sailboats

There are other ways to become smart, as a society, than having really smart individuals.   In fact, having a lot of smart people seems to have been making us, taken together as a society, dumb and dumber lately.

Tom Friedman in the NYTimes today bemoans overuse of texting and the dumbing down of students in the US.     I disagreed in a comment that may be posted later today.

Let me try to rephrase this again.

It's really important.

We have it all wrong. We're barking up the wrong tree. We're in the wrong ballpark.

We have been acting as if the only way out of the social mess we've gotten ourselves into is to create more and better "smart people."

So, based on that unexamined assumption,  we've been looking at our "educational system" and trying to measure "smartness" of our students, and trying to evaluate teachers based on how "smart" the students are.

But, if we simply read the papers, or look out the window, we realize that there are factors in society that seem to completely neutralize, negate, and otherwise remove the value of smart people.   As a society, we are still recovering from prior dumb things we have done, and are, in all likelihood,  continuing to do things that, in retrospect,  even we will agree were truly dumb.  I won't even name any, although violation of the Sicilian's advice in "The Princess Bride" does come to mind. ("Never get involved in a land war in Asia.")

More recently, spending a billion dollars on some magical Electronic Health Record thingie seems to be the disaster de jour that the fish are biting at and pouring our national treasure into, even though the track record of such projects is below dismal.  It may take on the scale of the magic self-paying-mortgage wealth-from-thin-air kool-aid we're still recovering from.
  
What do these grand schemes and subsequent wake up calls have in common?  We are failing to come to grips with the fact that we're doing something in general that's very wrong. We keep blaming the specific case (Thank you John Gall, for this insight), and failing to realize that this is a much more general problem that we keep running into, and one that has not been solved, so we are just about to run headlong into it AGAIN.

OK. So what are the take-away lessons here?

First,  about 100% of what we are asking our "educational system" do to is irrelevant.  We already have lots of smart people.   We don't even have jobs for the smart people we already have.   We have millions of smart people we've put out to pasture ("retired") that we're not calling upon to help out. That's what is NOT helpful.   We can stop looking up that tree for the "magic bullet".

Second,  what we DO need to do is to utilize the smart people we already have, so that, taken as a whole,  we, our society, stops making any MORE decisions that,  in retrospect, will appear even to us to have been so stupid we'll ask "How could we have been so stupid?".

To get to that noble objective,  I suppose first of all we need to realize the lesson that the cartoon character Dennis the Menace asked aloud one day, while being punished by "sitting in the corner".  He asked "How come dumb stuff looks so smart when you're doing it?"

Dennis is right, of course.  Stuff looks DIFFERENT from up close, and from far away.  Stuff looks DIFFERENT from right now and from later.   Worse,  this difference, we keep hitting our heads on and then promptly forgetting,  is the kind that hides the dumb parts from our eyes.

(Photo - "Marilyn Einstein" illusion, which changes depending how far back you stand from your screen,  See discussion of "hybrid images" if you think such things can't possibly exist!)

Garrison Keeler (Prairie Home Companion) told a joke one day about Sven and Ollie.  Sven comes by and Ollie's ears are bandaged.  He asks "What happened to you?"  Well,  Ollie says, "I was ironing and the phone rang, and I picked up the iron by mistake and held it to my ear."  "Oh. What happened to your OTHER ear then?"   "Ah... after I got hurt I tried to call the hospital. ...'

The point is,  "dumb and dumber" is defined by being unable to learn from experience, even vivid, first hand experience.

So,  rather than go off on a suggested solution to this situation that might turn people off, let me just try to wrap up what we might all agree on and see if in fact we agree.

1)   Dumb stuff often looks smart before we do it, at least to the people about to do the doing.
2)   There are other people around who could see how dumb it is, but they aren't included in the decision to go ahead and do the dumb thing.
3)   The way we normally interact and inter-connect and make decisions,  sometimes, yes, it is possible to "fool ALL the people",  so that EVERYONE is busy stampeding to do the wrong thing faster than everyone else.

I'll assert that these 3 points describe "A problem" that is more important to give a name to and provide research funding to than, say,  how to land on the moon or how to decode the XYZ3F doodad on some DNA strand.  It is MORE important to ask "How come our educating people in the past hasn't helped, even when we made really really really smart people?" before we waste a generation trying to dig out of our hole by generating even more of them, or yelling at each other because we're unable to generate more of them.

Take a breather, people.   It's not the components, the people, that are broken.  The people are fine.  It's the way we interconnect that's broken.

If we don't fix the interconnect, everything else we do in education is pointless.
If we DO fix the interconnect, we don't really need any more dollars or time spent on education.

And, more importantly:
Being able to transcend space and time with electronic networking may be the missing piece that allows us, finally, to get the strong muscles of "smartness" delivered, in real time, to the front lines where decisions are being made, in such a way as to give voice to the silent, secret dumbness of what we're about to do wrong NOW.

THAT kind of thing needs funding way, way more than almost everything else on the table.

Flying home and TSA today

Charles White put up on Facebook a link to a picture of a screened actor (one presumes) demonstrating what the new TSA airport security scanners might reveal.   The young lady (who we can confirm is female) is carrying a weapon or two.

In the hue and cry over this technology, I have to pause and reflect on what on Earth is going on here. Exactly what is the threat all this stuff is supposed to prevent or deter, and, how come the Israeli's don't use it, aren't having planes blown up,  and claim it's worthless?

The only reason I can see that terrorists or wannabe-terrorists attack airplanes,  now that the cockpits are sealed and they can't be used as guided-missiles,   is that they get a lot of press coverage -- way more than the 50,000 people who die each year of auto accidents, or the 5 million who die each year worldwide from smoking-related causes [World Health Organization statistics].

So, my humble proposal would be to nip these in the bud and simply have the FCC,which reports to the President,  issue a statement banning Fox News and other news channels from carrying any news,  MORE THAN ONCE, about attacks on airplanes.   This costs taxpayers way less than hundreds of quarter-million dollar scanners plus all the people to run them. It can be done in one afternoon. It doesn't even require "an act of Congress."  Obama picks up the phone, calls the FCC, and say "send this memo."   Life can go back to normal for the rest of us humans and business travelers.

Without the tremendous amplifying effect of Fox News echoing a crash over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over for years,   a plane crash and a few hundred people is no more exciting than the same number of people who die in hospitals from infections daily.   Yawn.  "What else is on another channel?"

Now, of course there is the issue of violation of sacred rights that make America great!

Two things on that.  First,   the TSA already said, go take your rights and stuff them where the sun don't shine, this is protecting America we're talking about.   So,  I guess, their opinion not mine, rights don't count.

Second,  I would suggest that, if rights DO have to be violated, that the so-called rights of pseudo-humans ( Fox News) should go on the chopping block BEFORE the actual rights of actual human beings (the rest of us.)  And before the rights of pseudo-humans (businesses) that actually hire real people to do real work, and want those people travel on airplanes to meet other people.

The only point of terrorism, by definition, is wide-spread fear, panic, and blowing a small event totally out of proportion.    Otherwise, it's just sabotage or vandalism.   In my mind, amplifying fear and panic is what Fox News OVER-reporting does in a big way, and the guy with bomb in his pants is small-change.

So,  in deference to the people's right to know -- let Fox News, and the others, break the news of any airplane explosions -- exactly ONCE.   After that,  people have been INFORMED,  there's no need to add panic with a gazillion replays.  And many reasons not to, if we don't want to be doing the hard part of terrorists for them,  getting them a billion dollars worth of free publicity for the price of a handgun.

AND,  we can free up airports so that human beings, and business, can go about their productive lives without playing peep-show cause no one ever looked at how illogical this whole thing is.

In the meantime, though, now that we, you know, HAVE all these pictures of naked potential terrorists, maybe those should be broadcast, live, over FOX web-TV, in real time,  so that everyone in America can help the TSA spotters look for dangerous thingies, and point at them with their mouse cursors and call attention to them to help the spotters out.    ... :)    You know ... to defray the costs of securing our borders.  And rights.  And values.  [ note to foreigners -- this paragraph is "satire".]

Seriously though ... there is an accident involving nuclear weapons every 6 months or so, by best estimates I've seen.    Here's a list of older ones.     Why is it that an attack on an airplane of several hundred people gets more press coverage than an oopise of almost detonating a nuclear "device" over South Carolina?   There are rational reasons why press coverage of nuclear accidents is kept to a tight minimum. I agree with those reasons.  I just think America's war against being led around by the nose by terrorizers  would be better served by having the same semi-blackout apply to aircraft accidents.

RWS

Building of true communities

The late M. Scott Peck and the FCE - Foundation for Community Encouragement (which has been resurrected!) have done some worthy thinking and experimentation along the lines of the nature of true community, and a formal facilitated 2-day process for getting a collection of people through the process of forming an actual community, in a very specific sense of that word.


I heartily recommend a read of a ten page document by Peck, chapter 3 from "A Different Drum", titled "The True Meaning of Community."   Even if you disagree with some of it, you will probably agree with much of it, and it forms a great basis for discussing the rest.


The Foundation for Community Encouragment describes itself on its website as follows:

We enable individuals, groups and organizations to identify and grapple with the issues that cause divisions between people. We encourage the members of the group to transcend the conflicts that may hamper progress toward accomplishing   the goals they are seeking to achieve.

In the twenty-five years since its inception, FCE has  actively built community between people from conflicting ethnic groups, religions and political beliefs in numerous national and international locations. From South Africa to Bosnia and beyond, FCE's Community Building workshops and Community Facilitation programs have helped individuals around the globe to experience learning and living the principles of community. Today, FCE continues to guide the world toward more effective communication and the possibility of peace.

The stages of community development which Peck describes in "A World Waiting to be Born" are described on this web page and I'll summarize that here as follows:

Stages of Community Building
Pseudocommunity
For many groups or organizations the most common initial stage, pseudocommunity, is the only one. It is a stage of pretense. The group pretends it already is a community, ... It is polite, inauthentic, boring, sterile, and unproductive.
Chaos
...the group members try to convert, heal, or fix each other or else argue for simplistic organizational norms. It is an irritable and irritating, thoughtless, rapid-fire, and often noisy win/lose type of process that gets nowhere.

Emptiness
...This is a stage of hard, hard work, a time when the members work to empty themselves of everything that stands between them and community. And that is a lot. Many of the things that must be relinquished or sacrificed with integrity are virtual human universals: prejudices, snap judgments, fixed expectations, the desire to convert, heal, or fix, the urge to win, the fear of looking like a fool, the need to control. Other things may be exquisitely personal: hidden griefs, hatreds, or terrors that must be confessed, made public, before the individual can be fully "present" to the group. It is a time of risk and courage, and while it often feels relieving, it also often feels like dying.

Community
At this point a member will speak of something particularly poignant and authentic. Instead of retreating from it, the group now sits in silence, absorbing it. Then a second member will quietly say something equally authentic. She may not even respond to the first member, but one does not get the feeling he has been ignored; rather, it feels as if the second member has gone up and laid herself on the altar alongside the first. The silence returns, and out of it, a third member will speak with eloquent appropriateness. Community has been born.

The shift into community is often quite sudden and dramatic. The change is palpable. A spirit of peace pervades the room. There is "more silence, yet more of worth gets said. It is like music. . ... now that it is a community it is ready to go to work-making decisions, planning, negotiating, and so on-often with phenomenal efficiency and effectiveness.” 
Excerpt from the book A World Waiting to be Born by Scott Peck (Bantam Books, New York, 1993)

 While Scott Peck offers a view that is sometimes scientific, and sometimes deeply mystical and Christian to this phenomenon,  and I share both those backgrounds,  I'd say that to me the change is akin to physical state changes such as the abrupt transition in resistance to flow of current as a material is cooled. 

Cooling a material reduces resistance to current flow, as there is less and less random disruption of the flow by heat, which manifests itself as random kinematic motion of atoms. As you keep lowering the temperature of a metal wire, say, at some point, often near "absolute zero", the resistance to current does not just lessen even more - it abruptly drops to zero.  The material has become a "super-conductor" and current flowing in it will not simply decay slowly -- it will not decay at all.  That isn't "magic" or "mysticism" -- it is a scientific property built into the foundations of the  physical laws of our universe. 

There are other similar physical processes that take effort to push up a type of hill, but that at some point suddenly cascade the rest of the way and latch into a self-sustaining different state.    The obvious example is fusion of matter -- where it takes huge pressure to force atoms, each of which is trying to sustain its own existence, to get crushed together so much that individual identity is suddenly abandoned and a collective identity as a new, higher-atomic-number stable "atom" is achieved.  There are all sorts of equations describing this in the field known as "quantum mechanics" but, having benefit of such courses, I'd say the metaphor of changing identity is decently close to give us reasonable insight into the concept.

Another similar catastrophic non-linear transition occurs when atoms of a ruby crystal are struck by light and forced into excited states.   Initially, these states are effectively unaware of and unmoved by each other, and what any given atom is doing might as well be done if it were on a desert island by itself.   But over time,  if radiated photons are kept trapped in this crystal between two mirrors, a sort of magical thing happens -- one that, if we hadn't proven it would seem most unlikely.    At one point the atoms all suddenly succeed in "entraining each other".   Instead of ten billion randomly radiating atoms,   we get one entity,  ten billion atoms in size,  radiating "coherent light".    The difference is that incoherent light may light a room but coherent light can cut through steel plate or light up a spot on the moon that's visible from Earth.      The "power" was always "in" the material, but a methodical process was required to bring about coherence in order to reveal it.

So,  what I see in Peck's description of the abrupt transition to "community",  especially since I've been through such a group transition once myself back in the 1960's,   seems to me and felt to me a similar sudden coherence,  latching, mutual-entraining state of thought that is, in a very real scientific, practical sense no longer contained WITHIN brains, but actually spans ACROSS brains.    In science as I understand it,  this is perfectly "scientific" and "possible" and doesn't require mystical invocations to justify or explain it.

Some literature search needs to be done and inserted right here regarding whether such collections of people in a common "community state" are, in fact,  off in zombie touchie-feelie land, or whether they are, in fact,  in an amazingly productive state with ability to focus on and resolve real world business problems.   From what I've glimpsed,  the latter is true, though I am unaware of any group that intentionally has commercialized this process as a part and parcel of improving the operation of corporations.

So, why not?

For one thing, there is a the deep-seated mistrust among business males of any kind of "touchy-feely" activity, as well as a large shared collective recollection of similar sounding activities they had ever explored once, and found to be fluff or ineffective, causing the entire area to be written off as irrelevant.

One problem is that the state takes two days, at best, to get to the first time.  Few businesses give their employees two days off to go to a retreat to do anything, let alone something that sounds so mystical. And even the "two day" timeframe is with people who WANT to do this on purpose, and who sign up for it voluntarily, and are led by a trained facilitator.   For anyone to do this with a group of executives who had been ordered to participate against their will would be, probably,  at best, unlikely.  And, there will undoubtedly be a number of fake and ill-trained facilitators around as well, since this is not a field that is regulated on a state level as a profession with a certification process.

Another problem is how,  once this state has ever been experienced,  to set a sort of GPS locator tag or group psychological bookmark that lets us get back to it without ANOTHER expensive two day process. 

So, it would be important to figure out how to do this on command,  to do a trick that someone like Anthony Robbins would describe as "state management."  He would undoubtedly focus on trying, once the state was achieved, to figure out exactly how it was tagged in our brains so that we could, at a later date,  reconstruct the state on command  and be back into it as if the group had never ended the meeting, disassembled, and left the room.    His books deal with techniques that many have found workable to, individually,  recapture certain success-helping states, so the ideas are somewhat applicable to forming a fast list of candidate ideas for doing this on a group level as well.

While these constructs may not be of much help, in the short run, in "Theory X" type organizations, they might be of a great deal of help in companies that embrace Theory Y type approaches to decision -making.   They might work better in that sense with not-for-profit companies with consensual management than with classically designed for-profit companies that explicitly reward and facilitate competitiveness into all internal behaviors.

It would seem then, if these were to work anywhere as facilitators of business success, that it would be in mission-inspired non-profits where the management and staff were all sufficiently committed to a common mission that they were willing to try to overcome competition's barriers to trusting each other, if it would help achieve the common mission.

Just imagine ....

If you had a 1 million GigaHertz supercomputer, could YOU make a show that people would pay $1 apiece to see?   Surely someone could.  Why do I ask?

Phaylen Fairchild blogged 11/18 on the "Facebooking of Second Life" and the past and future of virtual reality and Linden Labs.

I added a comment,  repeated below:

There are changes in software architecture that some new company will implement that may blast Second Life away. It’s sad that Linden Labs has turned it’s back on these.
One of those would be an operating system that attached the purchased CPU power to his avatar, not to a fixed piece of virtual land.
The immediate value of this would show up anytime you wanted to have a meeting or event. Right now, trying to put 100 people in a lecture hall results in huge lag, or complete failure. Under a mobile-CPU schema, the more people who showed up for an event, the more CPU power would be available for making the event even more spectacular.
Additional avatars would change from being liabilities to being resources.
That would make group activities unbounded upwards, instead of hitting the service ceiling where they are now. There could be events with 10000 participants. If everyone brought 1 GHz CPU spare power with them, imagine what you could synthesize in real time!
We haven’t even scratched the surface of where virtual reality could go. I think Linden Labs is displaying the behavior of the US Patent Office when they were about to close, because everything important “had already been invented.”

Rewriting the underlying operating system is a powerful paradigm.   I recall meeting with a principal of BAZIS, a company that wrote software for 2,500-bed hospitals in the Netherlands. This was in 1989 in San Francisco at the SCAMC conference.  They were delivering subsecond response time to 10,000 staff members, and running on a tiny machine equivalent to a MicroVAX -- the kind a secretary might have under the desk here for doing mail-merges.

How on earth did they do that, I asked.  Well, he confessed,  they had to rewrite the operating system, because VMS had become bloated and attempted to be all things to all people to the point where it didn't do anything very well at all any more.  (Shades of Windows....)

Similarly,  no one has tackled and solved the certainly solvable problem of how to make multiple CPU's into plug-and-play networks,  as my comment above describes, so that as more and more people show up,  the "system" has more and more power to work with and knows how to manage it on some emergent basis.

You could, in a place like Second Life,  invite a million people to an event, but each person has to come with 1 GHz of spare cpu power from their laptop,   as well as a $1 admission fee.   In return, they get a show only a supercomputer could deliver!   People would buy that.

In fact,  the model would be very addictive.   As people realized the power they wielded,they would ask all their Friends to come as well, and bring their friends, so as to have an even MORE spectacular event.    Instead of 100,000,000 people watching TV,   100,000,000 people would BECOME TV.

The financial possibility here is LARGER than that of professional football or soccer.  People ENJOY forming huge crowds with a common purpose.  People pay real dollars to have a chance to do so, a LOT of real dollars to attend a sports event these days.  But seating at real events is limited by the size and cost and huge lag time and investment required to build a "sports stadium".   At the same time, we read how a virtual nightclub sold yesterday for $535,000.  

These are, in terms of cash flow, JUST AS REAL AS BRICKS AND MORTAR, venture capitalists!  Listen up! You guys are all betting on the wrong horse.   Why not aim at having 1 billion people attend your next event? 

Just change the stupid operating system paradigm, dudes. This is perhaps equivalent to building a 40 story office building.  It is not trivial. but it is not rocket science either.  Call BAZIS in the Netherlands and ask them if their programming staff is busy next month if nothing else.
 

And the woman running the show would become very very rich. It's a sort of equivalent of the fable of "stone soup" or "nail soup".   It's more like a "pot luck dinner" where the guests bring the food and the organizer doesn't even have to own an oven or do any cooking (or dishes!). 

Alternatively,  and I point this comment to the US government,  what if some other country with computer savvy programmers, such as China,  figured out how to do this trick FIRST, and could call up and deploy a dynamically-synthesized supercomputer on demand to apply to specific problems?

Actually,  China is sitting on two trillion dollars of foreign reserve capital, wondering what to do with it.  My own non-humble suggestion to them is to invest in technologies that create more and more value as more and more human beings plug into the grid.  They don't need to be "efficient".    Only China these days (maybe Indonesia and India next?) when faced with "We need a dam across this river" still tends to think of solutions like "What if we had 10 million people each carry a bucket of rocks and dump them here?"   Maybe, for software,  solutions that start out inefficient at low values of "N" (number of nodes / agents) but then ramp up rapidly for high values of N are available that no body else in the world could even attempt. It's worth looking at a few minutes and pondering...  What can you do with 1.3 billion people that nobody else could even come close to that nobody else has ever even contemplated before, aside from just "playing the bell curve" and getting a top 1% of the population that's larger than everyone else's top 30%?

The two curves on the "Houston, we have a problem" graph I made could equally well describe those two algorithms.   One, popular in the USA and in short-sighted solution cultures,  rises rapidly to get the most "bang per buck" in the short term, but then runs out of steam. This is effectively what Linden Labs has done with Second Life.  They've run out of climb-power and given up growth.    The other longer-term solution does the flip-side trade off -- it starts out slowly, or even downwards in the typical J-shaped pattern of a long-term investment,  but then starts paying off in an ever increasing way, climbing up to cross the other peaked-out curve and then climbing unbounded to the sky.

I'm not wishing that a short-sighted dictatorial government should "win" here.   What I'm wishing is that somebody can be motivated to figure out what we can do with a planet of 6 to ten billion people that treats everyone of them as a resource, at least a high-quality vision-processing unit, (which by itself is superior in capacity to what the Pentagon pays a billion dollars for in terms of pattern recognition)  instead of as a drag on profits.   What bugs me the most is that the planet as a whole is sort of an analog to Linden Labs,  or the US Patent Office in 1844,  planning to shut down and close because everything important has been invented and all we can do now is cut costs and try to ride higher in the sinking lifeboat than the next dude,  or put on our running shoes so the other guy is the one caught by the bear chasing us first. ("I don't have to outrun the bear ....").

That's because, among other things, I don't fret so much about "competition" and who "wins", because the lifeboat we're all in is taking us all down with it. There is no "high point" in the boat.  We face problems like pandemics or asteroid impacts that won't respect political boundaries or turf and don't care who is where or who they will make "look bad."

If you want to conquer social unrest,  then give everyone something of value to contribute so they can at least feel wanted and important and that their pain is worth while.  People buy that.

We're not just talking "computer power" here.  We're talking 1 supercomputer equivalent AND 1 million sets of human eyes and human vision processing as sub-components to draw upon, all focused on the same problem at the same time.

God that sounds like a trip! It always looks like a trip when 100,000 starlings all gather into a huge river and practice moving as a single swarm.  When can we start?!  Here's my $1! What does it feel like to be a bird and be part of a million bird swarm?  Let's find out!

What would people do with this?   Adults probably scratch their heads and say "I can't think of anything."   Now ask 1 million 4 year olds if they'd all like to fingerpaint together....  There are things people LOVE doing that adults in board rooms would never think of.  

The goal of Second Life, once, was to let users have unbounded creativity.   Check out the video of the flash-mob "Random Act of Culture" at Macy's in Philadelphia to see how it COULD feel!

Humor, joy and despair - short videos

Here's a recent video full of joy - a flash-mob singing Handel's Messiah at Macy's in Philly.

http://www.philly.com/philly/video/106492678.html

and here's a recent video full of gloom -- a look at the Federal Reserve System's QE (Qualitative Easing).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

Brief thought on internet security and federal snooping

There is an effort underway, according to the papers, to expand the US government's ability to eavesdrop on personal conversations that take place in social media,  especially things like Skype.

People don't trust this snooping to be well-intentioned or well-managed, and don't like it. Businesses don't trust this snooping to be well-intentioned or well-managed, and they don't like it.

The argument presented by the government is that this snooping can catch bad guys before they do serious damage, and so it is justified, because it protects us from harm.

As as been asked of full-body scans at airports,  at what point does the harm done BY the effort to be safe exceed the harm it is intended to prevent?  How many of our values is it justifiable to destroy in order to save the rest of them?

I should point out that there is an extraordinary mathematical equation being used behind the scenes here.  To explain it, let me give an example.   I found out once that a database of names I was looking at had tens of thousands of people in it with a middle name of "Von".    We know that essentially no one in the real world has a middle name of "Von".  We know that name-parsers on data systems are typically baffled by "surnames" which have more than one part separated by spaces, or by punctuation or capitalization, such as "von Schmidt" or "de la Iglesia" or "McMuffin" or "O'Reilly".  There are extremely good odds that any given name in this database that shows a middle name of "von" would, if investigated, prove to be a parsing error of a last name with "von" and a space as part of it.

BUT,  when I suggested writing a short program to do a single mass update and move the "von" to being part of the surname,   the idea was rejected.   It wasn't rejected because of disagreement that in 99.5% of the cases, this would take a wrong entry and make it correct.   It was rejected because in a handful of cases, it would take a CORRECT entry and make it wrong.  There may in fact be a few people in the world who have a middle name of "Von".  (It would be easy enough for anyone with the US Post office name and address file to compute the actual percent of people mid-named "von" - if someonen does that, let me know,and I'll add the comment here.).

Nevertheless,   the RISK to a mid-level bureaucrat of making something WRONG,  in 0.01% of the cases,   is sufficient to completely outweigh the BENEFITS to the entire system of making the other 99.99% of the cases change from "WRONG" to "CORRECT."    There is a massive asymmetry in the equation.

I see the same kind of thinking at work in the decisions to go ahead and try to eavesdrop on every possible personal communication between people and business.      Yes, in a handful of cases, some bad people will be detected.    The question is, in all the other cases, how much suppression of free-conversation is caused by this eavesdropping,    how many people will be falsely harassed or imprisoned or have their equipment or books or company impounded due to something they said taken entirely out of context,  etc.    In order to avoid saying things that could be "taken wrong by a federal agent with no sense of context, humor, etc.,  everyone would have to continuously remember that there is no privacy, that someone who is an idiot is listening,  and that the someone, if offended,  can spring up and take action without a reason being given or even available after the fact, due to "security concerns."

Free conversations between people and "unconsidered thinking and words" that will vanish from our minds tomorrow will suddenly be saved for all time out of context.

My last post is on the tremendous impact on our health of having and keeping friends.  A substantial part of such friendships is a high volume of daily communication that is carried out with one's guard down,   because one is in the company of a good friend who won't take offense, who knows our humor, and who can simply ask if they are not sure if we are serious or not, or who doesn't need to ask"

If all privacy on the internet social media is removed, and blatantly removed, with a few examples made very public to make the point,  there will be a real, negative,  damaging effect on the role of the internet in sustaining the individual and collective health of the USA.

I submit that this negative impact on health is much LARGER, and will occur in EVERY case, than the 00.01% of the cases in which bad people are detected and deterred.

ONLY by the skewed math whereby a bureaucrat sees a 00.01 % risk of damage-type-1 as being more important than a 99.99% risk of damage-type-2 is the idea of internet snooping and removal of the last channels for open discussion and dissent warranted.    (damage-type-1 is the kind that the bureaucrat might be BLAMED for,  and damage-type-2 is the kind that the bureaucrat gets zero credit for if it is avoided.)

By the same logic that preventive medicine gets no respect, or that my fixing the "von" problem was rejected,  I would expect that internet snooping by the government will in fact become a reality, causing substantial damage to the country that the effort is supposed to be protecting.

Only people who could say "We had to destroy the village to save it." would find comfort in that.

I am not opposed to there being "security measures".  I truly believe there are people out there who mean us harm, or who simply enjoy causing harm.     I acknowledge that if security is not tight that some of those people who might have been caught and deterred will not be caught and deterred, with subsequent damage.

The problem is a larger one of letting the "bureaucratic risk avoidance" equation dominate the conversation, instead of a rational risk avoidance calculation.

I have the same feeling that the same kind of computation is involved in extending the wars the country is involved in far beyond any rational break-even point, well into the domain of not only diminishing returns, but actually causing the problems it is intended to prevent.   But no one can stop a war, once started, because of the bureaucratic equation -- to let it continue is a "risk free" process because "someone ELSE" made the decision.   To stop it entails a risk that something bad might get through the lowered net,  which one could be tarred and feathered for.  So,  despite the fact that EVERYONE thinks a war is bad, NO bureaucratic politician will vote to end it.   In human relations literature, or cogntive errors groups make, this is the "Abeline error" -- the impression of a concensus about somthing that actually has no concensus.

And the cost of it in lives and treasure on all sides is huge.

The key element of "social capital" is TRUST.    If trust is low,  the "transaction cost" for any action rises.   If the multiplier effect is in the trillions,   a decrease in  trust can cost the entire payroll.  We can easily imagine security around the US becoming tighter and tighter,  while the impact is that individuals,  scholars,  visitors,  conferences, and entire businesses decide to relocate somewhere else.  We will finally achieve a huge wall of protection around the dead residual core of a once great and thriving nation.  But the bureaucrats will feel good, cause no one can "blame them" for it.

This is the intervention point that is such a challenge.  Yes, indeed, we MUST start blaming bureaucrats for the "opportunity costs" of their interventions and constraints on our lives.

To paraphrase John Gall's law of Systemantics:  "The component that will cause your system to fail is the component you just added to cause your system to be fail-safe."

This was most wonderfully illustrated recently on campus when computing was shut down for several days on the Engineering quad because the batteries in the "uninterruptable power supply" caught fire, shutting down the computing center.

It was illustrated well in the Crash of Comair 5191, that I wrote about previously, brought about largely because the copilot was so busy going through the extensive safety checklist that he never had time to look out the window at where the plane was going.


Quoting Lewis Thomas (1974):

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

IN reality there are no side effects, there are just effects.  We need to do our sums correctly, when thinking about security,  and be sure we have included the costs of our interventions, not just the benefits, when we want to compare them.

Otherwise, at the end of the day,  feeling proud that we have defended "our country and its values" we will be shocked and baffled that the country and values inside the box we've been defending is damaged beyond recognition "despite" our "best efforts" to protect it.

Oh yes,  one more thing.  The POWER of Skype and Napster are in the fact that they BREAK the constraint that all communications have to go through a central point, and allow point-to-point communication.  To a computer science guy, this is the difference between unbounded success at setting up communication that works and a system that quickly bogs down just as some emergency occurs and everyone wants to talk to each other about what to do about it.

The peer-to-peer architecture is VASTLY more functional than the STAR (central point) architecture and the difference is "WORKABLE" versus "UNWORKABLE",  or scalable versus not-scalable.

What the Feds are asking Skype and others to do is to UNDO all of the progress of the last 20 years in moving away from central bottlenecks to point-to-point systems,    and FORCE all such systems to return to the model of sending everything through a central point, so that it is easier for the feds to monitor it.    Again, lack of trust induces huge transaction costs.  The communication system, now mostly immune to crashing during extreme social events,  will suddenly have a new property of becoming unusably SLOW precisely when business and individuals NEED to talk to each other.

Point-to-point traffic is the model the human brain uses for intelligence.   Bottleneck traffic is the model Washington uses for intelligence.   One is WAY more vulnerable to failure, abuse, mis-use, and WAY more expensive to maintain at any given level of reliability.

I do not think that making it HARDER for people to work together and talk to each other is the way out of the massive combination of social crises we find ourselves in today,  of which "terrorism" represents less than 1 percent.   We're doing a fine job of killing ourselves off without any action by terrorists at all.  It's THOSE threats that need to be on the table when we design a rational security policy for the nation.

The set of F-22 fighters that we proudly sent the first time to Japan (Feb 24, 2007) had almost complete system failure as they crossed the International Date Line.     The systems themselves were OK, except for one which had trouble with arriving at a point "the day before it left" the last point.    However, the broken system generated errors at the rate of 50 per second, and quickly filled the "error log".   In order for the F-22 to be "safe" on fly-by-wire, all components had to wait for the operational log (eavesdropping) to accept their latest step before proceeding. Suddenly, nothing could proceed, because the eavesdropping log was full.       The F-22's survived only because the refueling tankers were nearby, and by hand signals the flight got the tankers to lead them back to Hawaii for repairs.    This is a perfect example -- the entire fighting force was defeated by the sincere efforts to be "totally extra safe" from "error".

Finally, of course, there is the security risk that some internal group of the government, or some very bright well-funded group of bad people (read "organized crime") may be absolutely delighted that all traffic now has go to through one place, because THEY only need to compromise a single component of the US infrastructure in order to eavesdrop on everything.  AND, of course, if they want to bring down the entire communication channel in an act of sabotage at the start of a true massive offensive against the US,   they're equally delighted that we've taken a robust,  scalable,  nuclear-blast-resistant internet and wired the entire thing to go through a single point of failure, where they can attack.

These are very real costs.  They should be on the table.

What we need is the cohones to say that "Even if some bad thing occurs due to the lack of such 'security measure' that we could have done,  NOT doing it was, and CONTINUES TO BE the correct response."

This is a really hard pill to swallow. These words cannot be uttered by a politician, who confuses "best strategy" with "error-free outcomes".

This is as hard to accept as rescinding a law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, and then being willing to let them die after an accident with a head injury instead of spending social resources to keep them alive.      Most of us are not used to decisions which are basically triage, where, REGARDLESS what we do,  someone will die -- the only question is which someone will it be. These are questions that have no "great answer" at the back of the book.    In the USA, if a patient has a bad OUTCOME, they tend to sue the doctor, regardless of the fact that the doctor used the best known PROCESS to decide what to do.   The effect in the short run may be to win some cash, but in the long run it's to discourage good people from wanting to take up a career as a doctor. 

We seem to thrive on "blame" in this society in this day and age, for some reason -- perhaps because it is so simplifying to take complex systems (and "hamsters", ala Lewis Thomas, above) and reduce them to a comic-book level of linear cause and effect, under the delusion that we have now "taken control" of this threat.

I'm just not myself today

Hmm.  If I'm not myself today, who am I?

I've written a number of prior posts on what "shape" a person really is, or where the "edges" are of a person,  for various purposes, such as coming up with new ways to improve health or counter depression.

One thing that's increasingly clear is that a person's "body",  the stuff that is in a tight biological system with itself,  does NOT end where their skin meets the air.     According to an increasing flood of studies, "we" are impacted not just by what happens to "us", but also by what happens to our peers, our friends, and their friends.    When I say impacted, I mean that there are clear, measurable, undisputable physiological changes that occur HERE, in what we used to call "my body"  when someone intervenes over THERE,  in my close friend's body.

As seen by a video camera,  yes, my body ends where the air begins.  But mathematically, as seen by a map of where you can intervene that changes my internal chemistry,   my "body" is quite a bit larger and diffuse.

And, further,  my extended body has parts that are "detachable", that sometimes are so tightly connected to me that they matter a great deal, and sometimes are so loosely connected to me that they matter not at all.

OK,  so what? Why does this nit-picking about semantics matter?

One big reason it matters is that, once we realize we are larger than our physical body,  we can start looking for and taking advantage of more and different interventions than the old ones -- the ones that didn't work very well.

I've recounted before how all the world's top behavioral specialists, such as Bandura,  at a conference on "Self Regulation of Health Behaviors"at the University of Michigan,  agreed that their work consistently showed that the most powerful intervention on our "selves" was pivoted on "other people near us".     For example,  if you offer to pay a woman's CHILDREN $10 for every pound she loses,   it turns out to be more effective than if you offer to pay HER $10 for every pound she loses.

Again, isn't this just a semantic argument?   What am I going on about it for?

The point is that our mental model of "ourself" has a powerful and dramatic impact on how we behave, and often a crippling and paralyzing one.   If we think we are limited by the options inside our classical skin and "body",   we have far fewer options and resources to work with than if we assume we're limited instead by the resources in our entire exo-body.

Take one example -- finding the "strength within" to tackle a hard task and carry it through to completion.     People who are connected to a peer group that has strong norms and that expect this kind of performance or deliver negative feedback or expulsion from the group,  not surprisingly, are better able to deliver than people who are not in such groups. 

An example could be the U.S. Army,  which talks about "Be all you can be".  The whole point is, what "you are" is determined by what exogroups you belong to and are connected to in a tight feedback loop,   not what is currently "under your skin" or "in your genes."    The "epigenetic" component of YOU ( determinants outside your DNA genes)  is not fixed, and is not limited in its effect to the period in which your "body" is developing inside your mother's "body".  (How many people are there there while you're still attached by your umbilical cord?  One? Two? Can either of you change without affecting the other?)

Similarly, a study just published by Robert Putnam has found that people who belong to a religious organization behave differently in terms of social activities than those who do not.    The "belonging" has to be serious and intimate,  not "is on the list of members of..." type membership.

And I think we all have personal experience that humans who are "parents" behave differently than people who are not parents, or than the very "same" people did before they were "parents".

So, since our health depends mostly, in the long run, on our behaviors,  and our behaviors depend, mostly, in the long run, on the groups we are deeply embedded within,  then we can conclude that the "health" of our "body" is determined, largely, by the strength of bidirectional connections and feedback to groups that have "good" effects on us.       Hanging around with the wrong crowd WILL shorten our lifetimes and make us sick, in a very real sense.   Hanging around with the right crowd WILL improve our lives,  our resistance to infection,  our recovery time from injury, our rate of getting cancer .... you name it.


This effect is well documented.  


This effect is sizable -- For example  members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) in Utah have a life expectancy SEVEN YEARS longer than those who are not members. (ref?)

Even a single connection to a friend matters.   Solid resarch studies have shown that, for a 65-year-old person in the USA,    it has MORE positive impact on their health (and morbidity and mortality and resistance to infection)  to make ONE FRIEND, than the combined effect of stopping drinking, stopping smoking,  starting regular exercise,  eating correctly, getting cholesterol under control, and a few other things. (ref?)

OK, so summarizing -- the single most important factor in the health of your "body" is the number of links and strength of links to other people and groups of people.  The magnitude of this factor exceeds that of other medical and surgical interventions combined,  for the population as a whole.

That said,  let's reflect for a while on the last year's worth of debate on "health care" in the USA.

There was a great deal of conversation about "Insurance",   and a lot of talk about "Electronic Health Records", and "access to care", and about people called "caregivers" who often didn't seem to have to actually care to be called that.   These were people who provided the second-tier health interventions of drugs and surgery.

At the same time, there was essentially zero public conversation about the first-tier interventions of improving the number and strength of links that we each have to each other.

This disparity was not an "obvious" error, because everyone is operating under the framework, or lens, or glasses, or mental-model that our "health" is something located INSIDE OUR SKIN,  not something located OUTSIDE OUR SKIN.

Once you see that we are pouring our health-care expenditure down the wrong black hole,  you can see immediately why the general health of the American people has been getting worse and worse, "despite" the growth of the so called health-care industry.    And you can see that attempting to pour even MORE dollars down that black hole will also not work.  THAT is not where we're broken. THAT is not what needs to be FIXED.

I hate to play doomsday prophet, or "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermonized, but there is one thing that will definitely clear the deck of those with weak health systems, as surely as the autumn winds clear the trees of dead leaves,  and that is the next pandemic plague that comes down the road.

There seems to be an argument in the above logic and data, I present for your consideration, that said pandemic will tend to remove from the planet those who rely on doctors and drugs for "health",  and tend to preserve those who rely on deep friendships with each other and with religious groups of others instead.     This effect does not required a god or God to make it work -- it is an effect of the actual effective shape of our bodies in a world filled with diffuse causal chains.

Research shows that cells removed from the human body simply die. They effectively commit suicide. Their very existence is dependent upon tight interactions with a larger "body" of cells.   Also, if you take a cell and damage the DNA, so that the cell SHOULD by all rights die or become cancerous, often the cell will continue to happily function just fine, thank you, if it remains tightly bound to other healthy cells -- something called a "field effect."

I think the same thing, not just an analog, but a real biological process, is at work on the level of individual humans.  People removed from all human contact simply die, although sometimes violently taking others with them.     People in tight support groups can survive despite damage that would surely kill them if they had to make it without "a little help from my friends."

IN any case, these facts should illuminate national policy, and expenditures for "health care", far more than they have to date.    It doesn't make sense to spend another trillion dollars on "Electronic Health Records" and "Insurance bureaucracies" before spending a substantially equivalent amount on improving the true determinants of health, thriving, well-being, and productivity -- our living links to each other.

Photo by the author, also on Flickr at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24316765@N00/379155140/

Gulf Spill report reveals lack of expertise -- of experts reviewing the spill

I read in the Wall Street Journal that an interim report has been selectively released on the causes of the Gulf Spill at the BP oil rig, although not yet made public.

I was saddened by the third hand comments which did not use the terms "mindfulness", "vigilence" or "safety culture",  although cheered that specific "bad people" were not named.

What was reported had a flavor shown by the snippet quoted below:

Gulf Spill Linked to BP's Lack of 'Discipline'

Engineers' Report Blames Oil Giant for Failing to Ensure That Safety Trumped Cost; Regulators' Technical Acumen Is Panned

          By Stephen Power, Ben Casselman, and Russell Gold

An "insufficient consideration of risk" and "a lack of operating discipline" by oil giant BP PLC contributed to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, according to a report due for public release Wednesday from a team of technical experts.

The report from the National Academy of Engineering represents the most comprehensive examination so far of the causes of the disaster. The panel's interim report reaches few firm conclusions, repeatedly saying that possible causes require further investigation....

The 15-member panel includes engineers from several major universities and is headed by Donald C. Winter, a former Navy secretary who is an engineering professor at the University of Michigan.
...

Most of the technical issues covered in the report, such as the failure of a crucial cement seal and the misinterpretation of a key pressure test, have been raised by other investigations.

But the panel also identifies non-technical factors that it says likely contributed to the accident. The panel cites off "a lack of management discipline" and a "lack of onboard expertise and of clearly defined responsibilities."...

The report doesn't attempt to assign blame to individual workers or companies... it criticizes the lack of processes to ensure that safety didn't take a back seat to cost....

In defending itself,  we read this

Mr. Ambrose defended the training and experience of workers aboard the rig. "With a combined total of roughly 80 years of experience, the men who lost their lives on April 20 were considered to be among the best in the business," Mr. Ambrose said.

Not all criticism is targeted at BP and its contractors. Industry-wide training standards, the authors conclude, are "relatively minimal" compared to other high-risk industries.
Government regulators, meanwhile, did not have "sufficient in-house expertise and technical capabilities" to evaluate industry safety practices. The development of new regulations, the report says, "lags behind the rapid development of new technologies for deepwater drilling."

My comments on that:

Nature of causality in SYSTEMS:

I totally agree that attempting to find specific "bad people" and "events" as "causes" is helpful only to attorneys seeking settlements.   The goal should be to find structural processes that established the literal explosive atmosphere in which any random spark could have, and did, set off an explosion.

Ability of SYSTEMS to defeat expertise:

Mr. Ambrose defended the training and experience of workers aboard the rig. "With a combined total of roughly 80 years of experience, the men who lost their lives on April 20 were considered to be among the best in the business," Mr. Ambrose said.

 On the flip side,   the defense statements focus on a "good people" argument,   pointing to aggregate experience and training of individuals.   What this fails to address is that failure of such groups tends to occur as a failure of TEAMWORK,  not as a failure of specific individuals.   

As  extensive research by J. Bryan Sexton, Ph.D. points out, familiarity with others is a critical component of effective teamwork: 74% of all commercial aviation accidents happen on the first day of a crew flying together ( .. In other words, it's not individual training that isn't yet in place, it's the TEAMWORK meta-level processes that are not in place.)

I recently took a course in Patient Safety at Johns Hopkins from Mr. Sexton and Dr. Pronovost, and am familiar with their work.   Importantly,   Sexton's comments with teams that are simply attempting to coordinate with each other, in a neutral cockpit environment.

  What that fails to address is the impact on teamwork and perception of a climate, set by management,  in which the value system everyone understands to be operative  is clearly to suppress surfacing and responding to problems in favor of "making progress".     These can be caused by management, even innocently, with comments such as "I don't want to hear about problems! I want to hear about successes! Get back to work!" as well as outright suppression with comments such as "Don't bring me a problem unless you are bringing me solution!"

In other words the climate of "group think", as in the team that gave Challenger a "go" vote on the fateful day of the disaster, even though every engineer in the room thought it was a bad idea to launch.


Or, on a larger scale,  a room where every person in it was OK with the launch,  but only because those person who did NOT agree with the process had been previously identified and "weeded out" and removed from the decision-making process.


It is abundantly clear from studies in Group Think,  that putting experts in such an operating climate is fully capable of NEGATING the expertise of everyone in the room. We saw that in Bay of Pigs, in Challenger,  and in other well-known examples.

The panel notes a "lack of clear roles and responsibilities" on the drilling platform.  OK.  My point is, again, that's a SYMPTOM of a deeper structural problem, namely a working culture that did not dig in its heels at that point, detecting itself to have such gaps, and stopping operations until this gap had been fixed.    Were the people AWARE that there was a substantial confusion over who was in charge of what, and who was supposed to be the authority, and who was doing what? Yes, clearly, that was reported in multiple news accounts.


Then my point is it doesn't matter what the exact technical details of deep-water drilling technology  were involved here.  There is a more GENERAL and GENERIC problem in the nature of teamwork of the team, that doesn't take experts in drilling to detect or document.   There was visible confusion. There were substantial complaints.     The "teamwork" was not yet evolved or emerged.


Furthermore, there was no evidence of a process in place to detect and respond to a state of incomplete teamwork.   Management did not create a "detecting and responding atmosphere", nor provide any standard mechanism for resolving such NO-TECHNICAL issues (such as "who's in charge of this?"), nor training in said mechanism, nor stringent requirements that all employees demonstrate FLUENCY in using such mechansms,  not concern that said employees agreed the mechanism was SUFFICIENTLY well developed and deployed to cover that base and meet their needs.

Management might be resistant to giving employees a way to slow-down progress or stop it dead while they work on some issue.   In other words, management might says "I don't care what you think, I'm the boss."   Since it is very doubtful that said boss is an expert in deep water drilling, but is only an expert in managerial survival and tactics,  this completely defeats the point of HAVING people with 80 years experience on the work team.  If the boss is going to override them,  why not put much cheaper people with no experience on the rig?  And if you need good people, what are you doing overriding them?




Ability of SYSTEMS to overcome lack-of-expertise:


How about this quote:

Not all criticism is targeted at BP and its contractors. Industry-wide training standards, the authors conclude, are "relatively minimal" compared to other high-risk industries.
Government regulators, meanwhile, did not have "sufficient in-house expertise and technical capabilities" to evaluate industry safety practices. The development of new regulations, the report says, "lags behind the rapid development of new technologies for deepwater drilling."

This is truly worrisome, and is precisely at the point where lessons could be learned and actions taken that could prevent future disasters "of this type".

It is not necessary for the regulators to understand the details of deep-water drilling, any more than it is necessary for regulators of hospitals to understand the biomedical details of particular patient situations.      The breakdown of technical procedures is a SYMPTOM,   the equivalent of the random spark that is blamed for "causing" the explosion -- in this case literally.

What we need to do is head further upstream and ask what "loaded the gun" or "created an explosive atmosphere in which a single finger twitch or spark or technical failure COULD POSSIBLY have such a dramatic and bad impact."

We know that the most likely cause of such an atmosphere is precisely the lack of a culture of safety, and specifically,  the perception of team members that they are not in a situation in which problems are to be surfaced and dealt with,  but are instead in a situation in which it is understood by the staff that problems are to be brushed aside or ignored or minimized in an effort to "complete the task."

It doesn't even matter at this point whether this climate was intended or accidental -- that's a whole separate question.  What matters is whether the workers PERCEIVED such an environment and BEHAVED in accordance with that set of values,  however they grumbled and bitched while they did it.

And here, the record we can see from the newspaper reports is unambiguous:  YES, the workers FELT that they were under pressure to compromise safety in the interests of speed.


MY CONCLUSIONS

There is nothing new under the sun.

The BP-disaster, viewed at the level of teamwork and command and control systems,  is almost a textbook case of what goes wrong and how it goes wrong.  It is a type of system failure that is entirely general,  NOT restricted to deep-water drilling.  It is a type of system failure that has been seen multiple times before (Challenger, Bay of Pigs,  Financial Meltdown,  add personal anecdotes of your own here.)

It is a type of failure that is far larger than ANY amount of individual expertise that workers can bring to the table,  that negates all of the advantages of such expertise.    Having a huge number of hours in individual training does not protect against this failure mode.

It is a type of failure that does NOT require highly-technical regulators to detect and respond to. The only thing the regulators need to do is carry out an assessment of whether the workers FEEL subjectively,  under pressure to suppress safety concerns.  This can be as simple as a YES/NO response to a single question.   There are entire standard questionnaires covering "safety culture" and assessing psychological conditions of workers,  but there are short versions as well.

So, where does this lead?

The conclusion is the same one each disaster leads to.   What we call "standard management practice" -- whip in hand,  pushing "lazy" or "reluctant" workers to achieve a goal despite their "bitching" and "grumbling" without dealing with the issues leading to that -- is fatally flawed.

This accident was not due to an aberration,  not due to some special circumstances on the oil platform, not due to "bad people" on the rig.    This accident, as thousands before it,  was not caused by failures of concrete, or by failures of "blowout-preventers", or by any other technical issue, although those were the symptoms and sparks that triggered the failure.    The accident was CAUSED by failure of our business culture to FIX a broken model of how managers treat teams, and how managers treat problems.

I say this because actions taken after this oil-spill to give additional training to regulators, or additional educational training to oil-platform workers,  will NOT prevent this kind of problem from happening again and again and again.   Worse, it will not feed into fixing this VERY SAME FLAW in management culture that is producing disasters on the financial front, or in every other industry, or most hospitals in the world.

These are problems of MANAGEMENT CULTURE.    The CULTURE is broken.  The CULTURE is really, really, really good at pinning blame on anything and anyone except itself.

This disrespectful attitude towards workers,  and dismissive attitude towards worker concerns,  and non-feasance regarding processes to address these issues is what McGregor's "Theory X" of management is all about.  (There is an alternative, called Theory Y, in which workers are listened to, the organization is not running blind and has a learning curve, and results are generally spectacularly better. It's called Theory Y. It's not popular among those soaked in the brine of current theory X.)

It is a parasitic disease, destroying our industries and our payrolls and our economy and our health care. It is all around us.  it is a communicable disease in that new recruits into management circles are trained in how to disregard,  dismiss, and abuse employees on a routine basis as being a virtue and "being tough".

The Gulf Spill is just another symptom, another breakout, from the same contaminated source of "acceptable management behavior".     Technical fixes to deep-water drilling equipment and worker education in individual skills will not fix this problem.  It will, like "whack-a-mole", simply emerge elsewhere, again and again, until we get ourselves upstream and fix it at the source.

=====
WARNING

 It's pretty well documented that "theory Y" management produces a far better "bottom line" than "theory X" management,  so we might ask why stockholders don't demand this of companies they invest in.

The biggest problem is that both Theory X and Theory Y are like stable mountaintops in a sea of instability.     ONCE YOU HAVE theory X in operation, it is locally optimal.   Once you HAVE theory Y in operation, it is locally optimal.

But locally optimal means if you make a SMALL change, a TENTATIVE step  it will FAIL. It means, every local small step you might take on the pathway to a HIGHER PEAK will, in fact, at first, take you the opposite direction, downhill.

If managers have been consistently disregarding,  over-riding, and abusing workers, and treating them badly,    and the managers suddenly stop doing that and give the workers room to maneuver,  it is fully expectable that there will be a temporary, transient period of time in which the first reaction of the workers will be one of retaliation for past injuries,  of abusing THEIR new power of control by similarly causing slow-downs,  demanding more pay for less work, or otherwise being a true pain.

The question of how you GET from a stable "theory X" condition to a stable "theory Y" condition is a whole topic in itself.    I'll promise to my readers to pull together what is known about how to make that TRANSITION as smoothly as possible, so that the company does not die during surgery, and no managers lose their heads in the process.  Note - Theory Y managing, itself, is far easier than theory X managing..  You no longer need to pretend that you know everything -- by itself, that's worth the trip.

Most people who dump on "Theory Y"  are actually dumping on what they see if they attempt to take a small step from their Theory X mountain top, and notice it makes things worse -- so they extrapolate and say "I tried that, and it backfired, and I learned not to ever try that again."

China's unfair advantage -- collective action?

Today's Wall Street Journal had an article titled "China's 'State Capitalism' Sparks a Global Backlash".

The article basically whines that China is somehow breaking unwritten rules to let "market forces" prove how successful they are, by, gasp,  actually thinking about problems and taking coherent action to address them. This is viewed as an "unfair" advantage, apparently, particularly since it embarrassingly works much better than the solution we had all agreed to worship before called "market forces."   This conflict with our deeply held religious beliefs has to be resolved, of course, by erasing the data point that is in "the wrong place" so we can continue in our comfortable myth.

The article begins:

Since the end of the Cold War, the world's powers have generally agreed on the wisdom of letting market competition -- more than government planning -- shape economic outcomes.  China's national economic strategy is disrupting that consensus ..."

I had to comment on that, and I repeat it here:

OK, let's see if I have this correct. People are upset because China has "an unfair advantage" in that the central planners in government take a strong hand in the economy. In the same breath, if told the US government was going to similarly take a strong hand in the US economy, they would scream bloody murder.

Larry Summers calls China our largest challenge, but this is an opponent that writes out their game plan 15 years in advance and publishes it for everyone to read? And we still can't beat them?

It's time to stop blaming "unfair practices", health-care costs, foreign terrorists, weather, sun spot cycles, global warming, labor, management, oil prices, education, Democrats, Republican, Liberals, Conservatives and Scout Troop #217 in New Jersey for our own monumental collective incompetence.

This reminds me of a hospital I was in that had given 2 Gigahertz laptops to 10,000 staff members, but justified the molasses speed of the central computer systems as due to "insufficient computer power".

I'd suggest that we stop considering the word "collective " to be a dirty word, abandon the idea that competing with everyone over everything is a self-evident great idea, and start looking at better ways to work together to tap the resources we, collectively, have to bring to the table.

Even the lowly slime mold, when threatened or faced with a resource challenge, can literally pull itself together into a single cohesive entity, take coherent action to address the problem, before dissolving again into ten million "separate" cells. There's something we should be learning from all this.

Blaming others for "unfair advantage" is not the way to get there.

 A more insightful view of the world is in the book "Peace - More Than an End to War", by the Baha'i Publishing Trust, which

asks them to put aside their belief that conflict and aggression are intrinsic to human nature, to overcome the paralysis of will that prevents them from finding solutions to the problems facing them.

The book continues

The Baha'i approach to the achievement of peace calls for fundamental changes in all aspects of behavior -- individual, interpersonal, corporate, and international -- based upon the belief that human beings have an innate capacity for harmony and cooperation, which unfortunately, has been suppressed by religious fanaticism and the spread of divisive ideologies.

Let me be clear that I am not advocating that the US adopt Chinese Party rule. I am pointing out that coherent social action,  even when achieved by arguably dictatorial means,   is demonstrably MORE SUCCESSFUL in the short run (5-10 years) at dealing with the problems facing us on population scales than waiting  for "market forces" to address those problems.

Please note that I fully believe that central party rule,  with the suppression of dissent,  has within it the seeds of failure to be flexible to news from the front,  and will crash and sink on those shoals, as have all other efforts to rule by decree without corresponding efforts to listen to the people and accept surprising news, even if it overturns cherished long-standing beliefs and myths.

My point is that there are more choices than the anarchy of "market forces" and the powerful-but-internally-flawed central planning model of communism.    Central planning can work only if there are extremely strong built-in structures to weed out corruption and encourage dissenting views,  so that the strong down-flow of authoritative command is equally matched by a strong up-flow of wisdom from the front about the true state of affairs, which always seems to be invisible from "the top".

Otherwise, we get the all-to-common problem, say, in the US  of central economic planners unable to see a financial bubble the size of the planet,  despite a chorus of screams from below that it was coming; or of  startling and embarrassing comment from a vice president of General Motors that "no one could have predicted"  the drop in sale of expenisive gas-guzzlers when the price of gasoline rose.

Interestingly,  the US Army addresses just such a problem in Doctrine in FM22-100, the prior version of the US Army Leadership Field Manual.    The Army epitomizes a central command structure,  and yet the manual stresses the need for two things in order for such a structure to not blindly lead us all over a cliff -- (1)  the people at the top need to be exemplary in terms of moral behavior and concern for the troops,   and (2) the people at the top need to be acutely aware of their own blindness and take active steps to learn from those "below them".

Central Planning in communist countries, and as practiced in the US,  seems to have mastered the part about "authority going down" but seems to have discarded the part about "listening with humility to those below" going up.    Sadly,  that part discarded is the part that makes it work.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with central planning , with authority, or with coherent social action.  In fact,   as China is demonstrating, these are, in the short run, far more powerful than the chaos of the marketplace "solutions".     What's wrong is only visible on a larger time scale, which is if the central authority confuses the authority-to-steer with some kind of genetic-authority-due-to-mental-brilliance.   It's an easy mistake to make.  It's the normal method of failure of power, as "power corrupts" and "absolute power corrupts absolutely".   There is no intrinsic reason for this corruption of power to be a given -- but it will be a given if explicit steps are not built in to prevent that failure mode.

The only solution to such power grabs is to have absolute demands for the highest in character values and moral integrity, honesty, and trustworthiness of those we select as our leaders.  Not only "the appearance of impropriety" but impropriety itself must be considered disqualifying for office.

Otherwise,  we know what always happens.

In any case,  it does appear that

There are spiritual solutions to "economic" problems.

So far, there don't see to be any other kind of solution for "economic problems".

Supercomputer - bah humbug!

The latest news on the supercomputer front is that the Chinese have passed the Americans with a "faster machine".

Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, achieved a computing speed of 2,570 trillion calculations per second, earning it the number one spot in the Top 500 (www.top500.org) survey of supercomputers.

The Jaguar computer at a US government facility in Tennessee, which had held the top spot, was ranked second with a speed of 1,750 trillion calculations per second.

 Well,  I'd like to suggest that the benchmark is pretty bogus and, like most of the rest of our educational system, measuring the wrong thing.

There are problems on which there is no speed of computation, along those lines, is sufficient to solve. The reason is that the solution requires leaping out of the frame of mind in which the problem was posed, and reframing it in order to solve either it or a better problem.

What I'm looking for is a "computer" that gets part way into a problem,  goes "AHA!", has a brilliant flash of insight, realizes it's approaching the problem from the entirely wrong direction, reframes the problem, and then solves it.

And I'm also suggesting that 2,000 trillion calculations per second should be way more than enough to support this pivot in direction.    Stop aiming at MORE OF THE SAME and start aiming our resources at better use of what we have already.

Going for more "supercomputer speed" is like taking a car capable of going 700 miles per hour and trying to get it to go 800 miles per hour.   My point is ... so what?   It's useless to me at either speed.

This is not just complaining -- it's my method of going "AHA! You guys are solving the wrong problem!".   Cause I'm not a supercomputer, I can do that.

Here's the key.  99.999% of getting a useful supercomputer means solving the operating system problem of how to get the individual sub-computers,  now close to a million of them,  to work with each other in tackling different parts of the problem in such a way that their tiny efforts add up and amount to anything. (sound familiar?)

The Chinese got the parts to talk TO each other faster.  Well, good, as far as it goes. But we've gotten past sending surface mail, as it were, between the sub-computers,  and are past sending email between them, and are up to instant-messaging and screen-sharing between them (you can see what I see.).

Now, time to stop increasing the SPEED of the communication, and start increasing the VALUE of the communication.  Instead of sending the same old messages, but faster,  we need to reconsider the whole point of WHY we are sending messages in the first place.

On a theoretical basis,  we also need to stop obsessing about sending symbol-string linear messages between the parts, and start sending multidimensional IMAGES between the parts.    These may be "Turing equivalent" in the fantasy world where we have infinite time and messages that don't degenerate with time , but in the real world we have finite time and noisy messages,  so it DOES matter which mode we use.

For one thing, if we use images to communicate,   we can get vastly more robust against noise.  You can take a picture of anything and toss in "salt and pepper noise",  changing random bits to black or white,   for a long time before the image itself is actually degraded and no longer conveying what it was supposed to picture.

What THAT, in turn, means,  is that it's OK if some of the pixels are wrong.  It's OK if some of the computing components flake out mid way through the computation and start generating garbage output.    That's a GOOD THING. (attached is a picture of my uncle Roger Schuette with his early computer, that he said tended to need to be shut down to replace a bad component about every 3 minutes. It only had a 1000 vacuum tubes. Once you get to a million subcomputers,  this reliability tends to be an issue again.)

Still, the key point is to get past processing CONTENT and start processing CONTEXT.   What needs to be recomputed is the REFERENCE FRAME,  not the data in the frame. This is a classic technique physicists and mathematicians use.    They ask, in what reference frame would the problem I'm attempting to solve become TRIVIAL (or linear).  They they solve (using Greens Functions or something like that) for the reference frame to USE, and THEN,  having done that,  return to addressing "the problem" which, when phrased in those terms (in that basis set), is now "obvious" and "trivial"  (linear).  In some cases, this is solving for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors, if those terms are familiar.

The point is,  that most of the computational energy has to be spent, and should be spent,  mulling over how the problem has been posed,  refusing to accept that the accidental framework in which this appears to be a problem is the BEST possible framework to think about it within,  and searching for an astoundingly BETTER vantage point and framework, within which the "problem" essentially, "goes away." In some ways it's searching for a better algorithm, but the idea of a better PROBLEM handle is stronger and different than a better algorithm for attacking the same old problem.

Anyway, here's my thinking on it, which is a little silly, since no one is listening, but that's never stopped me before.    Because we don't know in advance WHAT the problem REALLY is, or how it REALLY should be phrased, parsed, and decomposed into sub-tasks,    we don't really know in advance which  subcomputer should be doing what.   We have to assume that, midcourse, a given subcomputer may decide to retask itself entirely and change what it is working on, and change which other subcomputer clusters it is therefore speaking to about what as they spontaneously reassemble around a new approach and see if THAT new agile idea can let them stretch out to span the space covered by the problem, with each subcomputer cluster attempting to span the smallest part of the problem that, in the current reference frame, is closest to it and easiest to get to from here.

In other words, the computer components have to become like a liquid, or one of those neat things with a grid of wires that can take on the shape of what it is pressed against. (picture?) It has to FLOW, like a ball of tiny spheres,  (new computerized robotic "hand") attempting to get all the way around, and get a "grip on" the problem, before it can THEN tighten up it's joints and DRAG the parts of the problem around to some better position.  The current approach is more like trying to figure out which orientation of each of the joints of a computerized arm and hand will let the hand grasp the problem, and typically NONE of the orientation combinations works well, and there is a literal combinatorial explosion of ways in which each joint might twist to get the hand around all the obstacles to the right point, so it becomes computationally unbounded, requiring a "supercomputer" with superspeed to attempt to "brute-force" the way through to a solution.   That's the HARD way to solve the problem.
FORGET the robotic arm, in this metaphor.   Let the computer REINVENT the concept of "arm" instead of trying to IMPOSE an arm and ask the computer how to MOVE THAT ARM to the right place. 

In many ways this requires "swarm" intelligence, because what each computer is doing now becomes a function of what the other computers "near it" that it SEES are doing.  (The swarms of differnt types of birds may intersect and pass through each other and operate in the same part of the sky. Fun to watch.)

 And now we get back to our standard question of achieving "unity above diversity" -- letting the parts each go their own way and still having an overarching emergent consequence of that, as well as an overarching authoritative pushing and gentle nudging of that, in a highly iterated loop,  forming a sort of slime-mold metabeing that can reach out on a large scale and engulf and subsume the problem.

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Side bar on Uncle Roger and early computer work at Barber Coleman in 1952.
From  invention.smithsonian.org/downloads/fa_cohc_abstracts_s-z.pdf

Interviewee: Interviewer: Date: Repository: Description:
Abstract:
Citation: Copyright:
Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977
Roger E. Schuette Henry Tropp June 20, 1972 Archives Center, National Museum of American History Transcript, 87 pp.
Schuette began working at Barber-Colman in 1939 and soon was involved in anti-aircraft and anti-tank projects, including design of a calculating device for a rangefinder made by Eastman Kodak. During World War II, Duncan Stewart of Barber-Colman met George Stibitz while working for the National Defense Research Committee. Stewart decided his company should build a commercial computer. By 1946, Stibitz had designed a small scale serial computer with error checking circuits. The first model was completed in 1948 and a second, much superior version, the Simple Electronic Digital Computer (SEDC), in 1955. Schuette worked on the memory and an input device for the SEDC. Others introduced a compiler and improved programming. This machine was used at Barber-Colman for a few months, but the company decided not to invest in either manufacturing facilities or a national service network and did not market it. They did sell patent rights to its system for arithmetic calculations and error checking.

[Comment - I think they sold the patents to a company called International Business Machines, which DID decide to go ahead and try to build a commercial version of this bug-laden computational thingie... :)  ]

Picture of the Barber-Colman Computer with uncle Roger at the helm
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/04/capstone-slide-6.html


Uncle Roger was instrumental in my 6th grade class getting a kit for an analog computer which could play tic-tac-toe,  which, surprise, I was selected as the student to assemble it.   So I got to build my very first computer in 1957, and it definitely got under the skin and into my blood!  The thing had a front panel,  six or nine, I forget,  wooden disks that could be rotated to indicate which move the person at the corresponding step had selected for their move, and some version of lights that indicated what the next move  "the computer" was making would be.  Underneath was a maze of wires connecting the parts.

It worked way better and longer than my first Healtkit radio transmitter,  a 150 watt job that I finished the several month job of assembling and decided to turn on "just to see it light up" before I bothered to complete the antenna.  Well,  minus the load of the antenna, the power stage went ballistic and exploded, thus ending in 2 seconds THAT effort to communicate with the world!

Anyway, the analogy to corporate life is pretty good,  in terms of supercomputer issues.  What they are trying to do is find ever faster and "more efficient" ways for employees to carry out the directives of the boss, and move the fixed robotic arm around to grapple with a continuing flux of new problems. This turns out to be HARD, and so employes are driven harder and harder to be more "productive".

At the same time,  what the employees want to do, and should be able to do, is get OUTSIDE the box,  dissolve the robot arm, RECONCEPTUALIZE the problem the company faces, and SOLVE THAT, then bring that back into the original framework and see what it works out to.   Then we are talking about measuring EFFECTIVENESS not EFFICIENCY.   Then we will see quantum leaps in "productivity" and the bottom line.

As things stand now,   adding employees or computers to problem solving teams only MAKE THINGS WORSE,  because there are N-factorial NEW communication pathways that need to be established to get everyone "working on the same page."   The problem with that method of thinking is that there IS a "page" already predefined that the agents need to be brought TO.  So we have the wisdom that "adding staff to a project that is late will only make it later."

Clearly,  we are on "wrong side of the power curve" here.   We need a better approach or distributed problem solving algorithm,  SUCH THAT, with the property THAT,  adding more people INCREASES the power of the group to solve problems.  Clearly, and admittedly, the "STAR architecture", where all communications have to go through a central point,  suffers from congestion issues and fails this test -- not because adding new agents is a bad idea, but because having them go through "the boss" to get anything done is a BAD CONSTRAINT on a good idea.

This is reminscent of the fundamental problems in the design of the virtual reality world Second Life, shared by most of the alternatives, or all of them at this point -- namely,  that the focus is on the ENTITIES, not the RELATIONSHIPS, and the focus is on people (as problems) moving across solution space (FIXED grids of computers) instead of letting the COMPUTERS reshuffle themselves to adapt to the problem of the moment.    

So we have the silly and dysfunctional result that 100 people can each own a simulated island (sim),  and operate just fine, but if they all want to talk to each other and congregate on one sim,   the poor sim-server trying to do all the work is overloaded,  while 99 sim-servers sit around bored.  There is a strong emphasis in that architecture to LIMIT The attendance at meetings, or, if you come,you have to leave all your fun stuff at home.

Consider instead an architecture where the computational power flows WITH the avatar, and can be pooled, so that,  the more people who show up at a meeting, the MORE cpu power there is to do fun stuff with!    100 attendees means 100 servers are all focused on making that one virtual meeting space fully empowered to do neat stuff!

This is the basic transition we need to make, the corner we need to turn.  We don't need "faster supercomputers" we need wiser supercomputers.  We don't need "brighter employees" we need management to open up the constraints and let the employees BE collectively wise PRECISELY by coloring outside the lines, thinking outside the box, stepping outside the preconceived constraints and doing things THEIR Way not the "boss's way".    We don't need Linden Labs to take over the entire power of the Hoover Dam to run even more powerful servers -- we only need to let the servers flex so they can flow to the problem,  not sit and wait for the problem to flow to them.

We have the resources we need. We don't need more speed. We just need to reconceptualize our problem.