A female version of one of the main characters in the film

I finally got around to watching Zootopia a couple of nights ago.  I’d argue that it’s the first children’s cartoon based on the idea of v-Meme evolution — at least in my experience.  The essential plot is that animals have not so much evolved genetically — they’re still identifiable as bunnies, shrews, Cape buffalos and the like.  But they have evolved memetically — there’s an integration of social order and a lack of predation among the 10% of the population that used to have the other 90% for lunch. Though the writers try to create a dichotomous predator/prey world to drive the story line, the reality is that Zootopia is already a world filled with independent relationships, and the core plot line is around this as well.  Judy Hopps, the bunny, and Nick Wilde, the fox, are friends with a shared goal, and a critical assessment of each other’s authentic personalities and abilities.

Combo montage of all the Zootopia trailers

There’s some species differentiation portrayed in the film.  The hamsters and lemmings, for example (at least that’s what I think they are!) are the only ones that get their own Habitrail Hyperloop.  But the values communicated across the film are one in profound support of not just Communitarianism — judging each animal not by their species, but by their actions and character — but also a profound examination of the role of self-awareness, and standing up to external manipulations.  We’re talking Global Systemic v-Meme here, folks!

The main villain is a psychopath who uses mental models of predators solely for relational disruption, and does her work through triangulating societal institutions against her targets, with the primary goal of power and control.  Just like we wrote about before here.

Of course, this is a Disney/Pixar movie, so there’s the typical Hero’s Journey (with a couple of twists) plot line for the main character — rabbit Judy Hopps.  What’s interesting here, though, is that the screenwriters juxtapose differently abled animals in scenes like the police training, and really stress the idea of the individual taking advantage of their unique configurations.  Very data driven indeed.

The movie wraps up with a Disney song — here again, we are seeing some very interesting inroads in animation.  Gazelle, the sexy singer, has no top and a big butt.  She’s singing a song praising experiential education that wouldn’t surprise me if it showed up as the main ballad for the next LEAN/Agile conference.  Take a look at this stanza!

I’ll keep on making those new mistakes
I’ll keep on making them every day
Those new mistakes

By far, though, from a Global Holistic perspective, what’s interesting is how the social physics of a functional, multicultural society are naturally emergent and propagate from the v-Meme set.  Everyone has mass transportation that fits them.  Food exists and is redistributed appropriately.  There are deviant actors, but legal scaffolding (as in the Zootopia police department) exists to manage them.  Inappropriate Authoritarian behavior is prosecuted — Zootopia is not a place where everyone always does the right thing, all the time.  The movie is ostensibly about confronting bias — but what it really is about is an evolution to individuation, vital for real, functional communitarian behavior. The movie designers worked for five years on this, working through, in an open, collaborative, empathetic fashion, the inconsistencies that had to be dispensed with for the movie to be a template for a positive future.  The effort shows, and serves as a lesson in the time it takes for any process to create that level of Global system continuity.

Zootopia may be fantastic, but for a cartoon, it shows the necessary social order for a sustainable future.  There’s not that many differences between Zootopia’s world and our own.  We just have to throw away our misconceptions, our historical in-group/out-group dynamics, make friendships a priority, and, well, empathetically evolve.  Who’d a thunk?

Further Reading/Watching:  For a look into a darker side of how control can creep in when we refuse to allow memetics to function, check out this storyboard of a Zootopia world that is decidedly more dystopian, where in order for the predators to be safe, they have to have a shock collar.  Interesting how one bifurcation can head a society down a completely different, devolutionary path.  

I went ahead and watched the whole documentary.  It’s actually really excellent from a progressive management point-of-view.  For those interested in how diverse workplace dynamics create positive visions where larger coherence is the goal, the whole documentary is really a must-watch.

Alicia, Birthday 2015, Chinook, WA

As a professor and a pedagogical expert — it’s my day job — I’m constantly pondering what I need to do to make my classes more effective for more of my students.  I mostly just run my Industrial Design Clinic (IDC) now, which is the capstone class for engineers in my department — the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, I go out and solicit projects from industry and NGOs, and the students are required to complete them in order to graduate.

The IDC started small — I used to have two sections of 15-18 students a semester.  But for lots of complex reasons, we’re now graduating far more.  Last semester, I had 90 kids working on multiple projects.  Needless to say, it can be very taxing dealing with so many, and in order to maintain the individual performance of all the students, I have had to evolve.  People ask me what it’s like, and I complain, because it is indeed exhausting.  I tell them I’m either a Deist God or the Pope, which are actually interesting mental models that describe how I do what I do.

As I collect the projects for the class, the sponsors are also given meta-scripts about how they are to deal with the students.  For example, the typical relationship for an externally funded and acquired project is the person on the outside in industry should act like a mentor.  I tell them they can’t do that — they have to act like a customer.  But it’s a self-aware customer, and since most of them are engineers, and many are also ex-students, they know that the limits of the role.  The idea is that if the students really stumble, they can shift back to mentorship, because we all want the kids to get the work done.  That’s the Performance v-Meme goal.

By being the Deist God — or more descriptively, the Watchmaker God, I set up the world.  And then at the beginning of the semester, I hit the start button, the students are dumped into the world, and the watch runs.  In Deism, there’s a distinction between a ‘cold’ God and a ‘warm’ God — completely non-interventionist vs. modestly interventionist.  I’m definitely on the ‘warm’ side.  Of course, the sponsors and I talk (they’re usually my friends by this point.) But since the world I’ve set up for the class is pretty much complete, my expectation is that by the middle of the semester, I’m going to be a ‘cold’ God again, and they will be independent of me save for some university paperwork and constant encouragement.

The other analogy I use is I call myself the Pope.  Pause for a minute and reflect on what you might think that means — it will tell you a lot about your own v-Memes.  Divine authority?  Only channel between people and God?  Not so much.  I tell people, when you have 45 kids in a lab session, they line up and supplicate themselves to you for favors.  I respond in kind — “can I wash your feet?  Bless your baby?  Give some charity?  Sign your P.O.?  Say two rosaries and three extra Our Fathers, and God will hear your prayers.”

These two representations map to the Global Holistic/Turquoise  (the Deist God), and the Bodhisattva/Coral v-Memes.  My student evaluations have never been higher.  But since I’m not actually that evolved myself, it’s pretty exhausting.  I have to stretch. Still, the class is tremendously successful, and much of the rumination on this blog is based on why this strange thing I’ve set up works.  And it sets up fertile soil for applying others’ insights to my own operation.

For example, lately, at the behest of one of my collaborators (shout-out to Ryan!) as I mentioned a couple of posts back, I’ve been listening to Daniel Siegel’s audiobook, The Neurobiology of We.  Siegel’s work as a psychiatrist is mostly centered around healing trauma.  In order to do that, he preaches his version of the concept of integration. Using a soft version of the left-brain and right brain understanding of the brain, he differentiates this into discussing how the left neocortex and right neocortex  — the big, thinking cap that wraps itself around our limbic/emotional system– operates.

Siegel assigns the primary function of the left-brain neocortex to storing and processing explicit knowledge — in his words, the fragments of events and such that the brain receives from the various sensory organs (sight, sound, etc.) and body parts that receive the stimuli from given events, as well as trauma.  He then assigns the primary function of the right-brain neocortex to a holistic, experiential interpretation and integration of those pieces of information on the left.  The integrator is the hippocampus — part of the limbic system that sits between the two and serves important roles in short term memory, and has recently been shown to have interesting effects in spatial and temporal regulation.  

Simplified Siegel Brain — how integration occurs

All of this assembles our autobiographical memory and synthesized narratives.  The hippocampus, this complex part of the limbic system with spatial and temporal scaling functions (now does that sound like an empathy-driven subsystem or what?) creates these linked memories.  You have to have stuff on the left in order to make those more complex, synthesized structures on the right.  That’s important to note.  But in any normal day, the hippocampus is there, doing that processing.  Siegel doesn’t mention it, but I’m sure sleep is also an important part of this.

In Siegel’s explanation of trauma, these three parts, when they don’t work, or integrate information together, create the sadness and potential mental illness that many suffer from. Fair enough.  I’d argue that in order to expand our understanding of trauma, as well as education, we need to add the effect of the amygdala, the part of the brain originally thought responsible just for fear, but turns out to have all sorts of other functionality.  In our modified Siegel Brain model, the amygdala serves as a switch, modulating the function of the hippocampus. 

When the amygdala is on low alert, the hippocampus goes on its merry way, taking in that explicit memory from the left neocortex, and shipping it off in narrative memories to the right.  Did that pie at the bakery that you just smelled remind you of your last Thanksgiving with your favorite Grandma?  That’s just the hippocampus and all the happy parts of your brain doing their thing.  Or if we had to get fancy with language, the hippocampus forming a neural chain across the neocortex, through the corpus callosum, making a synthetic persistent memory that reinforces cognitive bias toward cherry pie!

But an interesting thing happens when, all of the sudden, you are attacked, or upset.  The amygdala springs into action!  It shakes the hippocampus by its lapels, and says “Stop, you stupid hippocampus!  We’re gonna die!  And we need every bit of attention and focus of that short time-scale impulsive function right here!”  So it shuts off that process of transfer.

Trauma itself is an interesting biochemical phenemenon, one that we’ve discussed a little bit in the rest of the blog, and is in itself the subject of much study.  We know that good old fashioned adrenaline gets squirted into the system.  That can give us super strength when we need it.  And then there’s cortisol that’s produced, that speeds up sugar metabolism, for increased energy (flight, anyone?) as well as slowing down inflammation (let’s get those muscles in top shape so we can get out of here!)  I’ll also speculate that the sensory overload backs up creation of any kind of coherent fragments in the left neocortex, and that’s gotta mess with the brain as well.  Think of overheating your computer.

Psychiatrists and psychologists have various remedies for reversing this back-up of stimuli and getting toward homeostasis in the brain.  Not treating trauma leads to continued Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and a host of physical ills. There’s tons more to discuss, and I’ll just recommend that you listen to the rest of Dr. Siegel’s book.

How can we map this to the educational space?  The main takeaway I’d argue from The Neurobiology of We is not just that the insights just apply to trauma.  They also map to how we attempt to educate people.  If you ask any professor what their eventual goal with respect is to students’ education, they’ll almost always say “Critical Thinking”.  Here’s as good a definition as any:

Critical Thinking as Defined by the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, 1987  A statement by Michael Scriven & Richard Paul, presented at the 8th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and Education Reform, Summer 1987. Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.
It entails the examination of those structures or elements of thought implicit in all reasoning: purpose, problem, or question-at-issue; assumptions; concepts; empirical grounding; reasoning leading to conclusions; implications and consequences; objections from alternative viewpoints; and frame of reference. Critical thinking — in being responsive to variable subject matter, issues, and purposes — is incorporated in a family of interwoven modes of thinking, among them: scientific thinking, mathematical thinking, historical thinking, anthropological thinking, economic thinking, moral thinking, and philosophical thinking.

What can Siegel’s model of how the brain processes information from Left to Right help us understand and educate for critical thinking? We really want that holistic, integrated understanding of various subjects, because that enables the agency of the owner of the knowledge to act on that knowledge — be it in their profession, or choices made in their personal or political life.  But what are we actually doing in education?  Here’s a modification of Siegel’s brain applied to a typical lecture-based classroom:

Sage on the Stage

Our professor is now giving a lecture. And trust that most professors do care about student learning, and craft what they deliver so that they think students can understand them.  They don’t want the students to be afraid in class (well, mostly) but they do want the students to walk away with a corrected, coherent picture of what they were supposed to learn from the syllabus.  They’ve got to follow the syllabus, essentially an externally imposed calendar, and that is a big deal — we use it for accreditation, and checking up on each other as well as the students.

Using Siegel’s model, we can see the flaws in this.  The individual student is sitting in class, with information flowing toward their Left Neocortex.  Not much time to synthesize in any autobiographical context, because Mr. Hippocampus would tell you that this takes time.  That’s the purpose of the homework, any professor would tell you, or the idea of doing the readings BEFORE you come to class.  Flip that classroom!  Get those kids to be responsible!

The reality is that the sensory stream (or lack thereof) in the lecture is only incompletely being received.  And that is contaminated by the fact that it’s the first sunny day in a week, and the young women are wearing short dresses, or the guys are in muscle shirts inside the classroom.  Or the professor is telling the same stale jokes, and there are other assignments in other classes, or maybe the student has a job serving slop in the dining hall.  The upshot?  Incoherence in the input stream, as well as a lack of agency and time in the final, synthesized version that ends up in our holistic interpretation dramatically impedes initial learning AND retention.  And because there’s very little attempt toward autobiographical mapping (you need to read this text because it’s IMPORTANT!) the information structure formed in the Right Neocortex is, well, weak, and not anchored very firmly inside the rest of the structure of memory.  If it makes it across the corpus callosum, from Left to Right (and there’s no guarantee it will make it that far,) it’s due to be core-dumped from the Right side after the test.

And then there’s good old Amygdala sitting there in the student’s brain, turning Hippocampus on and off anyway, as the fear creeps up in their throat when they realize the professor is looking for someone to ask a question.  It’ll be a trick question, because the professor is mired deep in their Legalistic v-Meme, which says completeness is the most important thing, and what better way to establish status over these ignorant students than to show them the real breadth of knowledge they’re supposed to know?  There’s only 300 of them in the room.  Always good to get the rest to pay attention — throw one of them up against the figurative intellectual wall.  Forget that the WAY the professor is getting the students to pay attention is by using a trauma response, which sends adrenaline and cortisol into the brains of all the kids who are paying attention, shutting down their hippocampal synthesis process.  And so on.  Nothing like getting to see the ‘Freeze’ response in action!

So let’s see what the Siegel model looks like in traditional engineering education.

Pretty much the same.  But I’ve added a little detail.  Now we have the knowledge structures that come from the social/relational structures typically associated with the v-Memes of engineering professors.  We’ve got everything from Survival information (when are we going to have the next test? When is class over?) to more complex algorithmic processing (calculating the internal temperature of a boiler.) You have to teach this stuff — without basic algorithms for solving engineering problems, your kids are not going to get far.  And there can’t be any interpretation.  Enthalpy is enthalpy, after all.

But no matter how well-meaning all of this is, it’s unlikely to result in students being able to use the material.  The information flow is one-way.  And you still have the problems with overall information corruption.  While you can get past that with repetition and drill, there’s still going to be a piece missing — the autobiographical synthesis.  Once again, the knowledge, if it makes it across the corpus callosum, will be only weakly tethered to personal experience and agency.  And as such, it won’t be the first tool in the toolbox the students reach for when confronted with a ‘real world problem.’  There’s simply no autobiographical context/neural connection to move it off the textbook page.

So, let’s step up our game. Let’s now look at Active Learning in the context of the Siegel model.

We’re starting to see a little improvement.  Now we’ve given the kids a problem to solve, and we’ve also introduced some back-and-forth possible in information flow.  Students, in the context of solving the problem, can do some cognitive laps between Left and Right, asking for details on how to solve a part of the problem.  They’re gaining some experience, because they’re likely working in teams, so they’re sharing information and also triggering different empathetic mechanisms.  Now that we’ve got a little agency, students can use some heuristic paths in solving the problems, so they’re activating their right brains in pulling out autobiographical memory. We still have the base level scaffolding required in the Left Neocortex — see the list of knowledge structures that, of course, map to the relevant v-Memes.

But it’s still one-and-done.  There are twenty groups in the class, and if you’re a student, you don’t want to be with part of a group that can’t solve the problem.  Old Amygdala is still there unless the professor has created special safety sidebars, getting ready to turn off those higher cognitive processes and turn on fear!

Can we step up our game even more?  How about a little LEAN in education and our Siegel Model?

Now we’re getting closer!  By emphasizing quick solutions first, leading to more detailed solutions later, and granted agency for project timescales, as well as the introduction of concepts such as scrums and sprints, we’re finally putting Amygdala to bed, and freeing that synthesis process across the Neocortex.  All the Left Neocortex scaffolding is still there — we still need Young’s Modulus, and how to calculate the Coriolis force.  But we’ve got some heuristics that the professor has given us, and on top of that, we can now look across the other groups and see what problem-solving modes they’re using.  Now we’re really piling up the external empathetic modes as well — mirroring, rational place taking, as well as sharing the pain/ emotional empathy of trying to meet deadlines. Multiple loops of refinement are built into the process, and you already know that no one is going to get it right the first time. LEAN is built on several iterations toward a final solution.  Agile has multi-faceted timescales, with scrums and sprints, empowerment at the conceptual level across the workforce, and rapid multi-level prototyping to get to a point of feedback sooner rather than later.

What’s the next step?  What does reflective practice look like in the context of the Siegel Brain?

Now we’re aware of ourselves and our environment.  We’re grounded in the outside world — what might be actually doable and valid. And through the integration of authentic audiences, we develop the ability to share larger meaning.  Empathetic!

It doesn’t stop there — because the search for enlightenment never stops.  But this is a start.  It’s important to understand that we can’t do everything, always, at our Wise level.  That’s the metacognitive awareness of wisdom talking. But we can structure our lessons so we know what our expectations ought to be.  And how long they’ll stick.

 

Coconut huckers, Kauai, Hawaii, 2007 — they wanted to see if it would end up in California

I know that for some folks, when reading the columns on physics and system dynamics, there’s got to be more than a few that scratch their head and say “Is he really talking about what empathy is to me personally? What does any of this say about love?”

And while I’m the first to argue for the duality of any particular state — empathy included — I don’t want all of you out there to think that in the end, I’ve forgotten those fundamental truths.

So here’s a video about the role of attachment in trauma recovery, the healing power of empathy,  and love.

Happy Sunday!

Black Hornbill, Greater Kruger Park, 2008

Hanging out with friends Jake Leachman and Kevin Vixie. While I was in the bathroom, these two — my fellow mechanical engineering prof, and Big Data mathematician, came up with a great discriminator — guiding principles can’t be proven or disproven.  You can’t disprove calculus.  It works for a range of estimation, and gives answers with a range of validity and reliability dependent on the problem.

Algorithms can be, of course, proven or disproven, and as such are a limited metacognitive set.  Their reach is by necessity bounded.  Guiding principles are metacognitively open systems.  I’m sure this goes back to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.  The other thing to ponder philosophically is how this meshes with the receptivity of given social organizations to either recognize knowledge boundaries or embrace wisdom.

So if you’re looking for a proof for Spiral Dynamics, or my own augmented version of Empathetic Evolution, well, good luck!  They’re supposed to be open systems, and they just make things simpler.  I’m also going to lean on Jake to write up the original Boltzmann/Ernst Mach conflict regarding the existence of atoms in the comments.  It falls out along this lines.

So proud of these students — they designed an autonomous UAV capable of flying 140 miles through waypoints for < $3K .  Using the principles on this blog, of course! 😉

One of the more interesting characters populating the physics community — in particular, the cosmology/Theory of Everything Physical group is Stephen Hawking.  Hawking is a pioneer in understanding black holes, and most of his reputation relates to mathematical predictions of their curious dynamics, as well as links up and down the atomic scale to the world of quantum physics.  He has been honored with just about every prize available to physicists, from the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Fundamental Physics Prize — the most lucrative of all the great prizes.  Hawking has no qualms about speaking his mind on a variety of issues, and for the most part is not bullish on the future of humanity.

And, not surprisingly, the popular media look to someone with a brain as sophisticated as Stephen Hawking as an enlightened individual.  Yet, when reading his pronouncements, it’s tough to tell.  He’s obviously a big-picture thinker, and his attempts on creating a Theory of Everything are far more famous (and that’s an understatement) than those discussed on this blog.  But certain things he says I take deliberate exception to — especially when it comes to contact (potential or real) with extraterrestrial civilizations.    Hawking’s on the record for saying he fears such civilizations will squash us like a bug, citing human history and events like the Columbian Exchange as precedent.  His logic runs like this — “if humans did that kind of thing, we shouldn’t be surprised if aliens would do the same.”

Whether extraterrestrials would kill us upon contact (at least intentionally) is a great opportunity to explore the idea of empathetic evolution as it applies to advanced technology, and understand the social ramifications of creating more and more complex technology, as well as how different social organizations might view such tech.  So let’s start with a couple of concepts that will help us answer this question — will aliens view us as Nutella on a potential lunch sandwich?

Remembering that this blog is about empathy, and related to physical (as opposed to spiritual) properties and development, we can pull everything back to thermodynamics.  Everything we do has to be related to time, space, and energetics.  Expanded empathy/information coherence is related to some combination of these three fundamental variables.  So if we want to travel vast distances, over long (or even short!) times, likely with space travel, we’ll likely need a fair bit of energy to make it happen.

Where will that energy come from? We can gain insight from a famous Russian astrophysicist, Nikolai Kardashev, who came up with the eponymous Kardashev Scale.  The scale runs from Type 0-3, and characterizes the advancement of a civilization by its ability to harness energy at these three different levels.  Implicitly embedded in this is also space and time, as Kardashev geared it to astrophysical exploration.  Type 0, where we are currently at (actually slightly above) uses fossil fuels, and is fundamentally unsustainable.  Type 1 uses the energy of a whole planet; Type 2 an entire star; and Type 3 an entire galaxy.  Dr. Michio Kaku lays down the basics here in this video, using Buck Rogers as a Type 1 civilization, Star Trek as a Type 2, and Star Wars as a Type 3.

But Dr. Kaku leaves some important stuff out.  Implicit in any Type I civilization — or at least the odds are dramatically in that direction — is sustainability.  A Type 1 civilization must not destroy their home planet.  Not destroying their home planet is imperative for the time scales necessary to continue to develop the technology. In fact, sustainability has to become Job One in order for a Type 0 civilization to become a Type 1 civilization, because of those time scales.  We’re seeing the clock running on our own efforts with global warming, for example.  And while, in the video, Dr. Kaku talks about a Type 1 civilization controlling things like earthquakes, methinks that’s a little Authoritarian v-Meme talking.  The reality of a Type 1 civilization is that in order to become one, we have to understand the deep synergies that exist in planetary ecology, geology and so forth. It’s not going to be about controlling the weather.

Here Conway’s Law steps in and gets our minds right.  In order for THAT to happen — in order to understand deeply the issues of planetary ecology, which would then give us the knowledge to design the synergistic life support systems that would enable long-term spaceflight  — we have to have evolved social/relational systems that could share the knowledge to create those physical manifestations.  And that’s going to involve greater empathetic development.  We can’t share enough information across disciplinary boundaries, nor develop the trust necessary to figure out what our responsibilities are to our proposed disciplines, to create the larger transdisciplinary physical systems (and social systems) necessary for long-term spaceflight.

Or develop methods of colonization of hostile environments either.  We can’t get to the idea of terraforming — creating an Earth-like environment on another planet — until we deeply understand our own environment.  In fact, without support of enlightened empathetic scientific communities, we can’t even grasp our metacognitive limits — knowing what we don’t know, or having some idea of the unknown unknowns out there.

There is the possibility that there will exist a genius mind in the future that may discover the secret to accessing hyperspace, and create the highly improbable scenario of a history-changing single-technology solution to spaceflight – a singularity. That would map to the Authoritarian (or possibly Performance) “I” v-Meme.  But even with that one tech discovery, there still has to be an massively integrated approach toward navigation, life support and structures that will require developed empathy to share the information. And that will involve, once again, teams of integrated experts, freely and appropriately sharing knowledge structures up and down the v-Meme/social-relational structure ladder. It’s not just a matter of sharing data, or algorithms.  It’s also going to be a function of sharing heuristics, or multiple heuristics, and doing that at the appropriate time.  That’s going to require mindfulness, and a whole host of skills that Wilber and others call Second Tier thinking.  You’re going to have to be self aware to keep in check why you do what you do.

And when it comes to design processes, we’ve barely scratched the surface.  I wrote here about OpenIDEO, that insists on ingraining cultural relevance with a distinctly Communitarian v-Meme vibe.  That’s really just the beginning. We’ve got to go far past that.  And I, who have put a ton of time in attempting to understanding design processes in this context, get stuck much past the self-reflective, bias-aware designer.

Here’s some speculation.  If we want to move to a Type 1 civilization, we might barely have the roadmap for empathetic development and evolution to get there. We already make complex, reliable moving systems that carry our ecosystem all over the world, in pretty much a continuous fashion.  We call them commercial aircraft. And we have the beginnings of a true Type 1 information network that has emerged rapidly in the last 25 years.  That would be the Internet.  The Internet is rapidly being expanded in the physical world with the Internet of Things, as well as our increasingly complex smart phones. The sensor (and actuator) network that will be attached to all of this will continue to grow, and create its own emergent dynamics.  All this will require more synergistic thinking to process both the data collected, as well as the impact of our actions, and that’s a good thing. So we could make it.

Much past Type 1, though, I have no clue. I’ve confessed that I can’t really get a handle on a more profound understanding of mechanisms for Global Empathy, though I’d bet we’ll have to move past that as well for going to Type 2 civilizations.  That’s going to involve things we can’t really concretely establish (new dimensions?) other than to speculate on using mathematics. String Theory anyone?

The bottom line here is that any society capable of traveling great distances across the interstellar void is going to have to be, well, civilized.  And empathetic.  Because they simply couldn’t make the technology without being that way.  There’s probabilistically no way to make it happen, according to the laws of social physics we lay out on this blog. That means that we don’t have to worry about a Pacific Rim scenario, a la Guillermo del Toro, where aliens open up a crack in the ocean floor attached to an interstellar portal to invade the Earth with large Kaiju Godzilla monsters.  What we can learn from watching movies like Pacific Rim is more how their creators think — which is pretty arbitrary and authoritarian.

Which brings us back to Stephen Hawking.  Originally, when I started thinking about Dr. Hawking, I was predisposed to think ill of him.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out he was a narcissist — lots of awards, and being catered to his entire life because of his brain, even with his disability.  And it’s the height of egocentricity to believe that alien civilizations are going to be patterned on the Spanish conquistadores at this point in time.  No way that this is gonna happen.  But then I read a little more about his life history on the Wikipedia page and this link, and besides have ALS, the debilitating disease that robs your body of muscle function, he was also married for a second time to a woman whom there are allegations of physical abuse.  Could Stephen Hawking be a trauma survivor?  How would that influence his more Survival v-Meme interpretations of alien contact? Hawking refuses to talk about his second marriage.  Could unprocessed, non-integrative trauma affect his larger global worldview?

There are a couple of takeaways in all of this.  First and foremost, aliens aren’t going to eat us. If we go back to our understandings of inter-v-Meme conflict, we likely can’t even understand any communication that alien civilizations might be using, unless they wanted to contact us directly.  They’d have to dumb things down so much – de-synergize them. And they’re going to have a much deeper perspective on what them attempting to communicate with us is going to mean. Empathetic evolution means longer temporal and spatial scales in their thinking.  There would be no surprise if they had evolved a Prime Directive mentality, a la Star Trek.

The second conclusion is a little more surprising.  If we’re going to achieve a Type 1 society, we’re going to have to confront our policies that generate trauma in our societies and organizations. There’s no way we can create a trauma-free society.  I’m not a utopian. But when someone as famous as Albert Einstein says:

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

we might ask ourselves what insights someone like Dr. Hawking might have delivered, had he not been traumatized. Or the other Dr. Hawkings-in-waiting, across our entire world.

 

 

Braden’s first self-caught salmon, Chinook, WA, 2015, with a little help from Les Okonek

One of the most interesting examples of how social/relational structure is empathetic (or non-empathetic) destiny is the Linnaean taxonomy, which rates and ranks biological organisms in a hierarchy, starting at the phylum level and ends up down at the individual species.  Linnaean taxonomy was invented by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist.  If there ever was a relevant example of Conway’s Law in action.  A legalistic classification mapping to a legalistic social structure.  Who woulda thunk?

Linnaeus preceded Darwin temporally by about 100 years.  Linnaeus was mostly active mid 18th century, publishing the Philosophia Botanica in 1751, that significantly raised the bar for taxonomy of species.  He followed that in 1753 with the Species Plantarum, that attempted to name every plant known at the time.  The hierarchical system established with it is still in place.

Darwin, with the idea of temporal descendants, was to come 100 years later.  Coming out of a similar social structure, one can see a natural evolution in thought occurring with the introduction of his theory of natural selection.  Natural selection says the primary genetic transfer mechanism is through inheritance, with modifications in the genome coming through small mutations, selected out by the environment, over time.  If you look at either Linnaean taxonomy, or Darwin’s heritability, not surprisingly, you see trees — fractalized trees, with behaviors replicating up and down different time scales, mapping to changing spatial scales on the animals itself.  As scientific hierarchies grew, so did their observations, going smaller and smaller in differentiation.

If you need a social explanation, that’s why we needed another 140 or so years to get to something far closer to the truth — that arranging taxa and evolution in terms of trees is a mirroring of our scientific organizational social structures.  It’s definitely not the truth, or even close to the end game.  In this piece from the New York Times,written by Michael Pollan, titled Some of My Best Friends are Germs, we get at an image of ourselves that is much closer to the truth.  We’re a micro-biome — bags of bacteria, and what we are human-wise is around 10% of the total, at least gene-wise.

I’m not smart enough to do this, but it would be great if a complexity theorist type decided to look at redundancy and error-coding in the genetic code.  My guess is that incorporating bacteria into our very existence is likely a chemical hack that lets us have far more information encoded in genes that we could if it were all up to our own mitochondria.  Our own system complexity was pushing our own error correcting modes.  The way our bodies found around the complexity limits was to generate chemical empathy with a host of other organisms.  We’d trust them enough to swap a little DNA now and then, but mostly we let them do their thing.

There’s a couple of takeaways from all of this.  One is that once you’re locked into a given knowledge structure system or coding algorithm, you’re going to run into information complexity and error rate limits.  Diversity is going to help with this, if robustness is a goal.  Much less easy to corrupt a weakly coupled system of symbiotic anythings.

The second is that the next time you go to the museum, it’s OK to look at all those tree-like knowledge structures just a little askance.  They came out of the way scientists organized their social communities, which were just a scaled up version of the way scientists organize their brains, for the most part.  It’s not that those knowledge structures can’t be illuminating, or shed insight.  They most certainly can.  But they skip over the synergies and potentials for interaction, because, well, the scientists also do that kind of relational skipping themselves. They have to be almost rubbing shoulders, or bacteria, before the fact that everything is connected hits them between the eyes.

 

An Ariranha, a giant river otter, Pantanal, Brazil, 2006

One of my favorite social theories is Everett Rogers’ Theory of Diffusion of Innovations.  Splitting up categories of innovation adopters along a Gaussian curve, it breaks out individuals into five categories — Innovators/Pioneers, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.  Wikipedia’s post on the theory is a great place to start, for those unfamiliar.  Most of the information discussed below comes from that page.  Rogers wrote his book on the theory and was published in 1962.  The theory itself is extremely innovative, integrating 508 studies from areas as diverse as anthropology, rural sociology, education and medical sociology.  And it has been used across multiple disciplines as well, including organizational studies and complexity management.

Rogers Everett – Based on Rogers, E. (1962) Diffusion of innovations. Free Press, London, NY, USA.

Rogers’ posited a five step process for adoption of an innovation.  Once again, direct from the Wikipedia post, these are:

1. Knowledge — The individual is first exposed to an innovation, but lacks information about the innovation. During this stage the individual has not yet been inspired to find out more information about the innovation.
2. Persuasion — The individual is interested in the innovation and actively seeks related information/details.
3. Decision — The individual takes the concept of the change and weighs the advantages/disadvantages of using the innovation and decides whether to adopt or reject the innovation. Due to the individualistic nature of this stage, Rogers notes that it is the most difficult stage on which to acquire empirical evidence.
4. Implementation — The individual employs the innovation to a varying degree depending on the situation. During this stage the individual also determines the usefulness of the innovation and may search for further information about it.
5. Confirmation — The individual finalizes his/her decision to continue using the innovation. This stage is both intrapersonal (may cause cognitive dissonance) and interpersonal, confirmation the group has made the right decision.

Rogers’ work is seminal, and has stood the test of time.  Originally published in 1962, it has been re-published and updated as recently as 2003, and is still in heavy use today.  However, it is not without its Legalistic/Absolutistic problems.  Some of it, such as the concept of individual choice in adoption, has been looked at empirically, with little agreement.  Individuals choose to adopt for a variety of reasons, none consistent on the topical level.  Those followers of this blog should not be surprised.  The surface level lens almost always fails in broad studies, because many people may state the same reason for a given tech. adoption, but may be motivated for underlying causes that are not captured in a surface level analysis.

So you know what that means — let’s apply our Theory of Empathetic Evolution to the various actors in Rogers Theory and see if that helps!  What comes out is a portrait of social organizations and their dynamics for innovation.  Quelle surprise!

Pioneers/Innovators

Pioneers in any technology have to have, at some level, a core level of egocentricism in order to buck the tide.  Personal fascination, status-seeking and such are all part of someone’s v-Meme make-up when they buy the first electric car on the block, or whatever electronic gadget is newly extant.  There often isn’t any real data on a given product, though there is hype that can be generated in pioneering communities.

What does that mean from a perspective of empathetic evolution?  There’s gotta be some limbic/impulsive core to the Pioneer.  But interestingly enough, there’s likely a fair amount of diverse empathetic development.  Pioneering communities increasingly spring up on the web, where gender and ethnic/racial profiles don’t matter.  It’s fragmented information that’s feeding the beast.  Plus, what’s really interesting is that metacognition and experimentation have to be core values.  People in pioneering communities have to be comfortable with knowing what they don’t know, as well as being aware there are going to be unknown unknowns out there.  Pioneers also, by definition, are not going to be playing Follow the Leader.  So that also gives credence to the notion of some extended empathetic development.  Relationships have to be based on cross-connection around a product or goal.  I’m going to guess that there’s some pretty strong Authoritarian/Performance-based coupling going on. Not much Legalism, though — a Pioneer is likely to be a rule-breaker.

Early Adopters

Early adopters are people with developed metacognitive abilities — knowing what they don’t know — and are likely more data driven than the Pioneers.  They’re the ones scanning the various trade publications and magazines like Wired, looking for what’s new and what the beta is.  I’m going to guess that this involves a lot more data-driven thinking, and places Early Adopters in the Performance-based Communitarian v-Memes.  Empathetic development also means sharing across networks, and duplex information exchange, as choices are likely being made between performance profiles.  There’s also likely to be some mirroring behavior, and I’ll bet that Early Adopters, while being opinion leaders themselves as Rogers noted, are also heavily influenced by more specialized thought leaders.  That means seeking out more data-driven relationships and respect, once again, as often the Pioneers/Innovators are not going to necessarily be famous.

Early Majority

All the things about Early Adopters, but likely with a more Communitarian v-Meme bent.  Early Majority thinkers are less likely to be as comfortable with metacognitive guessing, and while being aware of their position and the need for change, are less likely to take risks.  I’m guessing that Early Majority are likely a little less data-driven (though that plays an important role) and a little more hierarchical in their thinking.  When someone important who’s a thought leader stands up and says it’s time to change, they jump.

Late Majority

Late Majority participants are definitely less comfortable with metacognitive stretch. They’re the ones likely to dismiss any change as a fad.  By the time the Late Majority gets involved, data has now started getting aggregated into belief.  The information on change is everywhere, and likely requires little empathetic exchange to come to a decision.  As such, Late Majority organizations are likely responding to Legalistic/Absolutistic change (such as new regulations), consist of hierarchies and power structures, and are sliding down the empathetic scale.

Laggards

Laggards are everything the Late Majority is, but in spades — belief-based thinkers, who are surprised by performance demands and changes in the regulatory environment.  Change happens to them — it is not something they welcome.  New regulatory environments are something they fight — not look as a method for driving product change and performance.  The millennial change fight over Combined Average Fuel Economy standards are a great example. How did that, in the end, help the U.S. auto industry?

As stated in the Wikipedia article, Laggards also have an aversion to change agents — something that really smacks of Authoritarian thinking, and the metacognitive shrink wrapping that happens in these types of organizations.  Not knowing is a downer to personal status, and that means two things:  a collapse of knowledge to organizational borders, as well as a connected collapse in awareness.  If you need an example of this, one need look no further than the contemporary university.  When one considers the fact that the dominant social structure in universities today is rampant authoritarianism, with a collapse in shared governance, it’s no wonder universities fall further and further behind the needs of contemporary society.  A triple whammy of a non-empathetic social structure, coupled with a lack of more profound societal grounding (aka the Ivory Tower effect) and declining budgets (decreased energetics) does not bode well.

It’s worth the time to read through the Wikipedia/Rogers definitions written below and see how they support the v-Meme analysis above.

1. Innovators – Innovators are willing to take risks, have the highest social status, have financial liquidity, are social and have closest contact to scientific sources and interaction with other innovators. Their risk tolerance allows them to adopt technologies that may ultimately fail. Financial resources help absorb these failures.
2. Early Adopters – These individuals have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the adopter categories. Early adopters have a higher social status, financial liquidity, advanced education and are more socially forward than late adopters. They are more discreet in adoption choices than innovators. They use judicious choice of adoption to help them maintain a central communication position.
3. Early Majority – They adopt an innovation after a varying degree of time that is significantly longer than the innovators and early adopters. Early Majority have above average social status, contact with early adopters and seldom hold positions of opinion leadership in a system (Rogers 1962, p. 283)
4. Late Majority – They adopt an innovation after the average participant. These individuals approach an innovation with a high degree of skepticism and after the majority of society has adopted the innovation. Late Majority are typically skeptical about an innovation, have below average social status, little financial liquidity, in contact with others in late majority and early majority and little opinion leadership.
5. Laggards – They are the last to adopt an innovation. Unlike some of the previous categories, individuals in this category show little to no opinion leadership. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents. Laggards typically tend to be focused on “traditions”, lowest social status, lowest financial liquidity, oldest among adopters, and in contact with only family and close friends.

What’s the takeaway from all this?  The first is that if you want an environment for innovation, you have to have an environment where Innovators and Early Adopters are comfortable and feel safe.  That means fewer titles, less status-based thinking, and an empathetic corporate/institutional culture. Books like more traditional texts like Arthur’s The Nature of Technology — What It Is and How It Evolves support this same premise at a more superficial level as well, with theories that new tech primarily comes out of combinations of old tech.  If that’s true, then the more diverse ideas one has on the table, the more potential combinations.  And then popping down to the deeper level of the Theory of Empathetic Connection, how people connect and what their social structure is Innovation Diffusion destiny.  The more populated your social structure is with Pioneers and Early Adopters, the more likely they can connect and create the innovations your institution needs to survive.

There’s one more thought to ponder in all of this — what kinds of communities do empathy really matter in?  Rogers’ Theory gives insights as well to the formation of titles and belief-based structures.  If things aren’t changing, we can add more and more verbiage to people’s salutations.  It’s a marker of where a company banks its innovation profile when they have a Director of XXX Innovation — and not a good one.

Takeaway:  Rogers’ Theory of Diffusion of Innovation dovetails perfectly with what we’ve been writing about on this blog as far as creating innovation environments.  The addition from our Theory of Empathetic Evolution is the need to emphasize empathy and duplex communications if you want to stay on the Early Adopter part of the curve.  The other big takeaway is to not attack your change agents.  They’re the ones scouting what’s coming next.  And in a world where ‘Next’ is always coming, you need them if you don’t want to end up in the Survival v-Meme.

 

 

My 阿嫲阿公 (Grandmother-in-law), Taipei, Taiwan, 2011

There’s a tremendous video ad that is a must-watch for all designers and ponderers of empathy — a commercial for SoftBank, a Japanese telecommunications giant, about linking technologies for transgenerational communication between a family (with grandkids) in Osaka, and their parents in Tarama, a remote island in the Pacific in Okinawa prefecture.  The video is in Japanese, and apparently the technology shown in the video is not available commercially.  But it’s well worth the pondering for any designer about the temporal dimensions of our rapidly accelerating technological society, as well as our more traditional concepts of spatial/national separation defining what we call culture.  I’d even go so far to say that it’s a must watch.

The storyline of the video is the separation that the family feels is initially framed as spatial — Tarama is a long way, and multiple flights, from Osaka. But it also clearly paints the picture of technological/temporal separation of generations of a family. The youngers are obviously ingratiated in the modern age.  But the grandparents live in the world of legacy technology — they have a black, dial phone (picture below for those that don’t know what that means!)

from BoldOldPhones.com

as well as legacy technology, including a VHS tape player for their TV.

The company pitches solutions not yet commercially available across this transgenerational culture divide.  These include things like a Facebook post aggregator, that prints out for the grandparents an actual newspaper of all the posts; an automatic linear traverse height measurement pole with a CNC stylus to engrave the heights of the grandkids; and a QR code reader that is installed in their VHS Videocassette Recorder that immediately accesses the Cloud for the latest videos of the grandparents when they insert the cassette in the machine; and the rotary phone that when dialed, opens up a video conference on the old folks’ TV with the pertinent party.  It’s pure genius.

Of course, assistive technology for old folks has been around forever — and things like stair lifts, or smart homes, are continuing to ingratiate themselves in our daily lives.  But what’s awesome about this video is that it directly confronts the empathy/connection gap between old and young in our rapidly accelerating technological cultures.

We are used to framing cultures in terms of national identities and spatial separations.  But the reality of the globalized world is that these mental models are themselves becoming outdated.  My son is an anime’/manga buff.  Young people everywhere love Hello Kitty.  The Peanuts’ Snoopy is well-known in Taiwan, even though many have never watched A Charlie Brown Christmas.  One of the very real empathetic separations is temporal separation, and the idea of a modified culture under constant change is now profoundly generational.  Whereas it used to take hundreds of years for cultures to change and evolve, our new tech can create cultural gaps overnight.  Anyone remember Myspace?

For the entrepreneur, such tech opens up new market possibilities by expanding our potential markets to temporal culture separations. And for the educator interested in developing empathy across cultures, instead of flying people across the world to increase empathetic range, there are opportunities here for rational place-taking in our backyard. The obvious side-benefit of developed emotional empathy and deeper compassion are out there as well, waiting for us to act.  I also have to admit curiosity that there may be bio-social aspects of loss of ability to read faces across the different ages.  This may be a larger empathetic issue than we realize.

What has to change for this vision shift to occur is to remove the stigma from those that are, by virtue of age, falling behind the wavefront of tech. evolution.  I’m proposing a hackathon series that confronts this issue.  Any takers?

 

Scene at the Pool, in the Greater Kruger, 2008

One of the more interesting constructs in thermodynamics, and by extension, how we create information and meaning, which this blog is dedicated to,  is the concept of Maxwell’s Demon of the First Kind.  Maxwell’s Demon was a hypothetical construct, proposed by the famous mathematician and scientist James Clerk Maxwell, on how the Second Law of thermodynamics could be violated.  The Second Law is famous because it says “you can’t break even” when it comes to energetics.  If you do something, there’s going to be waste energy, and so you can’t get to some higher state of order without putting in some energy.

Temperature in a given substance, like air, is characterized by the oscillation of molecules inside some given space.  Maxwell proposed that if we had a closed container with two chambers, we could invent a Demon — some little dude, sitting on top of the box.  The Demon controls a door between the two.  When he sees a rapidly moving molecule, he shunts that toward the right chamber. For the ones that are moving slowly, he keeps them  on the left side of the chamber, and only opens the door if he thinks the cold ones on the right can move to the left.  Over time, the right side gets hot, and the left side becomes cold.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons author この利用者は日本語の母語話者です。

Maxwell proposed this as some kind of perpetual motion machine, and there are lots of debates you read about this thought experiment.  The simple argument against this being a perpetual motion machine is that the little green dude needs energy to operate the door, and as such, that energy has to come from somewhere.  So the Second Law of Thermodynamics — you can’t break even — is preserved.

This concept was picked up and used in one of my favorite books — The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.  It’s a part of the sophisticated canon of science fiction for geeks, and one of the most deeply insightful, as far as trends and meta-trends, of all the early science fiction books ever written.  It’s full of word play so math geeks can feel good about themselves as well (we need that now and again!)– though the book, written as kind of its own divine comedy, is much more profound upon multiple readings.

The plot of the book revolves around two meta-robots, called constructors, Klapaucius and Trurl, and their various adventures across the galaxy.  The general plot thesis is that Klapaucius and Trurl end up in a pickle, and then build some kind of infernal device or robot to get themselves out of it.  Lem explores different scenarios in AI, logic, and interestingly enough, societal development, with humor and insight, through these short stories.  My favorite out of all of these is “The Sixth Sally, or how Klapaucius and Trurl create a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg.”  On one of their trans-galactic adventures, our heroes meet the Pirate Pugg — a very different kind of pirate.  He is a pirate with a Ph.D., and instead of wanting jewels or gold, he desires only to steal information.  He captures the two, and holds them for ransom.  Klapaucius and Trurl even offer him a magical machine to create gold out of constituent atoms, but the Pirate Pugg is too smart.  He realizes that once he can create gold consistently out of anything, it will be worthless.

But information?  That’s a different story.  So the robot constructors, in order to free themselves, strike a deal with Pugg.  They set out to create Maxwell’s Demon of the Second Kind.  Different than our more simplistic Demon of the First Kind that only sorted hot and cold, this Demon was designed by our heroes to look into a box of foul air in an old barrel, and out of the infinite number of coalescing and diffusing patterns, pull out only the ones with meaning.  Our Demon of the Second Kind is also equipped with a pen nib, and a roll of semi-infinite paper.  Upon discerning the pattern, the Demon writes furiously (lots and lots of disconnected facts are scrolling by!) and buries the Pirate Pugg in paper.  Pugg has a thousand eyes, and as he is furiously reading all the little snippets of information, tangled in paper, our heroes make their getaway.

from http://english.lem.pl/arround-lem/doodle, by Daniel Mroz (I think!)

 

What interests us today — to give you a glimpse where this is going with regards to Pugg, the Internet, and, believe it or not, empathy — is the idea of a Demon.  In particular, how would we characterize one?  Our First Demon sits up there, eating snacks, essentially coding out a binary sequence of hot and cold on top of his box.  That’s the lowest, and only level of information the Demon can parse out of this scenario, only controlling one box.  The time scales are short — the Demon has to be pretty fast to guess whether the molecule needs to go left or right.  And the spatial scales are down on the molecular level.

How about the energetics?  Well, those have to be pretty low, too, or we’re gonna have some problems with another famous law of physics — Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.  That says when you try to measure something (like the temperature of a given molecule) you’re going to distort the measurement in direct relation to how much energy and time you put into measuring that quantity. I don’t want to get bogged down in the essential physics here, but the short version of our powered, snack-eating Demon is this:  he’s got to be quick, he’s got to be focused, and he can’t spend much energy on each individual molecule, or it will mess everything up.

Now we move up to our Cyberiad heroes, Klapaucius and Trurl.  They are desperately trying to deal with the Pirate Pugg, a most pernicious Pirate with a Ph.D.  He wants facts, and the primary thing about those facts is that he wants them to be true.  Similar to Maxwell’s Demon of the First Kind, which measures atomic oscillations and therefore temperature, Maxwell’s Demon of the Second Kind is grounded deep in reality. But Pugg, with his thousand eyes, wants lots of facts.  He’s not going to be happy with just the temperature equivalent of binary 1s and 0s.  Each of those eyes is self-pivoting, hungry for information, with the mental model of how we traditionally think of information — disconnected fragments.  How does that work?

The Pirate Pugg, by Daniel Mroz for the original Lem text

“and little by little his hundred eyes began to swim and it dawned on him that all this information, entirely true and meaningful in very particular, was absolutely useless, producing such an ungodly confusion that his head ached terribly and his legs trembled.  But the Demon of the Second Kind continued to operate at a speed of three hundred million facts per second, and mile after mile of tape coiled out and gradually buried the Ph.D. irate beneath its windings, wrapping him, as it were, in a paper web, while the tiny diamond-tipped pen shivered and twitched like one insane, and it seemed to Pugg that any minute now he would learn the most fabulous, unheard-of things, things that would open up to him the Ultimate Mystery of Being, so he greedily read everything that flew out from under the diamond nib, the drinking songs of the Quaidacabondish and the sizes of bedroom slippers available on the continent of Cob, with pompons and without, and the number of hairs growing on each brass knuckle of the skew-beezered flummox…

And on, and on.  You get the idea.  Pugg, our Ph.D. pirate says he craves truth.  But what he really wants is data, with an emphasis on maximizing reliability.  Pugg, imbued from saw nose to tail with the Authoritarian v-Meme, is wildly, deliriously ecstatic with the efforts of his Maxwell’s Demon of the Second Kind.  He doesn’t care if there is no shared meaning– he’s an Authoritarian, and he gets to decide, in his own egocentric way, if the facts matter.  And there’s no one in that part of space besides himself anyway.

Because the Maxwell’s Demon of the Second kind is devoted to parsing true knowledge (or what we might call simplistically known knowledge) out of dirty air in a barrel, it is giving him this in the form of knowledge fragments.  These fragments map back to the social/relational empathetic structure (or lack of an evolved one!) with all its silos and lack of synergy extant in the modern academy, in Pugg’s brain.  Or in the case of Pugg, the post-modern academy, Pugg himself having been invented far in the future after all the humans are extinct.  That’s the thing about Authority-based relational structures — they aren’t designed to change.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Like Maxwell’s Original Demon, Lem’s Demon of the Second Kind has inherent temporal, spatial and energetic scales coded into its existence.  Time is short — the Demon has to be able to decipher a true fact in a micro-second, before the pattern dissolves.  Spatial scales are small.  The Demon looks in a barrel of dirty air.  That’s pretty constrained.  And finally, energetically, the Demon has some ability to judge the various strings of molecules.  But most of the energy is spent running the paper tape writer, which very quickly engulfs our Pirate with a Ph.D.

I had originally read The Cyberiad as a graduate student, upon recommendation of my office mate — Wayne Miller, now a Deputy Director of High Performance Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, in California. I had put it aside in my mind until about 20 years ago, a period when I was doing environmental activism.  A friend gave me another book,  The Last Extinction, a collection of essays on biodiversity loss.  In the final essay by  David Ehrenfeld, one of the founders of the field of conservation biology, he compares the Internet to the Pirate Pugg’s Maxwell’s Demon of the Second Kind, saying if we think we’re going to find the answers on, or because of the Internet, we’re not.  We can get inundated with facts and information from all over the world, and it won’t make any difference.  It was — and is — a compelling argument to many, including myself at the time.  Like Pugg, in our modern age, we are buried in the paper tape coming from our Demon of the Second Kind.  We cannot extricate ourselves.

But it is a view that is deeply flawed.  We may still be screwed, extinction-wise.  With increasing population, biodiversity loss, and global warming, there are plenty of days where I’ve got that bad feeling.  But that’s not the Internet’s fault.

A better question to ask is why Ehrenfeld’s view of the Internet is what it is — and why that mental model of the Internet is still so popular.  Why does he think the way he does?  Ehrenfeld was writing this back in 1985, when the Internet was still in its infancy.  Almost no one had any inkling that the Internet would be what it is today.  Yet the notion of the Internet as facts, disconnected, and unable to provide meaning, flows naturally from the Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme set that Ehrenfeld occupies.  It’s what the v-Memes in his head say he HAS to say.  And the other idea — that those flows of information are what will provide answers because individuals with egalitarian access to those perceived knowledge fragments may act on them doesn’t even occur to him. From the viewpoint of those imbued with status from knowing ‘known knowns’ — where Ehrenfeld and most scientists occupy — individuals don’t have agency to make change.  It doesn’t even occur to him that there might be the possibility that other people, being informed might make a difference, or that even the low-level data itself would make a difference to endangered species.

As far as the collective mind of the Internet, which plays out in literally billions of ways on a daily basis, from a molecular physics discussion board, to Yelp, to real-time tracking of sea turtles, there is no conception. Ehrenfeld, himself a professor with a Ph.D., and compellingly, being a founder of conservation biology — a field wholly devoted to connections in nature — identifies himself as the anti-Pugg. Yet to him, there are no Demons that can be invented greater than a Demon of the Second Kind.

But Spiral evolution, mapped with Conway’s Law and the Intermediate Corollary, tells us that this not true.  We can’t know what we don’t know, and we’re limited in understanding what knowledge structures we ourselves can process by the complexity of the social structures, coupled with empathetic development, that we can comprehend.  In fact, we can be part of something bigger than ourselves and still not be aware of what the larger consequence is for aggregate intelligence.  That’s a function of our own empathy.  To use an aviation example, no one person can, any more, know every subsystem in a commercial aircraft.  But a large group of them, structured appropriately, can make one of the most complex systems available to mankind.

So — trust me.  There are higher level Demons.

What would a Demon of the Third Kind look like?  Our theory of Empathetic Development and Spiral Dynamics point the way. That Demon would collect data from off the internet, and process this data with a set of defined algorithms, generating useful meaning or validity. In fact, this happens in many forms today. In Alex Pentland’s book, Social Physics — how Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter , he details the next transition in the v-Meme set of the cutting-edge scientist’s mind.  Pentland, himself a professor at MIT, discusses algorithms and applications that sample data (some of it real-time) and construct adaptive models for  sensing cities, how people pick restaurants, and how to predict stock market behavior. Pentland is busy creating Maxwell’s Demons of the Third Kind, differentiated from Klapaucius’ and Trurl’s creation, by watching the atomized molecules of humanity, running about their daily lives, and processing them through a combination of both algorithms and scaffolded heuristics, to give conclusions that are reliable (they can be repeated) and valid (the results actually mean something in the Real World.)  In the case of disasters, such systems could re-route individuals away from areas in crisis, as well as tell you which parts of a given city are going to be too crowded to get a table at your favorite type of restaurant.

We can go back to the scaling properties discussed earlier with these types of systems to understand how these Demons of the Third Kind have to work.  Most of the applications discussed in Pentland’s book, as far as being reactive, are temporal short-scale, and variable spatial scale.  Information can be collected from all over the country, but it’s typically knowledge fragments from a specific category that are collected.  Energetically, that’s pretty small.  And there are few connections, or modes of being, that are being processed.  It wouldn’t surprise us, once we understand evolution of sentience, for that to be the case.  Taking knowledge fragments and actually extracting meaning from them is a big step up from Pugg and his Demonic pet, whose only raison d’être was to bury the Pirate in paper.

But it’s still not very connected, or empathetic.  Connections in Pentland’s models are explicit, and only imposed by the rule set coming from him and his crew of experts.  And while he pokes and prods at the borders of empathetic understanding, there’s not a single time in the book he even mentions the word.  Not surprising, considering its relative lack of importance in his own social organizations, as well as the fact that he’s collecting points of data off of mobile phones.  Not much opportunity to judge the individual coherence of independent interactions.  He bases many of his beginning arguments on Kahneman’s ‘fast and slow’ non-empathetic thinking, regarding giving people agency.  Guess what — they don’t have much.  Pentland comes down on the side of impulsive ‘fast’ for most thought processes. But because of the fundamental fuzziness and uncertainty in the analysis, he can’t shake any way of classifying humans as connected networks other than lumping them into finer and finer demographic groups.

What that means is that there is plenty of headroom for the invention of a Maxwell’s Demon of the Fourth Kind. What would that look like? A Demon of the Fourth Kind might proceed with a base set of heuristics and look to larger behavioral trends to create deeper understanding of decision-making processes.  Such a Meta-Demon would have to be receptive to identifying emergent strategies — not just data trends — and show connections across social/relational classes.  One might step up from meaningful data aggregation with some kind of functional aggregation, looking at how networks react, and charting information flow.  It’s something to think about.

And if there’s a Demon of the Fourth Kind, it means that there’s a Demon of the Fifth Kind — the Internet itself. In the Internet, all sorts of people, information, groups, heuristics, and algorithms are integrated — from our Pirates Pugg to Daoist masters.  It functions at multiple levels, creating coherences and meaning that are at some level easily identifiable, like the best pizza joint in town, to the principle that school girls, no matter if they live in Nigeria or the United States, should not be raped and captured.  It embodies the empathy of the actors, because that empathy is intrinsic in the social networks that create at least part of it.  In the last week, it was the Internet that exposed beatings of partygoers in Iran, as part of another Islamic crackdown.  It also helped create Donald Trump as we know him.  Not surprisingly, for this particular Demon, empathetic and evolved in ways we can’t understand, timescales are long, and spatial scales extend out to near-Earth orbit, with tiny windows on the galaxy from the Spitzer Space Telescope.  Energetics are summed on a global scale.

I think it’s easy for people to comprehend the fact that the Internet stretches across the Earth.  But when it comes to seeking higher truth — that nested expression of validity, infused with reliability — we have to understand that time scales also are long.  We have a lack of self reflection toward our own personal evolution if we expect larger truths to pop up overnight, like whether or not Donald Trump should be president.  But that’s not the way that our Demon of the Fifth Kind can operate, and obey the fundamental laws of Thermodynamics.  It takes time for larger coherence to emerge out of chaos.

As far as whether our Maxwell’s Demon of the Fifth Kind will save the planet, I’ve got no definite answers.  If I did, it would demonstrate my own lack of metacognition!  And one must remember that Maxwell’s Demons — all of them — only create a given level of scaffolded truth that has to inform our actions.  Yet I’m pretty sure that it’s safe to say we can’t save the planet without it.

What’s Maxwell’s Demon of the Sixth Kind?  Now we start reaching into James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.  The interested reader can pursue the Wikipedia article.  But I’ll stop here!  I’m just not enlightened enough to suggest anything past that!

Takeaway:  We are, of course, all Maxwell’s Demons.  Think about that for a while!  Bring snacks!

 

 

 

 

Sleeping Lion, Manyeleti Game Reserve, Greater Kruger Park, South Africa, 2008

I was over for an after-action review at Boeing two weeks ago, for a shared project with my students called the Boeing AerosPACE program, where virtual teams of students follow a gated design process to produce a small UAV as part of their final, capstone class requirement.  The review was fine — it’s always great to participate in a project with other, talented educators.  But the real news that was confirmed by my Boeing partners was that Boeing is going through another major cutback — somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 management and engineering employees will be laid off, mostly in Washington State, ostensibly because of fierce price competition from Airbus. Reading through the various pieces in the Seattle Times like this one indicate that the folks at the top of Boeing in Chicago don’t seem to have any problems with South Carolina, and no jobs are planned to be cut there.  It’s only in the Puget Sound and the recently relocated folks from the Puget Sound, to Long Beach, CA, that have worries.

It all sounds so familiar.  According to Boeing leadership, Airbus (an international competitor) is kicking Boeing’s butt in getting new orders, and Airbus’ planes are good enough now that there’s no edge for monopolistic competition.  Earnings per share, as well as market share, are going to go down unless Boeing ‘does something’, which always means hacking away at their knowledge and relational infrastructure of high-priced employees in Seattle.  Commercial aircraft are supposedly a low-margin business, and as such, will be subject to the same forces as Tinker Toys and consumer electronics — doomed to move to places where labor is cheap (like South Carolina or China).  These are jobs that would be lost anyway, and if the people in Seattle have any expectation of a higher quality of living through knowledge and practice, well, they better wake up and smell the global competitive coffee. It’s all the neoliberal mental model we’ve been programmed to believe over the years, so we just accept it at face value.

And who can pull apart all the dire financial predictions, anyway?  Not the person on the street — or even empathy-wonky-junkie me.  You just gotta believe.

Fortunately, I have an e-mail pen pal inside the financial analysis community — Richard Aboulafia, vice-president and analyst with the Teal Group, whose paying job is to pull apart these arguments put forward by the aerospace corporate group, and figure out if they’re telling the truth.  In this piece in Forbes, he argues that they’re not.  And there are plenty of knowledge structure signs that they’re either unaware, or fibbing.  BCA CEO Conner is making his persuasive argument for job cutbacks not on data — but anecdotes — which is a typical belief-based mode.  He pitches hard the story from EVA Airlines, the national Taiwanese airline prone to Hello Kitty paint jobs and pillows (I know about all of this because of my Taiwanese wife, who is a loyal customer), who were ready to bail from Boeing to Airbus, and tells the public in this article by Dominic Gates in the Seattle Times. “That’s our reality” says Conner.  The question is more simple than that — is Conner’s reality actually reality?

Hello Kitty Boeing 777-300ER, providing service between Taipei and Paris, credit EVA Airlines website.  Most of the Hello Kitty flights are between Taipei and Asian capitals.

Aboulafia lays out the data succinctly. From his piece,

The problem is that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data.’ Conner’s notion of lost market share is simply not supported by reality.  Last year Boeing delivered 762 jets worth over $60 billion, while Airbus delivered just 635 jets worth $43 billion.  In terms of market share by value, that was BCA’s best performance since 2002.

Orders have been strong too, with 868 received last year. While Airbus scored 1,139, a higher percentage of Boeing’s orders are for more expensive twin aisle jets, meaning a much closer ratio. Also, so far this year Boeing has brought in 107 orders, while Airbus’s net total is just 11. While BCA’s profitability declined last year to a 7.8% operating margin from 10.7% in 2014, much of this was due to an $885 million pre-tax charge on the troubled 747-8 program.  And of course these margins are considerably higher than Airbus’s.

Best of all, as Muilenburg noted, the company’s backlog is extremely robust – 5,758 jetliners. This, too, undercuts Conner’s notion of price pressure as a chronic problem. 

Aboulafia goes on to destroy BCA’s Conner’s argument about aircraft orders, noting that the company has a backlog of orders out at least 7.5 years, at today’s pricing.  And what does that mean?  Last year, Boeing Commercial had the best year it’s had since 2002 as far as making money.  Why would Boeing want to spook investors with talk of a price war, when there really isn’t one?  There’s normal competition, and BCA will need to innovate.  But what about the long-term damage to the organization, from deleting managerial staff, needed to help transition product lines?  Why is Conner doing this, cherry-picking facts to support what could be a layoff of 10% of company staff in the Seattle area?

And what about the long-term damage to Boeing’s reputation in Washington State, that has consistently ponied up tax cut after tax cut just to keep these jobs?  How do you get to be Dennis Muilenburg, the current Boeing CEO of such a large part of our global economy and have that failure of vision?  You can track his career here.  One might point to signs that someone like Muilenburg might be untethered from the civil aviation sector. His career path went up through the defense ranks. But there’s lots of global developmental overlap with coordination with Boeing global services and such that Muilenburg oversaw. If anything, this shows that relying on understanding the mind of one individual in such a large organization — even if that person is the CEO — is a flawed path toward predicting what the person would do.  When Muilenburg replaced Jim McNerney, whose past career path had led up not through making planes, but making Sticky Notes at 3M, many people I knew breathed a sigh of relief.  Finally — a CEO that knew how to build planes.

Yet the path that Harry Stonecipher, former McDonnell Douglas CEO started, and followers like McNerney kept the company on still continues.  And to understand that, one must look for different understandings.  We’ve been raised here in the U.S. that the leader and the money are everything — that Conner, McNerney, and Muilenburg all must be doing whatever it is that they’re doing to maximize the bottom line.  But what does it mean if they’re not, on any time scale?  Boeing is simply too large for anyone to consider as an acquisition target, so the notion of gutting 8000 jobs to make the company more desirable to sell doesn’t make sense.  And no one’s talking about breaking up the megalith and selling off parts, a la Carl Icahn. Even if it were possible, Boeing itself demonstrated, with the 787 program, what happens when you de-verticalize your production chain.  You end up with disaster after disaster that pushed the 787 launch back by 3 years.

The only way you can understand what’s going on is through looking at the underlying social structure of the transition Boeing underwent when Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, merged with a stock swap in 1997. Up to that point in time, Boeing had mostly made airliners, and McDonnell Douglas had made fighter aircraft — two very different kinds of aircraft.  As we’ve discussed before on this blog, commercial aircraft have to maximize validity of multiple modes (design through construction through operation) of the company in order to perform. It’s a complex systems coordination problem — getting a couple of million parts to fly through the air over Greenland, land in Amsterdam, take on a tank of Jet-A kerosene, and turn around and do it over again.  No commercial aircraft makes money on the ground, and everything throughout the life cycle of the plane is designed to keep that $200M investment in the air.  Something gravity is not fond of.

In order to pull that off, Boeing (or at least the commercial division) had to evolve socially. Though Boeing Commercial is largely a Legalistic/Performance-based hierarchy, intertwined as it is with the FAA, its people are connected and interact with people all over the world.  There’s hardly a country on the planet with a national airline that doesn’t have a couple of Boeing airplanes.  I have former students who work in aircraft delivery, and that involves ingratiating yourself in whatever culture so that when you get in the plane and drop it off in Dubai, you do the right thing.  It’s a big deal. Boeing has multiple unions — even ones for engineers — that empathetically scaffold that global outlook (in a union, the folks on the floor have no problem talking up, as well as sideways, because of job protections,) and it’s no surprise that such a social/relational structure, and level of empathetic development, would create a very different problem-solving mindset than a defense company.

How would an aerospace company primarily dedicated to defense function?  Military aircraft are fundamentally different in scope than commercial aircraft.  Instead of validity across a broad system of concerns, military aircraft have really only one — the ability to not get shot down while executing whatever their respective  mission is. Not surprisingly, military aircraft adopt new technology far earlier than commercial aircraft (check out this Nazi flying wing if you don’t believe that) and are often poorly scaffolded when it comes to things like maintainability and such.  Getting 1% greater performance often relies on relatively rigid design hierarchies with algorithmic design processes.  And while there are examples of independently generated relational dynamics in military aircraft (I write about the SR-71 Blackbird here), this is usually the exception, not the rule.  It’s Authoritarian power structures all the way.

What happens when  Global Communitarians (the old Boeing Company) and old-school Authoritarians (McDonnell Douglas) combine?  We’re all engineers that love planes, right?  Though I’d argue that it’s not always the way the cookie crumbles, it IS the way the cookie crumbled this time.  The Power and Control group got the upper hand.  McDonnell Douglas was the Alien inside the host, with its corporate culture seizing control of the Boeing Company.  With an Authoritarian v-Meme sub-culture at the top, and a healthy demand for aircraft in the global market, there’s not much the communitarians COULD do — even if cooperating and collaborating would make more money for Boeing.  Because it’s not about the money.  It’s about power and control.  The  Authoritarians would honestly feel is likely be embarrassed if they were wrong and Boeing made more money by being kinder to its workforce.  That would be a major v-Meme violation.

The reality is that Boeing Commercial Aircraft (BCA) only has one real competitor for the near future — Airbus — though other companies like Bombardier and Embraer are attempting to nip at their heels. That’s a low competition market.  And as long as BCA can do better than Airbus in the short term, that’s good enough. Boeing also has enough higher-order social structures, like its unions, laid in so that its planes are unlikely to start falling out of the sky any time soon, which would also drive change from external societal pressures.

And the other problem is that BCA’s culture is emergent — it wasn’t designed with forethought to keep planes in the air at all times. It evolved.  That means that without major reflective exercise, there’s an ability to have consistent failure of understanding in leadership about what makes Boeing work — and that’s this complex, emergent social structure.  It’s not even a thought that is out there very often. Though I’d be happy to be proven wrong, no one writes about the larger collective intelligence/social dynamics in aircraft manufacture except me.

What was the critical stroke in the entire equation that really sent the Boeing Company down its path to current misery, besides its merger with McDonnell Douglas?  I’d argue it was the decision to relocate corporate headquarters to Chicago in 2001. Relational distancing was even stated by then-CEO as the reason!  Before 2001, there was the deeply grounding effect of having the corporate offices across from Boeing Field, and the overlap should not be underestimated.  Executives simply couldn’t cloister themselves from the reality of aircraft design, production and delivery.  You would run into the whole mix of people who built those planes, and the complexity would ground the executive corps on a daily basis.  They would have to be exposed to what made the company work, whether they liked it or not.  No Synergistic Stooge Effect — or at least one dramatically attenuated.

And when you put Authoritarians in charge of a Global Communitarian company, essentially people with fragmented, status-based thinking style in charge of a bunch of interconnected folks making highly sophisticated systems, relational destruction AND depletion of social capital has to happen.  First was the decision made in 787 construction to globally outsource important core components, like the main fuselage to Alenia, that resulted in the various rivet and rivet hole fiascos.  Relocation of facilities to South Carolina, all in the name of making more money followed, of course — that’s the mental model that sells in the U.S. Following that was the long attack on the various unions with pension replacement and such — shortening the empathetic timeline of what used to be a big vision company.  Deletion and cannibalization of research efforts have followed — McNerney, when CEO, even proudly trumpeted this.  And the latest attack on managers, largely the cohort who possess the social capital to facilitate the large-scale transitions that will be needed as Boeing phases in new product lines, like the 737-Max, or the 777-X, are exemplars of the Authoritarian overmind working to assure its v-Memes spread throughout the operation.  Even if it’s not the way you develop or build complex, integrated systems that can’t fail.  Those managers are a threat to the Authoritarian mind — even if the Authoritarians are unaware of it.  They feel it in their bones — or in their impulsive limbic systems.

It’s also no surprise that this comes on the heels of sending Boeing Services south to Long Beach.  I’ve worked with the people in that organization, and if there were ever a bunch of data-driven global thinkers, it rested there.  They’re the folks in charge of making sure any plane stuck on the ground, no matter where, is back in the air as quickly as possible.  On my tour of the command facility, filled with news streams from global news organizations filled multiple screens overhead.  It turns out the folks in Seattle were more likely to learn of an emergent problem by watching CNN than waiting for a phone call.  How’s that for pragmatic, data-driven decision making?

But the v-Memes said they had to go.  And so they went.

The problem with all of this relational disruption, which should deeply concern our national government, as well as investors, is they can’t keep this up and expect to make money, or innovative aircraft, over the long haul.

But that’s really a minor problem compared to the Big Enchilada.  The commercial aerospace industry has to innovate, or they’re going to destroy the planet. The number of passengers will double, according to the FAA, and that additional CO2 load has to be managed.  That will not happen without breakthrough innovation social organizations.  And the creativity to drive that innovation is going to depend more than ever on empathetic development.  I’ve had conversations with industry leaders, and they’ll all tell you they’re deeply worried.  Because that complex relational development/higher responsibility/empathetic connection thing really is true.

There are no easy answers here.  Boeing and Airbus are both large, transnational corporations — one through emergent dynamics, and the other through contracted agreement and design. As a transnational actor, Boeing has demonstrated over and over an impunity toward acting in good faith toward anyone at the state government level or below.  And even the federal government hasn’t done such a great job — the pervasive corrupting, influence of corporate money in politics in general, and defense contracts in particular, keeps getting demonstrated time and again.

But even though answers aren’t easy, they’re something that have to be sought, especially in the light of understanding how manufacturing, hooked with production, creates the larger empathetic mind.  Offshoring manufacturing, as we are realizing a bit too late in the U.S., besides creating economic dislocation, also disrupts the larger social/relational structures that manufacturing creates.  In any manufacturing operation, independent egalitarian relationships have to thrive, if only because of the Deming revolution that inverted the hierarchy of production and gave the individual on the shop floor the ability to stop the line when production went bad. That creates an information sharing culture that fuels empathy.  And those effects are felt far away from the source.  Donald Trump, anyone?  If there’s any solution for Boeing, though highly unlikely, it involves moving corporate back out of the boardroom and to proximity with manufacturing.  Marveling over the complexity of building commercial aircraft, as well as talking to the lunch bucket crowd, is good for the executive soul.  And we’ve got to hope it also rewires their brains.

Further reading:  One of my favorite Howard Kunstler books is ‘Home from Nowhere’, where he discusses the effects of built architecture on community development.  He makes a persuasive case that our current restrictive zoning, that disallows adjacency between the lower and upper classes, is a huge part of our collective empathy deficit in the U.S.

Others in the aircraft/airline industry also have concerns and recommend customer focus and empathy.  Read here for another two analysts’ perspective.