Pathways to a sustainable future

(From a discussion in a Systems Thinking forum in LinkedIn this morning.)


I think there is great hope for the future already visible amid the catastrophic failure all around us of the old ways that make it harder and harder to believe that "This will work, just keep doing more of it."

The paradigm needs to change. The pathways we need to take will be revealed through encouraging feedback to those who take action, again mixed with hostile feedback from those vested in the old ways.

In systems terms, our solutions lie hididen from us in the closed-loop IIR-world and cannot even be seen or imagined in the open-loop FIR-world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_impulse_response

To ask "what path leads there" is like asking, "If you start at the Empire State Building in New York City, which straight road leads you directly to Los Angeles?" The answer is "None" but that is not to say you can't get there from here. No single linear "path" goes from here to there, but big deal. The path hasn't even been created yet so of course it's not visible.

As Einstein said, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

While we may appear to have a shortage of food, water, and power, one thing we do NOT have a shortage of is people. So the question is, are people a resource or a "sink". If they're viewed as a consumption "sink", yes, then, we are basically screwed.

On the other hand, if people comprise an untapped resource, then we are saved. I fully believe in the "saved" model.

The legacy "competition" model between people, and ever larger-scale groups of people, is what is bankrupt -- not the people themselves. That model does not, empirically, either lead to good solutions, or, in application, lead to very efficient utilization of available resources and opportunities. Easily 95% of all effort in most people-structures at any scale is wasted on internal squabbling.

The larger the structure, the more pronounced this system-effect is.

(An excellent and hilarious, but profound, discussion of the failure modes of large systems is Systemantics, by John Gall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
)

At the same time, very significant research and practice in the creation of high-performance, high-quality, ultra-high-reliability systems in aircraft cockpits, intensive care units, fire-fighting, and military situations have shown, repeatedly, that CORRECTLY organized teams based on COOPERATION and mutual-respect can and DO function spectacularly better than those based on the legacy model of competition.

In management terms, "Theory Y" organizations are profoundly more robust and sustainable than "Theory X" organizations, make better decisions by far, and are far more fun to work for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y

I'd suggest focusing on the key elements of what is it that causes large systems to "go wrong" and become, de facto, corrupt, out of touch, dysfunctional and blind? And, can that be changed by a STRUCTURAL DESIGN change, such that the VERY SAME ELEMENTS (people) doing what appear to be the very same activities, now suddenly WORK instead of failing.

As systems thinkers, we know perfectly well that outcomes are as much functions of the STRUCTURE as the COMPONENTS. We know, from empirical examples, that high-reliability teams CAN be made out of low-reliability people, in the right context.

Are humans "incorrigibly selfish and mean"? Only in structural contexts that use feedback to push them into those behaviors. In the correct structural contexts, people are "incredibly strong, supportive, and capable of heroic and inspired action."

We, in systems thinking worlds, hold the keys to unlocking that buried power that is so vehemently and emotionally denied and attacked by proponents of "theory X". 
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Let me addend to my prior comment that there is an illusion that very rich people will oppose cooperation among underlings or people in general because they fear that, united, the oppressed will arise and overthrow them.

To some extent this is incomplete thinking and needs to be exposed. It is akin to saying "I'm glad I don't like ice cream, because if I liked it, I might eat it, and I hate it!"

If you take an incomplete model of a cooperative enterprise and treat it as "cooperation internally in order to COMPETE better externally",  then, yes, be concerned, very concerned, if the staff compare notes and unify.

BUT,  if you take a complete model, of "cooperation internally in order to be strong enough to cooperate externally as well",  then there is no threat to the existing very rich.

Once people realize that we live in a sea of WEALTH, not a sea of shortage, then there is no motivation to organize in order to redistribute the existing wealth (i.e.,  revolt and take it away from someone else so that we have it, or to "distribute" it more "fairly" or "evenly.")

A revolution in deed,  attempting to redistribute wealth,  will certainly be met with hostility.  This is not surprising.

A revolution in mind,  realizing that more wealth can easily be created so there is neither need nor motivation to threaten someone else's existing wealth,  can be met with at least neutrality.  

In fact,  creating wealth-creating structures of people could be WELCOME by the wealthy, who, frankly, are very hard pressed to know where on earth to INVEST a trillion dollars with any hope of getting a positive gain.  

New human structures, a systems-approach to altering the outcomes of human behavior, does not require humans to become something they are not.  There is no magic, other than the incredible power of structural feedback.  

But I think it can help, from day one, if it is made clear that this is NOT a "revolution" with all that implies.  It is an evolution, and a win-win approach to the future.

Wade 

Zen of agile programming

There's an interesting thing called the "Agile Manifesto" which is a set of guidelines about how to write software that actually works and is actually helpful to customers.

I love the overlap with my favorite guru of systems, John Gall, in his book Systemantics: How Systems Fail, and his principle #15:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.

This is a good start of an idea,  but like "Lean" and Six-Sigma and many other principles of good software design, there is a subtle but fatal flaw in it, IMHO.

With "Lean" process improvement,  this flaw is encapsulated in usually a few short sentences that say something like "For this to work, a culture change is required".   As if that's a rather trivial thing, like buying a toaster.

As I view it, Agile development, correctly done, works by using the immense power of a closed-feedback loop, giving you, in technical terms, an IIR system not an FIR system,  which is, indeed, infinitely more powerful.   (For details see my prior post Systems Thinking and the Emergence of New Life   and "Gentle introduction to feedback loops" )


Also, it only works by plugging into the power of the living social context and staying very closely connected to it, again, as we would expect any new life form to do, ala a developing fetus in the womb.

Still,  the key aspect to making this whole thing function is a "loop invariant" -- something that is destroyed in the middle of each loop, but is restored to its state before the loop exits, so that it appears to be "constant" viewed from outside the loop.   In Agile Programming,  this loop invariant has to include cleaning up all of the loose ends and "technical debt" -- everything that needs to be done to make the program "simple" again.      In other words, after each step of increased complexity, the change has to be digested,  and fully incorporated, and the whole shebang re-diagonalized back to "simple" again.  This cannot be "left for later", critically.


Sadly,  like "a culture change is required",   "clean up after each step" is much easier said than done.
Others have seen this problem:

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.  (Tony Hoare)

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

• I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. (Blaise Pascal, circa 1650).

In my understanding, this issue gets down to a core issue that is the subtle flaw behind most good advice, such as "To keep your expenses under control, develop a budget and just live within it!." The word "just" in such sentences is a red flag that the complexity and difficulty of this step has been grossly understated.    Similarly "Why can't you just have a place for everything and keep it in its place!"

The problem here is that, in the creation of new life,  it is absolutely unavoidable to go uphill in a thermodynamic sense, from a disordered state to a more ordered state.    And the laws of thermodynamics forbid such a thing from occurring.  Closed systems do not move uphill. Period.

Author T.S. Eliot captures the wished for state:

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.
(T.S. Eliot Choruses from the Rock)

In short,  the work of our hands must always reflect the state of our heart, and if we have a chaotic spirit,  there is no way, regardless of tools, that we can build unchaotic systems, let alone give them a breath of life.

Well, more correctly, there is no way as a "closed system" we can do that.  Only an open system, drawing in energy and revitalizing life from outside (as from a womb) can generate actual new life, actual steps up the entropy chain,  actual "value" for the customer.

Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.  (Psalm 127, Solomon Song of Ascent)

Summarizing this so far, for agile to realize the potential power, three things must be true:

• Only a truly elegantly "simple" system can evolve in a sustainable way,  so that it will not ultimately crash under the weight of unresolved internal complexity or divergence from external life in which it is embedded.  (All complex systems will suffer tissue rejection.)
• Each cycle of the loop,  true simplicity must be rebuilt, at surprisingly great effort and expense.
•  
• All efforts to rebuild simplicity will fail unless they are spiritually grounded in outside life, drawing heavily on it to move up the entropy curve.

 TECHNICAL DISCUSSION OF THE UNDERLYING MATHEMATICS

If the system is restored to simple  (imagine a diagonalized matrix), THEN it is true mathematically that any single small step (from that SIMPLE state) will be linear, ie, straight-forward and not filled with contradictory cross-terms.  This much is basic matrix algebra and finding the eigenvalues and eigenvectors.

But ONLY one step can be taken, and then the whole matrix needs to be re-diagonalized again, because the underlying Riemann metric in which you are "hill-climbing" is only approximately flat,  not actually flat.   The approximation is only valid for one small step.

In less accessible but far more profound accuracy,  the tensor you are working with, connected into physical and social reality, must be "rejuvenated",  and returned to elegant simplicity by giving up something, by contraction across one covariant and one contravariant index, setting them equal.

The very choice of this word by a mathematician is no accident.   A discussion of basic tensor algebra* is required to understand the precise meaning of these terms.  ( We need to understand that concept, the step of "rejuvenation",  to truly guide our insight into how agile development must occur to succeed.  

By repeating the rejuvenation step,  the algorithm becomes truly recursive, and at each step a profoundly simple system can take one step, and only one step, safely, before everything must be recomputed and rejuvenated again.   Expand and contract.  Differentiate and reintegrate. There is no shortcut, no other path, no way around this thermodynamic truth.

But, because the algorithm is, in fact, completely recursive,  you can get better and better at it, faster and faster, over time.  The algorithm never changes, even though the software it is generating is, in fact, being continually migrated along a path in curved metric space towards some objective. 

This ratcheted hill-climbing algorithm will, in fact, work -- but only on its terms, not ours. 

At least, that's how I understand it.

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*  See, for example,  as easy a discussion as you can find for non-mathematicians of tensor algebra in Introduction to General Relativity by Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer, chapter 1.  (McGraw Hill, 1965.)    
A less lucid reference, but one that is at least online, is Mathematics of classical and quantum physics, by Byron and Fuller,

The power of dyads

Maybe love is a feature not a bug, and they came to the ark in pairs for a reason.


Lately I've been spending a lot of time reading books on how to make groups of people better able to do the work that "meetings" are supposed to help with.   


People, as individuals,  have a lot of problems when viewed as "problem solving" units or agents.  We have terrible and selective memory,  flawed perceptions,  are easily biased and swayed in ways that are invisible to us, etc.     Sometimes, using the power of collective intelligence and social wisdom, we can come together and actually have a dialog and collaborate and consult, and overcome those flaws, at least partly, and make better decisions together than any of us could have made as separate individuals. 


Still,  when we assemble all that into larger units,  such as corporations and mega-corporations and governments,  the process seems to break down and revert to being dominated by the ego and psychological flaws of individuals all over again. Sadly, this time the individuals are armed with not rolling pins and sticks, but armies and nuclear weapons so the costs of these character flaws become much higher.


What to do?     Humanity has experimented with all kinds of mix and match ways to organize ourselves,  with assemblies and parliaments and elected "representatives" and houses and senates and committees and subcommittees -- but the results we were hoping for -- a central honest competent decision-making process -- remains elusive. On a business sense,  we seem able to put together close to a  million people to make a company, like General Motors, that is surprised by the fact that people seek more efficient cars when the price of gasoline goes up.    We have, in fact, made a collection that appears to be dumber than the average Joe on the street.

We've even tried "group work" and "collaboration",  which sometimes works better than "competition", but still has yet to demonstrate the robust power of a true solution.


I just noticed, however, that one thing we have always been doing is using individuals as the building blocks.

So, maybe we should consider using dyads (pairs, couples) as the building blocks instead, and see what we can make in the way of larger complex structures composed of pairs-of-people-working-as-one.


Of course, we are biased against this by being taught in school that  1 + 1 = 2.   We come to believe this, and it colors all our thinking.


In reality, however,   we also have the option of this math:

1 + 1 = 1

In other words,  a small one plus a small one can add up to a larger ONE.   Some couples can make this work,  generally assisted by a combination of "love" and a great deal of relationship-sustaining plain hard work and sacrifice.

I've discussed in prior posts the idea of "pair programming" and the power of working on a computing task as a pair with one computer and two people, intimately consulting on each step.   This is known to be very effective. It's also a lot more fun than working in isolation, and it overcomes the terrible trade-off our business structures force us to make -- between being social and "working". 


Why should the two be mutually exclusive? This is so strange.


Maybe,  the concept needs to be extended to all our business structures, and every slot for a "person" should be a candidate for being filled with a person-dyad instead, a pair of people.


Actually, our legal system recently made it clear that corporations are legally "persons" and have First Amendment Rights, etc.  So,  certainly a pair of people could legally incorporate and become a meta-person then, and hold one job between them.


Imagine if we allowed this to occur, and could consider for our elected official persons,   not just "individuals" but also "dyads".  Typically, suppose, that rather than choosing between a male and a female President, say,    we could elect a married couple as our meta-person to fill that slot.


This is a fascinating thing to consider.    Suppose we restrict the playing field to those couples that have been married for, say, 10 years or more.  Hey, we restrict it to people who have been alive for 35 years or more. so same deal here -- we're just looking for a meta-person, a PERSON, who has been alive at least 10 years.


By so doing, we will actually be selecting for a demonstrated ability of each of these individual people to overcome their own egos and work with at least ONE other human being over a period of time, where every step has consequences they are going to have to face.   


Maybe, that would be a good trait to select for in our elected leadership.   And, it might allow our leaders to have the option of being in two places at once,when needed.   More on this later.

We seem as a society to have somewhat abandoned the idea that two people,  with a male and female viewpoint, would come together for the purpose (or accepted side-effect) of managing a household and family.


I don't think that was such a bad idea.   The fact that the rest of our social and religious structures and culture undermined that construct didn't make it a bad idea, just one that has been increasingly difficult to accomplish.


Still,  if we selected for leadership couples who have managed to pull that off and accomplish it,  wouldn't they, as a pair,  have the type of insights and attitudes that we actually always wanted our leadership (in loco parentis) to have?


In any case, it would be one way to cope with the fact that we have more people than jobs these days -- start filling one job-slot with a pair of people, a legally-incorporated meta-person,  instead of with a single person.     Especially if the pairs are mixed genders, both male and female viewpoints can be reflected in their work.


Yes, it would be a challenge.  It would suggest some rather dramatic changes in our entire educational K-12 and college programs,  to be oriented around training dyads instead of training individuals on the one hand and "teams" on the other.


Still, since nothing else we've tried has been very successful,  I put this on the table for consideration.

Electronic Health Records not so great -- Rand Corp.

WASHINGTON – Hospitals' use of electronic health records has had just a limited effect on improving the quality of medical care nationwide, according to a study by the nonprofit RAND Corporation.
The study, published online by the American Journal of Managed Care, is part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that new methods should be developed to measure the impact of health information technology on the quality of hospital care.

[snip]

However, quality scores improved no faster at hospitals that had newly adopted a basic electronic health record than in hospitals that did not adopt the technology. In addition, at hospitals with newly adopted advanced electronic health records, quality scores for heart attack and heart failure improved significantly less than at hospitals that did not have electronic health records. EHRs had no impact on the quality of care for patients treated for pneumonia.

[snip]

"The lurking question has been whether we are examining the right measures to truly test the effectiveness of health information technology," said Spencer S. Jones, the study's lead author and an information scientist at RAND. "Our existing tools are probably not the ones we need going forward to adequately track the nation's investment in health information technology."

  [snip]

Support for the study was provided by RAND COMPARE (Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts). RAND developed COMPARE to provide objective facts and analysis to inform the dialogue about health policy options. COMPARE is funded by a consortium of individuals, corporations, corporate foundations, private foundations and health system stakeholders.

Other authors of the study are John L. Adams, Eric C. Schneider, Jeanne S. Ringel and Elizabeth A. McGlynn.

Then a miracle happens

Miracles do occur!

My wife and I went to the annual Baha'i conference on Social and Economic Development in Orlando earlier this week.  The session on dealing with how to design and run development projects in fragile post-conflict countries, such as Iraq or Afghanistan was particularly enlightening.

Here's a picture of my summary of the recommended strategy:

In words the steps are:

1. Invest in project
2. Crash and burn
3. repeat

So, I know there are skeptics among you, who will be comparing this strategy to the company president who was asked how he could price his products below cost, and replied "Sure, we lose money on every sale, but we make it up on volume!"

Yeh,  right.

ON THE OTHER HAND, consider the following body-building strategy:

In words, the steps are

1. Go to gym
2. destroy muscles by exercise
3. repeat

So,  at first glance,   the skeptics again might ask how on earth you can possibly "build up" your muscles by going to the gym and exercising so much that you destroy them.

Here's the thing though -- that turns out to be the only way to build up muscles -- you have to destroy them in order to build them up. 

The reason is that there is something else going on, that was left off the diagram.  So, maybe the diagrams should look more like this, and match the cartoon this posting started with:

We now have these steps in our success formula:

1. go to Gym
2. Destroy muscles by exercise
3. Then a miracle occurs
4. (repeat)

The point is, it's not really "a miracle", although it certainly is amazing.   WE put out some effort to constructively use-up our muscles, and then WE take a break.    While we are taking a break,  something truly amazing happens, and our muscles are rebuilt for us, including a little bit of overbuilding, so we end up with more muscles than we had before we started.

WE, thank God,  don't need to understand molecular biochemistry, or structural engineering,  or biological pathways and the Krebs Cycle, or all that stuff.  All that stuff is done FOR US.   We just need to recognize that a process is already in place that we can simply tap into and utilize.

The whole point of the SED conference,  in my mind, the summary of it all, is that the following diagram is ALSO true, and is really just the exact same process on a larger scale:

So the steps are

1. Invest in project
2. crash and burn
3. then a miracle occurs
4. (repeat)

Again, this really only looks like a miracle, and it certainly would be a miracle if WE had to understand all the details and plan them out.  Fortunately, just like the muscle-building strategy,  WE don't need to know the details.

In particular, the point is that the local people, the indigenous population,   need to be the ones doing the investing in their own self-help project.   AND, they need to realize that this project is very similar to muscle building, or learning how to shoot baskets at the gym -- the way you "succeed" is by repeatedly failing and going back for more.

There is no other pathway.  There are no shortcuts.   There are no pills to take. There is no way to "import" infrastructure,  and simply assemble the pieces in place, like some sort of prefabricated building.

But,  despite all that,  we are correct to place our hope, and our project planning dollars,  in the fact that "then a miracle occurs."

Comment -- This insight actually has a rather profound impact on how donors and funding agencies should assess whether a project is a "success" or a "failure".  

Zen and college admission webform flaws

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

By JACQUES STEINBERG   (Dec 22, 2010)

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

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

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

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I wrote this comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill and Mellinda Gates Foundation looks at education - MET

Classes exist, not just classrooms. This is important!

I'm reviewing the press release on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measure of Effective Teaching MET program (Educational measures) and a glimpse into what characteristics of teachers, perceivable by students, correlate with successful outcomes.   Many of the quoted characteristics overlap with characteristics of successful facilitators of meetings.  ( See, for example, Sam Kaners: Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making).

Also, in the last decade, the Institute of Medicine has reviewed factors that improve health care in the USA, and a central finding is that the behavior of "microsystems",  small teams of individuals working together, is both correlated with success and is the best intervention point for improving success.

 I recall that, at least back in '70's a study of Chinese school systems by Urie Bronfenbrenner showed that they routinely had the more advanced students assisting the less advanced ones -- that is,they turned every student into a potential teacher's aide.

And several years ago I went to a conference of "Self-Determination of Health Behaviors" sponsored by the Knight Foundation on what it was that got people to do what was good for them regarding health.  What was startling was that every presenter in this area, the world's experts,  talked about how social interventions were more effective than individual interventions.  It had more clout to pay a woman's children ten dollars for every pound she lost than to pay her, for one example.   At the end of the conference, there was a panel, and I asked whether I was imagining it, or hadn't every single one of them said that social interventions were the more effective than individual interventions?   They discussed and agreed.  So, I pursued, why did not a single paper they had written include this finding?  They conferred again and said it was because they didn't know how to measure social interventions and collaborations, SO THEY LEFT THAT PART OUT OF THEIR PUBLISHED WORK.     Basically, they did't know how to compute a "P-value".      Despite that, their semisecret findings are intensely relevant to education.

What I am hoping is that the MET program can at least LOOK AT the area of small groups,  teams,  group cohesion,  and in particular "competition versus collaboration" in the environment.   In terms of Karl Weick or Harvard's Amy Edmondson's work on "safety culture"  -- is the classroom "psychologically safe" for a student to raise her hand and say "I don't understand?"  without ridicule and with support?

All of the work I refer to above focuses on the target of the intervention on the TEAM, not on the individual per se.   In the real world, TEAMS are what fly airplanes and make business decisions. 

It looks to me like the preliminary results released so far support the idea that the best teachers build community in their classrooms, psychologically safe environments to be open within,  mutually supportive environments (peer to peer) not just teacher-to-student.

Basically,  the published results treat the situation no differently than if a teacher was really simply surrounded by 30 computer consoles, and was multiplexing his or her time tutoring the students at the other end of the computer connection -- the entire social structure of a "classroom", and more precisely, NOT the room, NOT the fixtures, NOT the books, but the OTHER STUDENTS has been left out of the model. 

Unless the other students are unruly or disruptive.  The other students are viewed simply as a competition on the teacher's time,  a drain on resources, something we'd do best if we could simply LIMIT the number of students per classroom and per teacher.

I am strongly suggesting that the best teachers in fact turn their liabilities into assets,  turn students into resources, and turn the entire class-worth of social support and approval into an engine that can help each student in that CLASS (and that classroom) learn new material and debug gaps in understanding of prior material.

The measures stated so far are essentially blind to that dimension.    I feel this is akin to the disastrous search pulsars, which are strobe-like sources of energy in the sky,   second in brightness only to the sun -- but they were totally missed by radio astronomers for decades because everyone knew such things didn't exist, so they short-circuited any data that might reveal them.

Yes there is a teacher, and a student (times N) and a classROOM.  But there is also a "class" - a living, breathing,  multiperson social composite organism in that space. That is both something to be reckoned with, and a resource, and a potential intervention point.

On secrecy and surprise

After the mathematician turned jungle explorer had an affair with the chief's beautiful daughter, the chief pondered a suitable punishment.  "You will be executed at dawn some day in the next week such that it will be a surprise," he declared, and the explorer was put in jail on Sunday evening to contemplate his fate.  

The chief was known to be a man of his word, so the logic engines began to whir. Maybe there was a way out of this mess after all.  He figured that he couldn't be killed on the final day,  next Sunday at dawn, because if he had made it that far, it would no longer be a surprise.  That ruled out Sunday.  Well, how about Saturday?  Since Sunday was out of the question, if he survived till Saturday, THAT would no longer be a surprise. So Saturday was out of the question as well.   Curiously,  so therefore was Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, and even Monday.   In fact,  no day would be a surpise!

At dawn on Monday he smiled, knowing he was safe, and, as the Chief's men arrived and proceeded to execute him, he was indeed surprised.

There are many situations in which secrecy is not required in order to achieve "surprise".

In any contest in which your opponent is simply unable to believe that you are doing something, call it "X", you can simply continue to do that and your opponent will suffer the damages caused by your use of "surprise".  If you subscribe to Liddell Hart's rules of strategy, and you believe the element of surprise is a key component, this does not mean automatically, as has been assumed, that therefore you require secrecy of operations.

I say this looking at the current furor over WikiLeaks.  While most policy gurus are fighting over how and where to apply pressure to stop the leaks, I'd like to step back a few more steps and consider the case where we adopt a strategy that is immune to leaks -- not because there aren't any, but because they don't matter.

It seems to be taken as an unquestioned tenet of action that the optimum behaviors occur in the darkest dark,  with maximum security and secrecy surrounding them.    Let me challenge that head on, and say, frankly, hogwash.

Let me propose instead an alternative tenet and rule of operations, which says that the optimum behaviors occur in the brightest sunlight, and have no need for secrecy -- which is good, because secrecy is increasingly impossible to obtain.   The very nature of secrecy requires compartmentalization and the creation of silos of knowledge and action, which are directly in the way of any kind of large scale coherence of thought or action.

Now, the idea of abandoning secrecy strikes one like the idea of "open-source" software -- our first reaction is that such a thing is patently absurd and couldn't possibly work.    But,  we are increasingly aware that open source software not only works, but works better and more reliably than software developed in tight corporate secrecy.   Something is apparently wrong with our mental lenses and insights, because this comes as a surprise to us.

And,  despite being front-page news,  every time we see it it comes as a surprise.   It is itself an example of something that can hide in plain sight because our mental model's blind spot falls directly on top of it, shielding it from our sight.

There's more of that going around than you would think.  In fact, as Thomas Kuhn (Structure of Scientific Revolutions) would agree, anything that goes against the prevailing paradigm ( effectively, the current narrative, story, or myth) is, de facto, invisible.  It is either not seen at all, or when it is forced upon our consciousness, it evaporates quickly leaving no trace or change in our model of the world.

There is these days a transition in management thinking from McGregor's Theory X ( people are disruptive idiots who need a strong whip hand and know zilch and don't care) to Theory Y (people are caring allies who know a lot and if left to their own devices will help out.)    There is much evidence that open-management models work better for many kinds of tasks,    because facts known by the "lower" levels of the organization are no longer kept secret from the top level of the organization.   More to the point, those "in power" are more willing to listen, and once they listen, are no longer surprised by actual intelligence from below.

Some threads come together here when we try to take these facts and apply them to pondering what national policy should be regarding secrecy of operations.

First - if secrecy is abandoned as a policy,  then we have a chance that the left hand will know what the right hand is doing.    I'd affirm that as a requirement for success, and not an easy one to achieve in these days of leaky on-line systems that we attempt to surround with expensive and intricate layers of nested security that only have one sure property -- they are a pain in the ass in terms of doing one's job.

Second,  if we continually are honest and open about what we are doing and why,  after a while this can serve as a basis for trust,  which, as writers in social capital have noted, will lower the transaction costs for every event.We are far more likely to find willing allies if they actually believed, based on observation, that we were being honest and sincere and open and capable of doing what we said we'd do.

But, a contrary thought goes, wouldn't that mean we would lose all the benefits of deception and surprise?

As to surprise,as I mentioned above, it is possible to maintain perfect surprise in plain sight, if your behavior is contrary to what your opponent believes it must surely be. If our opponents believe we are liars and thieves, then any action we take which is honest and fair will come as a surprise to them.    We do not lose the strategic and tactical benefit of "surprise" by being completely open.

How about deception.  Isn't it true that the best outcomes of negotiations or diplomacy arise through use of clever bluffs and lies and deceptions?

Actually, the latest word on negotiations is that  where interests are admitted and facts are not hidden, open negotiations can lead to and often do lead to far better outcomes for both parties than negotiations based on bad faith. 

But surely diplomacy depends on lies or at least silence that preserves a lie, doesn't it?

Let's look at an example. When your girlfriend asks if you like her haircut or recipe for stew, and you can't stand it, aren't you better off lying about it?  What about the impact of facing that new haircut and that stew for supper every week from then on  -- is that going to strengthen and  improve the relationship?

It is no longer obvious, at least to me,  that diplomacy requires lies in order to function.  Diplomacy doesn't require lies unless your entire behavior and being is one huge lie, and you are terrified of being "found out".  It is possible to disagree with someone "diplomatically". The diplomacy per se is in how the response is delivered, the human context surrounding it,  not in the content of the response.

It is possible to say "I don't like the haircut but, listen, it doesn't really matter because I really love YOU so much and I'm just blown away by the effort you put into getting it to make me happy."  That can work.  That is what diplomacy can still be about -- knowing how to disagree without it being disruptive.

This is hardly a comprehensive analysis of this subject, but I put it on the discussion table anyway.  Maybe,  expending our treasure to protect our shield of lies and deceptions is not the most effective strategy available to us.

Maybe, long term, we'd be better served, both internally and externally, by taking down the massive shield of secrecy and putting our energies into being worthy and reliable allies.

Comments welcome, public or private.

Kindle is to book as Electronic Health Record is to ... what?

Dan Newman writes in todays WSJ on why he does NOT want a Kindle for Christmas, and it's worth a read. Excerpts below:
(A Kindle for Christmas? Spare me!)

I should be the perfect candidate for an e-reader: I own thousands of books, lack space for more and often schlep several heavy volumes in my bag. So when I begged my family to refrain from getting me a Kindle for Christmas, they were confounded.
[snip] 

While a search function is useful, it also points to a flaw in the Kindle: All the pages are alike, to the extent that there are pages at all. 


I remember passages by where they are in my books—this or that detail is two-thirds of the way through, on the bottom left. That physical memory runs deep.

... I've seen her set down a dozen stiff-backed Little Golden Books before a group of adults. They chatted with delight as they held old copies of ..  childhood favorites. "The physical book holds meaning," says Ms. Kroupa. "If I were to bring a modern edition of 'Dumbo,' it wouldn't elicit nearly the same response."

Print editions enable shared experiences in ways unavailable to electronic versions. I'm no snoop, but one of the first things I do when I enter a home is scan the bookshelves. As often as not, that sparks conversation about the interests of my hosts and about what they've read and hope to read. They invariably pull out other books, some inscribed, and hold them in their hands while we talk.

That experience simply can't happen crouching over a hard-drive. Imagine entering a living room and saying: "Hey! Mind if I scroll through your Kindle?"

A book is more than a shell for words: It's a box whose magic starts at its real-world dimensions. No other common item so lacks a standardized size, and that makes individual books memorable. ... Maybe I'm a Luddite because I feel sorry for children who read "Goodnight Moon" on a phone. And perhaps I'm a softie for hoarding my torn copy of "Huck Finn," a gift from my grandfather, with an inscription that still makes my eyes water.

I could tell you what it says. But it's best to read with the book held in your own hands.

Mr. Newman is a writer at work on his first novel.

I'm with Dan.   I have all my old class textbooks, heavily annotated, and know where to find a passage or equation by where it is on the page, and about where in the book that is. And the book is this big and blue and this tall and here it is and .... here's the passage I wanted to show you....  etc.

Given my focus on Electronic Health Records (EHR) , and trying to articulate what is is that's so subtle and at the same time so blatantly wrong with them,   I noted his description above.

... a flaw in the Kindle: All the pages are alike, to the extent that there are pages at all. 

It is, of course, a "given" that the pages of an EHR look alike.   In fact, the pages of every patient look alike. In fact, if designed "correctly" according to modern theory of User Interface design,  the pages will also look pretty much like your email, your word-processor, your spreadsheet, and other familiar paradigms, so it is "easy to use".

It is this "feature" which in my mind is a "bug" -- it makes the chart and the structure in it extremely easy for a computer to read and process, being as it is all "machine readable" -- but it makes it all merge into a single huge identical "chart" for a human doctor or nurse, and therefore any given patient's story becomes exquisitely forgettable.

When I pick up a book, by the time I have it open the nature of the book has brought back to mind all of the contents, that were filed,  (technically "hashed"),  based on the color, size, weight, smell, font, margins, and other distinguishing characteristics of that specific book.  This makes it easy for me to store and recall it as a single associated unit.   The question is, when a doctor opens the EHR "chart" on a patient,  is what he or she sees sufficiently distinctive that it instantly brings back to mind the contents of the patient's story?  Almost certainly not.

Does it mattter?  I think so, for the same reason that memorizing sacred writings or poetry or songs is a very different thing than looking them up.   Memorized stuff goes into a state where other things are continually compared against it, and it against them,  sometimes adding to them.    A fully-internalized patient story will go where, weeks later in the shower, something will go "click" and it will pop back into consciousness with an answer to your unspoken suspicion that there is something else going on, something wrong with the glib initial diagnosis, but you couldn't put your finger on it. That kind of error can get fixed, in other words.

The EHR stands a risk of the equivalent of being so busy taking pictures of your vacation or birthday party that you forgot to HAVE a vacation or birthday party.    Yes, you end up with pictures.  Yes, they probably are "more accurate" than your memory.  But they are not the same thing as a memory, at all.

Designers go to great lengths to put the name and 9 or ten digit patient identifier on every "screen", so that there is no confusion as to who this data pertains to.       Names, and 10 digit identifiers are not processed in the same part of the brain as, say, a photograph of the patient.

Maybe, at a minimum, a photograph of the patient should accompany every screen, so that the other part of our brain, that associates facts and builds a narrative,  is fed instead of being starved by the system.  Then when we see the patient walk in the room, we don't have to ask for their story -- it leaps to mind full-blown already.   We've associated it with something that is unique for human beings (a photo) instead of with something that all looks alike to human beings (a ten-digit ID).


RWS
Ann Arbor

Math education, discipline, and catching up to Shanghai

This is a much shorter version of a recent post on math education. I'd like to challenge a basic assumption behind the solutions presented to teaching math and physics.

I was a physics and astrophysics undergraduate major in college. I love math and physics, couldn't get enough of it.    On one exam, as a senior, we were allowed to bring in a 3x5 inch notecard with laws of physics on it.   We didn't need the entire card.   Physics is almost entirely approaches and derivations, generally using math,  from very few basic laws.

After conceptually isolating and extracting a subset of the world as a model, the math involves labeling the parts of the model, symbolically manipulating the model into a new state, and then reasoning from the new state back to the real world to see if what you just derived actually works in practice.   The math, to me, makes much more sense in a context where it is connected to reality at each end than where it is simply floating in space as something to learn on its own.  Also, its quite relevant to realize that the process of model building and dissecting a model out of context is a crucial step to this actually being useful in the real world,  can easily be done wrong,  and is a part where system dynamics experience could be helpful.

Regardless,   the math involved is primarily an activity of manipulating strings of symbols.   This is not required by mathematics, but is typically what is used.

And therein lies the problem.  If our practices had grown up after the development of image processing hardware, it's possible we would go about this a different way, and that battle rages in artificial intelligence today.  Here's why:  images are robust against noise, and symbol strings are not.

I can take a picture of George Washington on a $1 bill and randomly change half the pixels to black or white, and a human can still see George there.  Images are, for the most part, quite forgiving of point-wise errors.  They are also quite dense in information, or can be.  ("One picture is worth 1000 words", etc.).

Symbol-string manipulation on the other hand is exquisitely sensitive to point-noise.  If I randomly change one symbol in the middle of a derivation to something else,  the entire derivation becomes instantly worthless.  It is not even "mostly right" -- it is simply wrong.

So, in order to use symbol-string manipulation successfully, a huge amount of self-discipline, structure, and orderly behavior is required.  This is not negotiable.

For whatever reasons and whatever you think of it,  students in the USA today are not, in general,  capable of such self-discipline.  The culture as a whole not only does not support it, but is actively hostile to such behavior,  unlike in Shanghai, to pick an example from the news.   A long discussion of psychosocial determinants of "self-discipline" is out of place here, but I'll simply assert that much current thinking puts the determinants "outside the box"  and outside the "student" and says that,  in the absence of a strong cultural support system,  an "individual" is simply not capable of intense self-control.   

The point is, however, that there is no way that students, lacking self-control, can ever possibly utilize mathematical techniques of symbol string processing and get correct results,  or get any kind of encouraging feedback.    It won't work. It can't work.  It can't be made to work.  "Close" doesn't cut it.

In short,  due to the nature of symbol-processing,  "self-discipline" is a necessary pre-requisite for math, which is a pre-requisite for physics and other hard sciences.  The discussion about HOW to teach math is therefore effectively irrelevant, to all except a few lucky teachers in classes with students who are, in fact, psychosocially and culturally prepared for the subject.

I pursue this line of thought somewhat further here:
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2010/12/rails-across-swamp-why-math-education.html

In short, I conclude there that nationally we are not likely to solve the self-discipline problem in the next generation, at the rate we are going, and if we wish to "catch up" with the Chinese we need to either figure out a new mathematics using image processing or some other technique that is, in fact, robust under noise,   or we need to start working as small clusters or teams of individuals structured so that the team is noise-resistant, despite the error-proclivity of each member.  Again that is a total shift in the focus of education, to see the intended "learner" is a team, not an individual.  

Of course, teams have far more places to "put" learning than do individuals.   The Institute of Medicine,  interestingly enough, recently concluded that changes in health care practices should be focused on changing the behavior of "Microsystems" -- small teams of people who work as one to accomplish tasks -- not on trying to change individuals,  based on increasing evidence that changing individuals doesn't really work.    In safety engineering,  we find results showing that, say, 74% of commercial aircraft "accidents" occur on the very first day that that TEAM of individuals attempted to work as a TEAM,  despite their individual professional expertise.  (Source:Bryan Sexton, Johns Hopkins).

The real social leap would be letting a team, with a corporate identity, take over the slot called a "job" which we currently allocate only to "individuals".   This may be facilitated by having the team teleworking, so that additional desks are not required.  Massive social change is required for this to be implemented, although less, I think, than that required to restore a culture that supports discipline to two generations that reject it out of hand as a life-style to be admired.

Unless this problem,  separable from "physics" and "math" is addressed, it seems purely academic to argue about how to teach "math" in the abstract.   Students will continue to blame physics or math for being "hard" subjects conceptually, when in point of fact they are failing at a different point in the system.   Physics, per se, is actually quite easy, if one is already fluent in math.  And math, I'm asserting, is conceptually not that difficult either, in context,  but is in practice essentially impossible due to lack of the required self-discipline.

Wade Schuette
Ann Arbor, MI

Rails across a swamp - why math education is a waste of time in America

We've had a fascinating discussion of what constitutes core competencies and concepts in math, and now physics education.   I myself had benefit of one of the USA's top-10 high-schools,   and was an undergraduate Physics major, and just love math and physics.   I've also struggled to teach this skill and love to people I've tutored or taught.

On reflecting on the struggle,  and how to overcome it,  I think it might be worth pondering together whether we can separate out practices from concepts, and address them separately.

My own sense is that the concepts in physics and math are not that impenetrable or alien to children.  As college seniors we were allowed to bring a 3x5 notecard to an open-book exam once,  and it was not that difficult to put ALL college physics onto that card.  There's not that many equations or concepts -- almost everything is implications and derivations from them.  It's not nearly as full of separate islands of disconnected concepts and "facts" as history or biology or chemistry.  And, what concepts there are can be demonstrated in videos and experienced in person or on-line in a simulated experimental world.

To me, it's way way easier than "What did Hemmingway really mean when he used the image of the fisherman?"  or "Please disentangle the things Islam and Christianity agree on and those they disagree on."

So, why is it so "hard" then?

I submit that the problem is actually subtle, but also staring us in the face, so that, once seen, it becomes easy to continue seeing.

First, let me slightly oversimplify physics and math by modeling the activity as follows:    We know some things about the world, and there is something else we are now curious about.   It's hard, expensive, and possibly dangerous to simply go look or try stuff, so we want something easier, cheaper and safer.

So we circumscribe and transform what we're sure of in the real-world into a simplified abstract model, consisting of "facts" and "symbols" and "equations" and "rules".    Then, we can use some process to do two things, in an order that depends on our sophistication -- one is to "fit" the model's parameters to the real world, and the other is to "extend" the model, or play it out, or transform it so that it reaches to the part of the world we are curious about.    Either way, once the abstract model now is extended to that part of space,  we then can un-abstract it back into real stuff and see how well we did,  or build the thing, or look for the effect, or whatever our goal was.

For the part of life we have, for sociological and psychological reasons called "the hard sciences",  this process is relatively easy.   We CAN disentangle a part of the world from context,   build a model for it,  transform the model, fit one end to reality and read out the other end as our new insight about what "should be true" if our model is valid and no new physical laws have swung into play.  We conclude that "If we build the wing shaped like this, or the bridge shaped like that, it should work" and try it and it does and life is good.

The hard part of this has to do with the nature of the representation of facts and relationships as strings of symbols.  Right there we should stop and consider what we're doing, and historically we have not done that.

Let me oversimplify a huge controversy in the artificial intelligence community by saying that there are two ways to represent stuff:   as symbols and as images.    Each representation has some processes and these days,  hardware which can do the heavy lifting for you.

Images... I love images.   You can take a picture of George Washington on a dollar bill, say,  and randomly change half the pixels to white, or black, and you can still recognize Georgie boy.   We can say images are both packed with information ( a "thousand words") and robust against some types of "noise".   Images are, in that sense, "forgiving".    We can, in many ways, be sloppy about our collection process and our transformation process and still come out with the correct answer.

Symbols and symbol strings,such as equations.  This is a different story.  This type of representation and processing is exquisitely sensitive to noise or what one might call "error".     A single point-wise error in even one symbol can, and almost always will, make the remaining 5 pages of work totally useless.

I would submit for consideration that this is the crux of the "problem", the shoals upon which our students are smashing their conceptual boats and sinking.

It has nothing to do with the concepts of physics.  It has, in the end, very little to do even with the concepts of mathematics.  It has, however, a very great deal to do with the error-sensitivity of modeling and symbol processing.

The reason this is a problem is that our students today have no basis in the rest of their lives for being the type of compulsively neat quadruple-checking each and every step detail-obsessive workers that symbol-processing demands in order to work at all.

We are trying to lay precise rail-road tracks across a thinly-encrusted swamp of sloppy behavior, and, frankly,  that simply does not work, and cannot be made to work.   Unlike image processing, symbol processing does not allow a "close enough" attack to "mostly work".

It is a whole other discussion of what psychosocial context and cultural factors,  habits, training, experience, group memberships, expectations, value systems, sports experience,  and other things come into play in making it possible, or likely, or almost certain that a person can impose on an activity a high degree of neatness and structure.

What is clear, I submit, is that such capacity is an absolute, non-negotiable requirement for "doing math and science", at least mediated through symbol processing.

So, the policy and practice implications of that strong assertion are enormous. Either we bite the bullet and figure out what it takes to accomplish "self-discipline", or we should abandon all pretense that we can "teach math and science".

At this point,  self-discipline can probably be taught only by a continuous series of successful experiences using it to solve problems, which means we need to go way back before calculus, before stats, before algebra and get things mastery-learned to a higher degree of certainty starting with addition.

Put it a different way -- if the closest tolerance your machine-shop can give you is plus-or-minus ten percent on the dimensions you specify for parts,  you should abandon the idea that you are going to build a jet engine.

This is a problem that is completely distinct from questions of what shape the parts should be,  or engine design,  or propulsion, etc.

Either we should figure out processes that will work despite sloppy parts, (maybe a variant of image processing?) -- a sort of Loc-blocks of the mind that makes straight what we sort of get roughly straight,  or we should stop wasting all this time and energy on a pointless task.

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

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

Shanghai

So, in other related news, yesterday the results of the world-wide OECD PISA test of 15 year olds were release, showing the USA near the very bottom of the industrialized countries, and Shanghai, the city of 20 million,   scoring at the very top.

See:

Shanghai students ranked best in the world at maths and science

Schoolchildren in Shanghai have been ranked the best in the world at mathematics, science and reading by the leading global study of secondary school performance. 

The counter-narrative told in the USA is that China scores so well because they are basically robots who are into mindless drill and obedience,  at odds with the innovative and creative spirit that has made this country great -- or some such thing.  Every Chinese version of a new car, plane, train, computer, etc is met with the comment that it is a "copy" or "clone" of creative work done elsewhere, most likely here.

Curiously,  they must have one heckuva copy machine, because their "clones" often work 20% faster, more reliably,  less expensively,  or otherwise seem to actually be an "improvement" over the prior version.

There is a mistake being made that confuses "rigor" with "rigidity" and freedom of action with anarchy.  By the "freedom" argument,   anyone trying to run the marathon, or play great basketball or football is hampered by the fact that their bones are "rigid" and they would be much better if only their bones were creatively flexible and not so darned rigid.

The reality is that what they would be if their bones were flexible is ... jellyfish.

For fluidity of graceful and powerful motion, some things should be rigid. 

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

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

This seems to come as a surprise to people, students and teachers alike.   You cannot build a high quality car or plane or computer-program out of parts that are 85% correct, or 95% correct, or 99% correct -- although 99.995% correct might work for machine parts for some things.

However, for mathematical equations and symbol processing systems,  even that is not sufficient. Each symbol, each step, each transformation, each equation must be 100% correct,  or the answer at the bottom of the page is pure rubbish.   Your satellite to Mars will attempt to land 200 feet below the surface, instead of on the surface, which is "pretty close", given the distance to Mars .... but not "close enough."

Either you go with "mastery learning" or you are wasting your time poking at mathematics skills that will never be useful to anyone.   Assuming we want to compete with China,   we need to go for "mastery learning."

And, to put it mildly, we are coming from behind on this issue these days.   Our students are behind. Their teachers were not taught well and are behind, overall, with some clear exceptions.   Given the rate of progress we've seen recently, and the total inability of those in Congress to reason together about, well ... frankly, anything,  it is arguing uphill to think we can get that turned around in less than a generation -- time we simply do not have.

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

OK.  Then let's be creative about this level of the problem.

Working separately, as competing individuals,   we are very unlikely to win or even catch up and break even with the Chinese.  The arguments are above. They look solid to me.

So ... maybe we should put the "image processing" analogy on the table and look long and hard about it. 

Why is it that "image processing" is so strong and immune to damage from "noise" or point-wise error,  unlike the mathematical tools of "symbol processing" ? 

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

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

If we cannot make our INDIVIDUALS reliable,   that doesn't mean we are unable to make COMBINATIONS OF INDIVIDUALS reliable.     Individuals are like symbols;   teams are like images.

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

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

From the point of view of "business" or "commerce",    the only thing that is needed in a particular "slot" or "job" is some person,   OR TEAM OF PEOPLE WORKING AS ONE,  who can take a problem and solve it in the time available. 

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

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

(1) We could try to back-fill remedial high-quality self-discipline into our students and culture PLUS "learn math". ,  or

(2)  We could try to remove the "do your own work separately" constraint and start tackling problems as pairs of somewhat-sloppy but cooperating individuals. 

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

Both of these require a cultural shift to support them.

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

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

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

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

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

Again, I didn't say it was easy -- I suggested it was EASIER THAN THE ALTERNATIVE, given where we're starting. 

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

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

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

My thought is,  yes.  

So,  we should redefine the OECD PISA test to reflect, not what we have assumed all along is the style of education and learning, but what is the 21st century style of operating.

We should allow small-units,  teams,   squads of  2 or more people, working together in the web-context, connected to each other and their friends on the web,   to compete with Chinese individuals working alone, and see who comes out better on THAT test.

That would more likely work if the teams, like SEAL teams in the US Navy,  or cockpit crews in commercial aviation,  trained AS TEAMS.

This is a whole new ballpark of opportunities and pitfalls, but the only ballpark so far that I've seen that has any chance of catching up with the Chinese -- already in motion and already beyond us.

Of course, it's sort of ironic that the Chinese, with a strongly stated national culture of collective action,  turns out to be succeeding best in the area of competitive individual action,   while the USA, by my analysis,  with a strongly stated national culture of competitive individual action,  may turn out to succeed best in the area of collaborative team performance.

I guess, when you're coming from behind, "whatever works" is a good philosophy.  We have a lot of sports where doubling-up on your opponent is a winning strategy, don't we? If they're allowed to use our tactic of "competition" we should be allowed to use their tactic of ganging up on someone, shouldn't we?

Especially if it would even the odds here and give us a "level playing field."

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

Anyway, it IS "American as apple pie and baseball."   Baseball is a game where players learn how to collaborate with each other so that their TEAM can "cover the bases" and "compete".

Yeah -- Bill Gates, are you listening?  We need an international competition on CONNECTED-TEAM-ENTRIES into things like the OECD Exam.

You pick your team size,  you are allowed to be connected to the web, it's open book, open notes, open cell-phone,  ok to consult with each other.   Then we can see who can field a better "team".

And you know why that would be better? Because that's EXACTLY what international business competition is about.   You get to pick your size.  You get to pick your structure.  You get to pick your hardware.  You get to network.  NOW, let's see who can solve a real world business problem and take advantage of a real world opportunity faster and more effectively.

So, isn't that what our "schooling" should be preparing us for by running us through it over and over?