many months behind schedule, the Department of Defense on Friday issued a new policy that, on the surface, seems likely to expand access to popular social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter by troops using military computers.

The new policy, which can be found here, says that the default policy of the department will be to allow access to social networking sites from the military’s non-classified computer network, known by its acronym, NIPRNET (for Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network.)
...
A growing number of deployed units have also begun using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other networking sites to share photographs, release official information and disseminate newsletters.
...
“This directive recognizes the importance of balancing appropriate security measures while maximizing the capabilities afforded by 21st Century Internet tools,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III in a statement.
...
Lindy Kyzer, who advices the Army’s Chief of Public Affairs on social media issues, said that while the new policy does leave much discretion in the hands of local commanders, it also opens up access to social networking in several significant ways.
...

An interesting note, Price Floyd, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, broke the news of the policy announcement on his Twitter feed, not via the traditional route of a press release.

• Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

US Army and twitter

http://twitter.com/USArmy

Leadership in the US Army of the future - concepts

This is from: www.army.mil 

"The official home page of the US Army".

 

Dempsey talks TRADOC future, leader development at AUSA

Feb 25, 2010
By Carroll Kim (TRADOC Public Affairs)

Photo credit Sgt. Angelica Golindano


Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commanding general of Training and Doctrine Command, gives a speech during the Winter Symposium for the Association of the United States Army in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Feb. 25, 2010. The speech was on TRADOC's perspective on the Army's need to adapt and decentralize while retaining the fundamentals that have succeeded throughout the Army's history.

Related Links

• TRADOC on Twitter
• TRADOC on Facebook

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Feb. 25, 2010) -- Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, delivered remarks on leader and concept development during the Association of the United States Army Winter Symposium and Exposition here today.

Dempsey began by explaining the conditions of the battlefield and its ramifications on the force and leader development.

"If you think about what was going on ... in the late 19th century, that was an age of discovery and science and how systems fit together and the Industrial Age was affecting the social fabric and so forth," he said.

"Systems are interdependent. And in their interdependence, if you want to keep up with the systems, then you have to evolve at least as fast as the system. And if you want to get ahead of the system, you have to evolve at least twice as fast."

A way that TRADOC has been focusing on these concerns is through the Army Capstone Concept, published in December. The Capstone Concept addresses the conditions of the battlefield and how the Army is evolving to meet those demands through technology.

"It causes [leaders] to reconsider, rethink and challenge the assumptions upon which previous capstone concepts were made," he said. "Some of the assumptions we've made about technology have just not been realized because adversaries, or potential adversaries, understand what it takes to deliver those first."

Dempsey continued, "They've decentralized ... they use the network and they've proliferated the technology. They live among the population. Which means that you can't gain the kind of knowledge you think you can from a distance, and deal with it exclusively through precision."

In order to combat decentralization, the Army has also had to decentralize and provide more decision-making power into the lower ranks.

"We've done it remarkably well and for the most part, invisibly. There are implications to that decentralization. If you're on a path to build the network that affects echelons above [the brigade combat team], now you find yourself in a situation where what you really want is a network optimized at echelons below BCT."

However, decentralization has also been met with challenges, but Dempsey believes that systems have to be able to adapt to new audiences, situations and needs.

"Those kinds of challenges clearer to us today after the challenges of the past eight years, but it also means that though you should, in reaction to the changes in the world, decentralize, you also better recognize that at some point, you may have to have the ability to reaggregate those resources."

Dempsey also cited changes in leader development because of the different roles of Soldiers provided by full-spectrum operations.

"We've conceded that a leader must be grounded in not only tactics, techniques and procedures of force-on-force, but also in integrating his capabilities with other capabilities in a battle space that's increasingly crowded and increasingly transparent. So now we choose the term 'mission command' because we think it sends the right message on what we're about."

As decision-making abilities move down the ranks, Dempsey reinforced that junior leaders need to be empowered with orders that have a balance of guidance and room for the junior leader to critically think and apply their skills to develop the situation.

"We used to sit and think that the best information came from the top down, but this document implies that the best information comes from the bottom up. And if it does, you have to prepare young people to deliver it and you have to prepare them to prevail in it."

Dempsey assured a balance between preparing for future operations and maintaining a professional ethos will continue to be achieved through TRADOC schools.

"I'm worried about a drift in our fundamentals," he said. "We will not allow that to happen. So as we hurry helter-skelter we will never forget the fact that there are things that are fundamental to our profession."

Concluding his remarks, Dempsey took a look at the Army's role in national security in a quickly changing world.

"We've talked about an environment where competitiveness is the norm. We're in a competitive security environment. The dimension in which we have to prevail is the competitive learning environment because if we prevail here, we can make the changes and adaptations," he said.

On the Tea Party

Ann Arbor, MI

February 18th, 2010

6:38 am

So, the battle cry is "Anarchists, unite!" ?

A different framework is that the problem is not that coordinated groups of people exist, but that such groups as they grow and age tend to become depressingly blind, inefficient, arrogant, ineffective, amoral, immoral, self-serving, and corrupt.

If you view that as a fact of life, smaller is better, fine. Discard the car and we'll all walk.  If you view this as a design flaw, like a stuck gas pedal, and one that could be fixed, that changes everything.  Fix the car so we can all go much farther than we can walk.

Humans are individually not very reliable, but these days much is known about how to build highly reliable systems out of unreliable components.

We have very sophisticated theory and tools in "control system engineering" about "checks and balances", regulatory feedback-loops, stability, responsiveness, etc. See for example "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" by Franklin, 5th edition.   All kinds of cars, planes, and equipment is built using that stuff. It works.

"It has a demon, blow it up!" is a pretty primitive approach to problem solving. Why not use the technology we have to design and model large human organizations that might actually function correctly?

Or at least use it to simulate and model proposed changes and see whether, under broad assumptions, the changed model would perform any better than the current model.

The problem is almost certainly that it's not breaking on any given part, it's breaking "between the parts" on a system level. It's not the pieces that are wrong, but the way the pieces relate to each other that's broken.

It's like airplanes. A plane is a collection of parts, each one being too heavy to fly. The power of the plane is in how the parts work together, not in any one magic "flying" part that the others ride on.

It's not right to seek a leader who can fly, and it's not right to abandon the idea of large groups, corporations, governments, etc. in favor of us all learning how to jump higher as the best we'll ever do.

The structure CAN be made to fly.  We HAVE the tools to do that. Now is the wrong time to quit.

Govenment "auto-braking" - as rampant short-term greed prevails

February 17, 2010

New York Times

Excerpts from the article on the "gridlock" nature of the problem,   leaving out the part about debt.
The photo is from an amazing collection of photos of Detroit, on Flickr, by "Detroitderek Photography".

I've pondered how to teach "systems thinking" as a whole, but one specific example is brought to mind by the article below -- some very basic facts about flying a plane.

Most people seem to believe that if you want a plane to go "up",  you would pull back on the control yoke and point the plane "up".
That isn't actually true.

If you pull back on the controls,   it is true that for a very brief time, the plane climb a little by consuming forward speed (and slowing down).  BUT -- if you continue to hold the controls back, as the plane slows more and more,  it will start shuddering, and,having lost flying speed,  start falling to the ground. If you insist on pointing the plane up even more at that point, you will crash.  Period.

There is no free lunch.  If you want the plane to climb for real, consistently, over time, and stay up,  you need to use the engine via the throttle.  You need to provide power.   You don't need to raise the nose of the plane at all -- just add power and you will climb.

There are amazing parallels in thinking here in politicians who discovered that plundering our nation's hard-won resources and spending them and calling the rise in "GDP" income, things appeared to be going "up".    Right now, we're at the "shuddering" and "losing flying speed" stage.

If short-term greed isn't replaced by hard work, as with the airplane,  there is only one foreseeable outcome.

People need to get their noses out of the air, individually and collectively. "Me first, Me now, only Me" is not a survivable strategy, or national policy, or cultural norm we should even tolerate, let alone praise when it has a short-term benefit at an even larger long-term cost.

This is a 1st grader type of perceptual error,  akin to a dog with his leash around a tree who can't reach his food dish and isn't willing to walk away from the food back to get unwrapped around the tree.   Pulling harder and harder is not the right answer.

The question is how to teach that perception, to about 6 billion people,  in under two years.   Our engine is the collection of virtues we once respected:   honesty, hard work, integrity, compassion, perseverance, hope.  They made the country great, and abandoning them is making the country sink.      In the very short run, turning away from them has a short-term visible gain,   but there is always a longer-term, significantly larger loss that comes with it.

So, the more we "win" the "behinder we get."   There is no sequence of such short-term gains that will get us to prosperity and economic health.    We need to walk AWAY from the food of short-term gain, back to the tree and get our leash unstuck, and recover "flying speed" before the wings stop doing their magical thing of producing lift and simply turn into heavy weights.

A plane has been described as a collection of parts, any one of which, by itself, would simply fall out of the sky.   This is true for the nation as well.   It doesn't fly because this part is "better than" that part -- it flies because the parts WORK TOGETHER.      If you remove the "working together" part, all you have left is a bunch of rocks in the sky, that will, duh,  fall down.

Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis

By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise...


Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, ...

Mr. Bayh, the centrist Democrat from Indiana, lodged his complaint about excessive partisanship and Congressional gridlock on Monday by way of explaining his decision not to seek re-election.

“I used to think it would take a global financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, who was a fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republican leaders and a witness to past bipartisan budget summits. “These days I wonder if this country is even governable.”

Sensing political advantage, Republicans are resisting President Obama’s call for a bipartisan commission ...

“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson said.... “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”

Elected Republicans, however, are under intense pressure from their party’s conservative base to oppose any tax increases — a line in the sand that dims any prospects for bipartisan cooperation....


But anger about big deficits has stoked the populism roiling politics, and Republicans as well as some conservative Democrats want to cut spending right now as a way of addressing perceptions among voters that government has gotten too big, too intrusive and too profligate.

Many analysts say the president and Congress could send a strong signal to global markets by agreeing this year to a package of both long-term tax increases and spending reductions...

As debt rises, so do interest costs; by 2014, at a projected $516 billion, they will exceed the budget for annual appropriations for domestic programs. The government will be competing with the private sector for credit, forcing interest rates higher and imperiling future prosperity.

Lesser financial and fiscal crises have brought the two parties together to compromise on tough choices about taxes and spending.  .. Those bipartisan deals were done during times of divided government, when one party had the White House and the other controlled at least one chamber of Congress, giving each side some governing responsibility to find solutions. Now, with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the parties have less incentive to work together.

Republicans today see opposition as a way back to power in November, and their party is more ideologically antitax than in the past, especially now that it is courting the Tea Party movement. Conservative activists so oppose compromise of any sort that several lawmakers have drawn primary challengers for working with Democrats.

Because the worst of the fiscal problem remains years away and therefore somewhat hypothetical to most people, there is also not the same incentive to act immediately that drove, for example, the 1983 deal, when Social Security was facing an imminent crisis.

More than Mr. Obama could have imagined, the situation now tests his promise to break Washington’s gridlock and to lead in making “the hard choices.”

Yet politicians’ failure to reduce deficits has long reflected voters’ opposition to the necessary steps.

Comment on Kristoff - physiology of politics (NY Times 2-14-2010)

Your article says "“What research like ours may help with is in figuring out how to construct an argument in a way that is going to meaningfully connect with those on the other side,” Dr. Smith said."

I think you've fallen into the trap of thinking that logical arguments are what shape perceptions, instead of vice-versa. That may be somewhat true for academics, but I don't think it's true for most people, who are more in the "Some things you have to believe to see" camp.

Don't fall into the psychological trap of thinking that most people are like the people you hang around with. They're not. They might as well be a different species.  The type of logical discussion taught in the academy is not how those other people operate.  In fact, to them logic is unpleasant and irrelevant.  That is not going to change before the next election, or go away because it means your whole campaign strategy needs to be rethought from the ground up.

The rest of the USA population does not admire academics and wish they had PhDs too.  Get past that error in the model.  What your eyes and the daily news tells you is, in fact true - There is NOT a shared value among the general population that education and logic are either important or desired traits. This is hard to accept for academics who are immersed in a world in which those are universal values.

Be pragmatic. Accept empirical data. Count the votes.  A campaign based on "facts" and "reasoning" is doomed to fail before it begins.  If you can't accept that, let someone else drive.

Someone said once "Man is not a rational animal - he is a rationalizing animal." This is worth some serious pondering.

Put another way -- as you probably have observed but simply cannot accept, there is NO ordering of the "dots" (facts) that will be "connected" in their brains to make a persuasive, perception-altering "case" or "argument." In fact, there is macho pride in who can dismiss the largest fact and keep on trucking. It is not about facts, and it can NEVER be won on the basis of facts and logical arguments.

I think what is at work is more of a flock or swarm peripheral vision effect, where they don't trust their own eyes or judgment, but they DO subliminally perceive and implicitly trust which way the herd or swarm is apparently moving. What counts is "impressions" of attitudes, from as many apparently different sides at once, over and over and over.

No one could make a logical argument that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, and yet over half the American populace believed that (or perceived that to be what everyone thought) on the day we attacked. In this game, however much stress it causes academics, facts are simply irrelevant. Sheer volume of impressions of what "everyone thinks" are all that matter.

Of course, to round that out, a tacit understanding that it is "bad" or traitorous or antisocial to even consider or look at any input from the "other side" helps keep the percentage of supportive impressions high enough to keep the lock in place.

So, in that model of "how things work", volume matters -- volume in terms of number of impressions, and volume in terms of decibels. Facts have negative value. Appeal to facts gets the mental door slammed with disgust at "damn elites trying to make me feel stupid."

It's a sad and depression model, but I submit to those who do work on empirical facts that this model is a pretty good fit for what we see going on around us. I recommend reading "Thank you for smoking" to get a short course in how such flim-flam is applied in practice, since the readership of this column surely reads for information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You_for_Smoking_(novel)

The sober and sad fact is that there are apparently more US voters who watch TV than read (or think) as a basis for their opinions. And at this point they are bonding over shared disdain for elites (aka education, logic, facts, algebra, calculus, big words, complex ideas, etc.)

Back to the point. There is NO set of facts that will crack that lock on their vote. Abandon that approach. Follow the Republican lead and treat American voters as mindless flock animals who sustain on non-verbal peripheral vision clues about where everyone else is and is going.

Sigh.

What we all got wrong

What We All Got Wrong

Sat Feb 13 03:04:51 GMT 2010 by Wade Schuette
Comments on "Survival of the fittest theory", New Scientist, 6 Feb 2010 p28

Moving to Darwin was a hard paradigm shift, and now moving beyond Darwin will similarly be attacked and wrongly stereotyped as regression, and lumped as fanaticism and enemy action. It is as if the US Congress's protocol ("never yield on anything") is controlling our models instead of rational and civil discussion.

What I see is brash decrees of what is "obvious" on both sides, by people who can't even analyze or predict the simplest multi-level feedback loop.

There are battles between "the genes do it" or "the animals do it" or "the species do it" and very little interest in the far more likely reality -- they all do it, and simultaneously, bidirectionally, filled with feedback loops on multiple scales of time and space.

"Science" has great power for open-loop systems and equations, but almost no tools or reliable insights on complex closed-loop systems.

What is clear is that humans are somewhere in the middle of a hierarchy of living control systems where cells have some life of their own, organs have some life of their own, individual humans have some life of their own, aggregate human clusters such as corporations and nations and cultures have some life of their own, etc. It's a mess computationally and totally unjustifiable to "simplify" it by tossing out that aspect of it.


[ Added note by author:   As we were taught at Johns Hopkins, it is becoming clear that the impact of "psychosocial" factors on what has classically been called "biomedical health" is at least as large, if not larger, than "biological" factors.  As we open our eyes to such pathways, they are starting to show up everywhere. How can anyone say that policy decisions at the national level about health care funding do not, ultimately, alter the "fitness" landscape and inflluence, perhaps heavily, who lives, who dies, and who has children?

Or take the state of the "national economy" and "the stock market", which are aggregate entities with a very powerful influence on the odds that human cells will be exposed to "unusual" levels of alcohol these days, let alone the immune-suppressing impact of "depression" on multiple spatial scales. It's all tangled together, bidirectionally.  It goes upwards as well:  a single fatigued, depressed , and drunk person, attempting to do something stupid on an airplane, can change the entire behavior of an entire country. These are very real intra-life-form interactions that cross many orders of magnitudes in scale.  You can't ignore them because of some legacy political decision about what constitutes "alive" or "life". ]

On top of that, the increasingly dominant organized life-form on the planet, aka "corporations", can not only replicate and divide and reproduce, they can also "merge".

And, to boot, they can modify their internal operations and structure, in close to real-time, based not just on the past, but on observations about the present and even predictions of future conditions.

If you believe, as I do, in some kind of hierarchical, scale-invariant symmetry and invariance of the mathematics of key control-loops, the implication is clear -- EVERY level of life has some capacity to adapt its own internal structure and what it propagates based on current events, not just past discrete, acute "reproductive" events.

Given the empirical behavior of the parts of the world we can see around us every day, and read about in the paper, and our almost total inability to model complex feedback systems, I can't see any "scientific" justification for boldly ruling out such aspects of life based on their political and religious ramifications.

Life appears to be self-catalyzing, and there is as much downward pressure on the direction of the planet from meta-organisms (e.g. corporations, religions, terrorists) as there is upwards pressure from genetics and emergence.

In the US a corporation has announced plans, on top of it's constitutional right of free speech, to run for office of the President.

Seems like the definition of "alive" needs some tweaking, even before the computer network sits up and asks for the vote as well.

And, if downward pressure on evolution, to force it in certain directions, is an aspect of the nature of LIFE (and it is in the only case we know about), then, in the limit, regardless how unpopular, it is not credible to discount all reports, however distorted, of "direction" on evolution around us, and, "from above."

Take where we are and add a billion years.

It seems the question shouldn't be is there intervention in evolution from "above", but what the nature of that intervention, today, is.

Maybe I've missed something in the last few decades, but I'm unaware that science has calibrated and reliable equipment to measure even, say, CIA intervention in country X, let alone much larger- scale, longer-term and perhaps less-obvious tilts to the evolutionary playing field.

There is a way out

The issues we are calling "problems" seem to all be "symptoms" of one deeper actual problem, and if we don't fix that, the symptoms will simply, like whack-a-mole, emerge somewhere else.

Of course, nobody wants to fix it, and besides they argue, its hard to fix -- as if fixing the rest of the mess we're all in is easy or cheap.

The "it" I'm referring to is the core of civilized behavior, a culture that encourages, if not demands, a few basic virtues: honesty, respect, compassion, integrity, and humility.

Once, I thought pretty much all religions agreed on those. "Science", in a massive disservice to mankind, seems to have undermined religion but not replaced the parts required for a civilization to continue to operate with something at least as good. We now have a high-tech, zero-wisdom society. Great.

Again, please dear reader, ignore the "hard" part and ponder what would happen if these were repaired.

Example - the "mortgage meltdown" would not have occurred, not due to astounding oversight by some Czar, but because average people would have consulted each other before biting at sucker bait. Even those who bit the bait could have decided to pool forces and move in together and share the rent or mortgage, instead of sinking into catastrophe separately.

Mass behavior can be changed -- ask the TV, tobacco or alcohol advertising gurus -- it's what they do.

The point is it simply doesn't work to make a world where everyone is out for maximum greed, selfishness, and rudeness and then we try to constrain that explosion with endless leaky regulations and regulators.

It is NOT a given that "people are just like that." We make them like that.

We can change what we make each other. There is no other way out, and we will keep on being forced to confront this inconvenient issue until we finally yield and deal with it.