Cap’n Bob and Yours Truly, in the Whitsunday Islands.  Cap’n Bob gave me the immortal advice, when I was up in the rigging about 30′ off the deck.  “Ya won’t fall off if ya don’t let go!”

I’ve been listening to (and have almost finished) Daniel Siegel’s audio discourse, The Neurobiology of We.  For those folks that seriously read this blog (Sela Hocker– this is a shout-out to you!) it’s worth the eight hours of talk time to hear what Dr. Siegel has to say.  He’s a super-famous psychiatrist, a holistic thinker, and a key person in the evolution in the field of interpersonal psychology.  Like me, he’s attempting to link a series of insights together on how the holistic mind works.  And also like me, he likes the ‘blind men and the elephant’ analogy.  If we have a difference, it’s that Siegel, who interestingly enough goes by “Dr. Dan” — very similar to my “Dr. Chuck” — focuses more on the smaller, more individualistic and neurological scales of the Theory of Everything.  As a psychiatrist, he wants to treat people and help them get over their trauma.  So for him, he’s recognized that there’s an elephant, and then crawled up the elephant’s nose and spends a ton of time poking around the elephant’s brain figuring out how the elephant connects to other elephants on an independent elephant level.  That’s a lot of elephants!

I’m one hour away from finishing the entire eight hours, and he’s deep into individual processing and the role of emotion in integrating experiences.  His goal is pretty obvious — it’s focused on understanding how to help people heal and be happy.  Which is great.  And he distills that down to his concept of ‘Mindsight’ — which is in reality, just an integrated version of my Empathy Pyramid.  I’ll write more on that in another post.

Dr. Dan’s analysis of brain science is excellent, and if you’re into that kind of thing, you’ll love his explanations.  They’re a great curation of the neuropsychology research.  Dr. Dan makes sure he weeds out the stuff by holding up the research work to structural and functional bars — he makes decisions about what to believe with a validity- based lens. Does it work, and actually describe the various observables?  It’s refreshing, and different than just trusting the data.  And while he does talk a bit about complex systems theory (he’s not an expert in this by his own admission) and gets a little sideways with some of the paradigms, he should be forgiven.  As someone playing in the neuroscience field, I’m also grateful when those specific practitioners grant me some deference in my unintended abuse, or more generally omission of certain concepts.

Where does my work fit in with Dr. Dan’s stuff?  Remember– he’s figured out there’s an elephant, and he’s spending a lot of time with his flashlight inside that elephant’s brain.  I’m the guy that realizes that there’s an elephant, and I’ve got a casual understanding of the brain inside the elephant’s head — as well as basic map of the three parts of that brain. I do realize that all the parts of the elephant’s brain are hooked in some form or another to all the other parts, because I bring in an evolutionary perspective.  Things had to evolve, and that means that they have to be hooked together.   We didn’t just get a huge neocortex overnight.

(That’s a huge advantage, because a lot of contemporary neuroscience is dedicated to the proposition that each little part of the brain is segmented off, with limited communication ability, from every other part of the brain.  That’s a direct reflection of the Authoritarian/Legalistic social structures that form the scientific community.  In order to be noticed, everyone’s got to claim their own little piece of turf.  No holism is allowed!)

And then, I hop on my flying saucer and take off.  And look down at a herd of elephants — not just one.  And that this herd of elephants is structured differently than other herds — all herds are not created equal, nor do they act equally.  And because of that, the dynamics created by that social structure create different brain wiring inside different members of that herd.  Which then affect how their offspring’s brains are wired, through things like epigenetic phenomena, that can fundamentally affect the individual elephant’s genes.  And then I bring in the concept of self-similarity — propagation of patterns up and down the various scales (the elephant’s genes, neural wiring, personal affect with other elephants, social structure, elephant culture, and finally interaction with the elephant ecosystem) are going to be resonant.

Enough about elephants.  Though I DO like elephants!  Here are a pair that I met about 8 years ago!

Mother and child, Manyaleti Game Reserve, Greater Kruger National Park, 2008

So that leads us to a better, modified version of the Theory of Everything.  If we want to understand how an individual thinks — not just an organization, or what they will do, then we’ve got to move past my first version:

Culture + Social Structure/Empathetic Development = Behavior

And we need to add a couple more things into the mix:

Culture + Social Structure/Externally Promoted Empathetic Development + Individual Experience (Trauma Included) + Independently Generated Empathetic Development (level of mindfulness) + Epigenetic Influences + Genetic Disposition = Individual Behavior

We’ve covered each of these subjects individually.  Now we have a complete multi-scale roadmap of the information space that all sentient beings (not just humans!) operate under.  This roadmap starts at the chemical and cell level (epigenetics and genetic material, which then manifests as neurophysical structure), moves up to the individual structure level and experience (individual experience and independent empathetic development), then on up to the organizations one participates in (social/relational structure) and the larger culture an individual operates in.  Of course, these things are all bound together — remember the ‘elephant wrapped in spaghetti’ when we were talking about addiction?  ALL of these parts of the various elephants have connections and influences up and down the scales.  Hardware, firmware, software — there are lots of metaphors that we can use to understand this.

As we’ve discussed before, genetics can and does limit expression and speed of development.  But the path of sentience, and emergent organization guides all.  Even if, as the larger collective intelligence, racing down that evolutionary path, can only see past the end of our noses.

Further watching:  Besides listening to The Neurobiology of We, for those who are still skeptical and insist that this stuff  (like social structure and its effects) only applies to humans, I’d encourage you to watch the National Geographic special on stress.  The interesting part for me was the baboon before-and-after an epidemic.  A priori, a group of baboons were run in an authoritarian fashion by a bunch of bully baboons.  All the baboons suffered. Then a plague killed off the leadership, and a more tribal/ potentially communitarian structure popped up.  Overall health rose.

 

In front of the main cathedral on Plaza de Bolivar, Bogota, Colombia, 2014

I really don’t want to get bogged down with politics on this blog too much.  But every now and again, a piece comes rolling along that’s so close to the heart of the material of this blog, I can’t pass it up.

So it was with this piece by Neal Gabler, titled Why Donald Trump can lie and no one seems to care.  Gabler attributes much of Trump’s appeal to what we’ve discussed as confirmation bias in the electorate — Trump lies and changes his story about many things many times. By doing so, he finds something that plugs into everyone’s story that lets them identify with what he has to say.  We naturally skim over most of what he says, living as we do most of the time in our own distracted, impulsive minds.  When he says something that sticks, it reinforces our already extant mental models of the situation.  By broadly traversing the knowledge space, Trump uses his “sea change antennae” to score more wins than the other, more rigid and consistent Republican candidates.  And by doing so, he gains allies.

Which is, of course, what narcissists do.  I really recommend checking out my previous post on this here, and the effect of hyper vigilance and that super radar.  This lets individuals with these disorders quickly pick up on what people think they need to hear, and use that lowest level of empathy — mirroring behavior — and send it right back to them.  I wouldn’t be the first to call Trump a dyed-in-the-wool narcissist. But that’s not what’s so interesting about Trump’s rise in the polls.

What’s more interesting is what Gabler calls “The Winchell Effect”.  From the post above, here is a great quote that describes it:

“Walter Winchell, about whom I wrote a 1994 biography, was a hugely popular New York-based gossip columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain and an equally popular radio personality, although saying that is a little like saying that Michael Jordan was a basketball player. Winchell was thegossip columnist, with an estimated daily audience of 50 million. He practically invented the form, and the form was a long chain of snippets — rumor, prediction, innuendo — racing down the page, separated by ellipses.

Some of these snippets were scarcely more than a noun, a verb and an object: Mr. So-and-so is “that way” about Miss So-and-so. Does her husband know? In this way, Winchell became not only the minimalist master of gossip but also, quite possibly, the first tweeter – before Twitter.”

The Donald is definitely a modestly Performance-based Authoritarian.  And he’s mastered a similar speaking style.  No long-winded diatribes — only short knowledge fragments, straight out of an Authoritarian Conway’s Law mapping — that alludes to a better, higher v-Meme Performance-based view of the world.  To steal from Nike, Trump repeats over and over again “we’ll just do it.” And for a nation with increasing fragmented social spaces, and increasing Authoritarian methodologies on both the Left and the Right,  that narcissism thing, combined with knowledge fragments with memetic-viral potential, lets him hit the mark.

I wouldn’t want to deny Trump his own agency, that at some level, he is responsible for his actions.  But it would be great if we would own up to a greater understanding that Trump is also an emergent phenomenon of our own social structure.  And upon realizing that, love ourselves enough to get busy with the hard work of repairing our own grounded social/relational empathetic networks that more accurately enable us to seek the truth.

Takeaway:  Narcissists can hack elections in representative democracies using their super-sensitive antennae to pick up on memes that are resonant in their constituencies they are courting.  Agile narcissists — ones with no problems lying, able to speak to different constituencies in an electorate, and skilled in using knowledge fragments/sound bites — can use confirmation bias in receptive audiences to secure disparate constituencies.  When the majority of politicians are operating under old systems of beliefs that are in conflict with some level of data-driven thinking in the constituencies they are attempting to secure votes from, the narcissist has a huge advantage. Old-time reliable messages are no longer valid, and the narcissist can exploit this to his/her advantage.  

Narcissists can lie any way that is persuasive.  But the electorate is left, unfortunately, only with the truth they experience.

Guangzhou’s Jade Market, 2010, Guangzhou, China

Every now and then, I have an ‘Ah Hah!’ moment that makes me realize that while things may seem entirely consistent to me (or those damn squirrels in my head!) they may not seem so obvious to my readership.  There’s a famous (likely apocryphal) story about a mathematics professor teaching a graduate class.  He’s scribbling like mad on the board, and then turns to his class between steps of a proof.  He says “it’s obvious that XXX follows”, then turns and looks at the two steps.  He then exits the room, returning 20 minutes later, and says, “Yes, it’s obvious,” and then continues writing.  Another famous cartoon by Sidney Harris captures this as well:

Such was the moment I had earlier today. I was forwarded this opinion piece on the importance of art and poetry in managing uncertainty, written by Tod Marshall, the most recently named Poet Laureate of the State of Washington.  It’s really highly recommended, as it gets at the core of much of what I explain in a more systematic fashion, and that is the role of modern society in fragmenting us, as well as the importance of art in unifying our vision, increasing empathy and connection.  While I’ve emphatically maintained that education in literature and the arts alone is not enough to create empathetic individuals (years of observing sociopathy across the various disciplines at the university has convinced me of this, as well as the fact that there is no substitute for empathetic connection and its practice) there’s also no question that art and literature can expand us empathetically, once that groundwork is laid.  Or in the practice of learning together, we can be profoundly transformed in our ability to connect.

How does that work?  Lower level empathetic relational structures — those that exist mostly in the world of titles and beliefs — have a natural tendency to exclude asking questions about what else is out there.  Authoritarian structures are very bad in particular, as whenever one gets up and admits a lack of knowledge, that person suffers a loss of status.  Over time, such structures see metacognitive shrink wrapping — an inability to know what you don’t know, as well as cultivate an awareness of what is unknown out there — those ‘known unknowns’, as well as the ‘unknown unknowns’.  That loss of appropriate mystery is anathema to empathy for those different than you, and inevitably gives you angry, judgmental gods.  Before you know it, you’re sacrificing 40,000 people a year on an altar just to make sure the sun comes up every day, or burning witches at the stake.  Not very empathetic.

Higher, more developed empathetic relational structures encourage metacognition. You don’t know, but since you want to get to a goal, you can work to find out (Performance/Goal-based Thinking).  You’re going to work with a diverse group because you’re all going in the same direction.  Or you don’t know that stranger, but you can read them and figure out whether they’re friend or foe by analyzing their face, or their body language, because we’re all humans after all (Communitarian Thinking).  As you develop, you become more comfortable with the idea of knowing that you don’t know stuff, and that means you also become more comfortable with uncertainty.  The two are intrinsically paired together.

There’s deeper scaffolding involved than just that one connection.  The more empathetic you are, the broader network of people you’re able to assemble in your life.  That means you’re also able to deal with greater contingencies, because you have access to a broader knowledge base.  Uncertainty doesn’t bother as much, because you know someone who probably knows.  Your car won’t start?  You have a friend that knows what to do.  That’s gotta help your fundamental Survival and Safety needs.

You’re also able to understand the different social structures and the behaviors they generate.  That’s gotta help with overall predictability when you see behavior that is unfamiliar to you.  If something unusual pops up, you can relate it to something you’ve seen before.  That brings us back to art and literature — by placing different situations with different people in context, we can amass a greater body of shared experience than one person can in one life.

And that empathetic development also leads to a fundamental element of human development — the ability to trust others.  And not only that — you can also trust yourself.  You can only get that through development of personal agency, which then also involves the higher, more empathetic social structures that enable this kind of development.  Which then circles back around to the more- or less- empathetic.

But if you’re locked down in a fundamental incuriosity of one In-Group, you’re going to suffer.  Things unfamiliar are going to be scary.  Things uncertain are going to be threatening.  People with different, more difficult-to-read faces are going to be suspicious.

And now, hopefully, we can see that this ties back to a lack of larger empathy.  When you can’t connect, you’re gonna be alone, and your genes are going to tell you a lion is going to eat you.

So… it’s obvious.  🙂

 

Guangzhou, 2010, before a large sporting event I can’t remember!

Scott Page is a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.  Page is a researcher, like me, in collective intelligence, and a skilled statistician and mathematician.  In The Difference, he set out on a truly massive task — how does one prove mathematically that diversity makes a difference?  We’ll discuss his argument in this post, and then also note that Page is also extremely self-reflective.  He spends the last third of his book, dedicating it to getting a handle on how much really can be known and proven with this question.  It’s a great book, and for a book with pretty formal mathematical proofs, it’s actually pretty readable.  I’ll summarize the main arguments, which highlight both the strength of the argument, as well as how any absolutistic argument is not just limited by the decision space you exist in, but also limited in evolutionary direction.

Why do we need to prove diversity works in the first place?  On a broad scale,it would seem that the benefits of diversity are obvious.  Having excluded out-groups in any society can cause chaos.  Integrated wholes and shared common purpose are good for nations, not just companies.  And even with the unsupported (and wrong) belief that companies that pursue diversity strategies are ‘taking one for the greater good’, one could still argue for societal benefits.  I made the argument here that team diversity actually makes us more creative and rational on a deeply neurogenic level, so I’ve staked out my position on this issue.  What we’re going to explore in this post is how Scott’s work on diversity meshes with mine — and how in these larger questions we attempt to balance reliability of knowledge with validity, and evolutionary path.

The way Page goes about proving diversity (roughly) is this.  Every person on a team brings some unique talents to the table.  These talents can be summarized as a point, or more appropriately, a bounded knowledge fragment, in the knowledge space of heuristics.  I gave a more formal (and nuanced) definition of what a heuristic is a couple of posts back. In Page’s argument, this is boiled down to a solution and a direction on the larger map of what mathematicians and engineers call an optimization problem.

What’s an optimization problem?  Let’s say you’re out hunting in hills and valleys on a landscape.  You know that if you get to the top of a hill, you’ll be able to see further.  You continue to search around your piece of ground until you find the top of a hill.

But what if you were on a diverse team, with different perspectives?  They might have a different piece of real estate, or a different method of getting to the top.  If the two parties got together and compared their solutions, the odds that they’re going to get to a higher piece of real estate is going to go up.  Getting people who have exactly the same perspective won’t do much for finding new things, or improving an old solution.  But with diverse perspectives, you’re much more likely to get to the highest hill in the neighborhood consistently.

Page goes on to rigorously prove some very interesting results:

1.  In a group, aggregate diversity trumps individual ability, provided the problem is difficult ( no one person knows all the answers).
2. Having individuals learn diverse perspectives themselves helps overall in understanding how to solve problems.
3. Individuals may make bad choices, but overall, crowds are wise.  That’s why someone always guesses the number of gum balls in huge jar at the fair — or why it’s almost impossible to consistently beat the stock index when picking stocks.

There’s more in there, along with some great reflection on the limits of diversity.  If you have no expertise, but lots of diversity, you’re still going to have a bad solution that comes out of your process.  Yet while it’s important that someone like Page steps forward to come up with a rigorous proof of some of these concepts, lots of stuff that happens in real life gets left out.

So what insights can we get from our Theory of Empathetic Connection, and how does it inform expansion of Page’s work?  The first part we have to start with is the very basics — where does Page’s work sit on the v-Meme scale?  And how does that influence expansion, reliability, and validity?

To start, any rigorous proof is going to sit squarely in the middle of the Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme set.  You’re showing something, with a set of carefully prescribed conditions to be true or false.  That’s not a shades-of-gray kind of deal.  What that means is that reliability is a given — you prove it once, you can prove it again.  That’s a standard for publishable work, and a core element of what the academy is supposed to be known for.

But it also imposes v-Meme restrictions, not obvious on the surface.  To start, it means that the heuristics referenced must either be represented as a self-contained knowledge fragment, or an enclosed algorithm.  What does that mean?  The heuristics brought to the table need to objects to be moved around as part of the argument.  If we are trying to find an answer, either Party A has the path, or Party B has the path.  When they get together in a diverse environment, at any given time, one or the other has the answer.  One or the other has an answer that is more optimal — or MORE RIGHT.  By combining their efforts, they’re more likely to be a success.  But there’s never any knowledge synergy in the context of how they go about seeking jointly the answer.  There’s no empathy in the process of solution, and that has major effects on understanding the validity of the result.

How do humans in diverse groups (or any group) actually work together? Usually there’s a larger meta-heuristic (like a design process — the NASA/Ulrich and Eppinger one, or OpenIDEO) that guides larger actions by the group.  Inside that (let’s say everyone’s working in the preliminary design phase), group members may meet for lunch, and discuss what they need to do next.  One person — Bob, has an idea about how to proceed.  He enters into a more involved conversation with another person in the group — Lisa.  Lisa has some thoughts/heuristics of her own.  They start discussing between the two — let’s say they’ve built up a trust-based relationship, and while having similar competencies, don’t share exactly the same background.  They synthesize a shared heuristic that may include elements from both individuals’ backgrounds, and decide how to share information.

Now the shared heuristic doesn’t look at all like an either/or situation.  It may settle mostly around Bob’s ideas, or mostly around Lisa’s.  And maybe the way that it settled was Bob wasn’t feeling great, or had a softball game he wanted to go to.  Maybe Lisa felt sorry for him, and decided to share the larger burden of work.  There are an almost infinite number of possibilities that could exist to create that new, shared heuristic.

But there was likely one moment — and this is not trivial — where, in the discussion, either Bob or Lisa switched, and changed their mind about either part, or all of the developed plan of action.  That impulsive, unpredictable part is key.  Because it is in that unpredictable moment that whatever the process for combining plans, or in our parlance, developing a shared heuristic, our system of meta-linear aggregation of information — picking either Bob’s heuristic, or Lisa’s heuristic — transformed into a meta-nonlinear problem.  And by transforming into that meta-nonlinear process, any hope of rigorously proving anything just went out the window.  Proving something for nonlinear systems is infinitely more difficult than for linear systems.

Yet the validity of how I described the actual process went way up.  Anyone participating in a design team knows that tasks get parceled up, and depending on the difficulty of the unknowns, or more formally, the metacognitive space — both the known unknowns, as well as the unknown unknowns — the schedule of the activities, or really, the schedule of the executable heuristics, will vary.  Development activities that have lots of stuff to be discovered are going to have schedules that look very different from designing a building according to code.

Page’s insights with the simplified system still hold water, and can inform our understanding.  Parties coming together are going to do better with some overlap in understanding of each other’s disciplines.  They’re going to be able to share information and come up with synthesized heuristics if they’re close enough in understanding.  Diversity in thought is going to likely get to a better answer.

And Page’s insight that not knowing anything but being diverse won’t get you very far is also still applicable.  But it’s more valid if we take it in the empathetic sense.  Everyone knows something – Will Rogers said “Everyone is ignorant, just on different subjects.” But if parties involved are separated by large in-group/out-group dynamics, it can be much harder to bridge the gap.

Let’s look at the case of the Boeing 787 battery fire problems.  Marketing may have come up with the idea that the plane needed to lose four tons in order to be salable.  But it’s highly likely that they didn’t sit down with the battery group, nor the subsequent vendors, and sort through the scenario of risk associated with attempting to apply a new technology at such a scale in a commercial aircraft.

How can we take these insights from Page’s work and expand them using our Theory of Empathetic Connection in understanding not just when diversity works, but when it doesn’t work, and how to predict a team’s performance, as well as develop individual team members to realize the benefits of diversity?

Page’s first point — that diversity gives better solutions, provided the problem is difficult (no one person holds all the answer) also keys in well to understanding algorithmic vs. heuristic design.  In cases of design requiring specialized knowledge and incremental refinement, diversity isn’t likely to help you very much.  The solution space exists primarily in low-empathy, Legalistic v-Meme processes. Specific expertise, well-developed, is called for.  But in the case where creativity (and empathy) matters, you’re taking a performance hit.  You just can’t live without it.

And still there are times when diversity doesn’t work — consider the potential for v-Meme conflict inside a diverse team.   One of the things I’ve noticed with helping under-represented groups at the university level is that they often do not have the social/relational constructs that the majority has.  These vary from group to group, and as you can imagine, create a hot-button issue when discussing them.  Very often, Chinese graduate students from Authoritarian v-Meme backgrounds have to be inculcated with the need to follow academic standards against plagiarism and augmented ‘borrowing’ — a Legalistic v-Meme concept that rests very lightly in mainland China.  Workshops help.  With students from disadvantaged backgrounds in the U.S., I’ve worked with our Team Mentoring Program at WSU in having peer guides for new students from locations like the Yakima Valley, a primarily Hispanic and disadvantaged area where students are often first-generation college attendees.  For them, scraping along in Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme societies of trabajadores migrantes, what is important is to trigger Mirroring behavior through guidance by a peer mentor that looks like them superficially, but has experience in navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy that is the contemporary university.

It doesn’t take long for them to figure out by watching their mentor — this is not a summary judgment on mental capacity.  They’re plenty smart.  But a deeper understanding of the social structure and empathetic expectations of their environment improves their ability to master more complex heuristics.  And then a synthesis of different lower v-Meme scaffolding, along with the ability to talk at the same structural level, create a path for real benefits of diversity.

Should we hold out before implementation for higher level proofs of the benefits of diversity, using more complex models of shared heuristics?  Something tells me that an individual using that argument has other issues.  Any modeling along that line will necessarily involve systems of nonlinear equations, as opposed to Page’s relatively simple models.  In order to have equations that can capture that impulsive moment, they have to have the capacity to have bifurcation behavior — in particular, a Hopf bifurcation.  How you’d tune such a system is beyond me.

How I create greater reliability in my understanding of diversity is something that I’m working on in my head.  That alone is challenging — getting enough data, from enough folks, working on the same problem, and then doing a meaningful comparison looks to be super-challenging, if not impossible.  Until we get to the point where we can do brain scans of people as they process the faces of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds — people that don’t look like us, basically — while they do design tasks, this is also going to be elusive.  But the validity is there.  And it creates pathways that Page’s reliability work directly augments.

If there’s a real takeaway in all of this, it is also that developing people socially and empathetically is not an either/or proposition.  Diverse or not, one maximizes validity in a group, regardless of the nature of the design space, through sharing of information.  People don’t exist as a single data point in time.  And even in the most algorithmic of situations, there’s still no excuse for feeding the larger pipeline with a non-diverse group of individuals.  Because while we may not be able to prove everything algorithmically, as Page has done, we have to recognize our own metacognitive limitations.  Besides the provable ones regarding creativity, there are benefits to diversity still out there, waiting to be discovered.

 

 

 

 

 

Trying to get close — off the Kona Coast, Braden and Alicia, 2014, Kealakekua State Park, Hawaii

Check out this link from the New Scientist.  It discusses dolphin team problem-solving, in the context of removing a lid from a food container. My initial thesis has been the driver of higher intelligence and empathetic development on the planet Earth was the need for mes0- (middle) scale predators to coordinate both prey attack, and predator defense.  Early mirroring behavior dates back to the Silurian, with schools of bony fishes.  And there are lots of examples of empathy and intelligence development stagnation among animals, both reptilian/saurischian (dinosaurs) and mammalian.

But when you put the need to both avoid getting eaten, and, well, eating other things, you’re on your way out of the Survival v-Meme.  You’re not guaranteed to make it, as this piece on near-extinction shows.  There’s a fine line of ecological sustainability, while being lucky enough for only modest climate catastrophe.

For those that need a longer treatise on trans-species empathy, you can read this post that I’ve written here.

Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney, Australia

A couple of terms I toss around with a fair amount of frequency are ‘algorithms’ and ‘heuristics’. Though I think I’ve discussed algorithms and heuristics before, a deeper understanding of both based on empathetic development is in order — especially as we pursue deeper understanding of their effects in our minds, and how our social/relational structures generate knowledge with them.

To start, both are process-based knowledge.  When we decide to use either, we know that we are going to step along some path, and transform some set of input conditions to a final condition. That means both require some sense of temporal scaling in our heads — from start to finish, time will pass in their execution.  That matters, because as we’ve discussed earlier, how we conduct our social business directly affects how time scales in our heads, and whether we follow a ticking clock, the passage of the seasons, or a pre-arranged agreement based on events that might or might not occur.  That’s going to  affect process execution and sense of consequentiality.

But algorithms and heuristics are fundamentally different.  The generation of perfect algorithms lies primarily in the Legalistic v-Meme.  We have a process, we have some inputs, we tick through the steps, and we get a result.  No agency required — and likely some other person, community or society has figured it out before.  Of course, there are tons of algorithms in fields ranging from accounting to engineering to medicine, but perhaps the best example of algorithmic thinking can be found with Lego directions.  Totally visual, they click the viewer along through thousands of pieces, in sequence.  You start with a bunch of little plastic blocks, and four hours later, you’ve got a reasonable facsimile of the Millennium Falcon sitting in front of you.

Instructions, Lego Millennium Falcon — follow the arrows!

Algorithms can be written down with language, math symbols or pictures.  The key ingredient is during execution, there is no (or extremely limited) agency required.  Just follow the steps.

Not so for heuristics.  The formal definition of the noun heuristic, from Dictionary.com,  is:

Downtown Sydney, Australia, on the Quay, with the local didgeridoo player

I’ve been reading and listening a little bit on the Internet about the issue of wisdom — what people perceive it to be and such, and thinking about how to map this to our business organizations.  As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of Ken Wilber, and have spent some time with Ken’s dialogues with another great thinker on wisdom, Roger Walsh.  Ken and Roger both are obviously enlightened, Second Tier thinkers, but the lower v-Meme that consistently comes out is pretty legalistic.  There’s a lot of classification of different heuristics in their models for wisdom, which are are somewhat useful, but still lack a guiding principle ethos.  I think that one can discuss wisdom from a topical level — for example, few would question “be kind to others” is a sign of wisdom.  But after that, one can get bogged down in the details pretty quickly, as with all surface-level analyses.  Someone who is wicked might quickly interpret a statement like “be kind to others” as a pathway to “so you can exploit them later.”

Is there a way, then, to understand wisdom in the context of the work we’ve done on empathetic connection?  I’d argue ‘yes’. It would be as an evolutionary process — and that implies the processes we create with an eye to wisdom would also create wise behavior that would hopefully be naturally emergent.  We’d also want to use a metacognitive lens.  How do we handle and process what we don’t know? If we create wisdom-generating processes in our meta-world, wise solutions will appear in our constructed reality, without having to be imposed from one viewpoint.

The other guiding principle must be that wisdom is fundamentally tied in with validity.  It should increase the validity of solutions or products that an organization creates, as well as its ways of being. Validity also helps up and down the v-Meme value chain.  Products that are valid will solve customers’ problems, as well as not kill the people who make them, as a small example.  The problems with microwave popcorn come to mind.  While a person may enjoy sticking in a bag into a microwave and two minutes later pull out a hot, tasty snack, it’s not going to be held up as an exemplary, wise product if the workers are sick from the oils in the factory with Popcorn Lung, or the waste is one more thing added unnecessarily to a landfill.

So here are the two guiding principles, somewhat tied together of course, that we can use, to evaluate our social/relational structures and our tools and cultures for our organization.

1. Wisdom is a direct outcome of how well we – ourselves, and our organizations – develop and use our metacognition — knowing what we know, awareness of what we don’t know, and a deeper awareness of knowing that there are unknowns out there we can’t know until we encounter them.

2. The amount of wisdom inside an organization will express itself in the validity of the solutions it provides, which emergently includes the health and well-being of the sentient actors inside it,  its ever-increasing temporal and spatial scales of consequences associated with its actions, AND its self-awareness of potential consequences outside it.

These two principles tell us some very important things about how we can discriminate wisdom in the various v-Meme levels.  Chief among these is that wisdom is going to be dependent on the knowledge structure spawned.  That doesn’t mean that lower v-Meme levels can’t have wisdom — far from it.  But the limitations of the knowledge structures (and the social structures that created them) are going to constrain tools and processes that can be used by contemporary business for planning product development strategies.

Let’s walk through a couple of examples in order to understand how this might work.  Few would question the Native American wisdom about the need to take care of the Earth.  It is fundamental on such a basic level — without water to drink or air to breathe (Survival v-Meme) we will all die.  The concept is deeply valid, and indisputable.  At the same time, it does not inform specifically on the first principle in a way that helps us plan our action.  So while it must be part of our bedrock scaffolding — organizations that destroy the place they live are fundamentally unwise (anyone questioning that can look at the picture below of a mountaintop removal site in West Virginia) it doesn’t help much with structuring processes on smaller scales, where trade-offs will inevitably be made.

Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in West Virginia — Geologic Time Devastation (2009)

Once again, I do want to repeat — we ignore deep Survival/Tribal v-Meme wisdom at our existential peril.  At the same time, it was the inability of development of the first principle that led to the overwhelming of the Tribal/Authoritarian societies back during the Columbian Exchange.

Next up on the social/relational evolutionary scale is our Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme pair.  These, too, offer insights on how to develop wisdom inside our organizations.  Authoritarian systems process systems in knowledge fragments for the most parts, and I’ve already discussed chengyu in past posts as effective ways of coding validity.  This type of wisdom, that captures guiding principles in a short story, is another example of triggering larger understanding, metacognition and validity.  My favorite is 塞翁失馬 — the story of Sai Wang, who lost a horse.  The villagers came to him, consoling him for his bad luck.  He said ‘Good news, bad news, who knows?’  The next day, the horse returned, with another horse.  Hit repeat on the villagers’ script, except this time as good news.  Sai Wang replied again in the same way.  A good explanation of the story is here.

As a piece of wisdom, Sai Wang’s story holds up to the two principles.  Sai Wang encourages the villagers to think regarding longer consequences of events (though not actions)  reminding us that there are things that we just don’t know, and events in the future that we can’t know.  But, as with all fragments, it can’t satisfy the second statement, on what to do next.  Even the best Authoritarian perspectives are frozen for that moment of impulsive time.  For that, other insights are needed.

Other examples of wisdom can flow out of Authoritarian cultures.  Confucius was famous for giving advice to rulers on how to be good authorities, all with the notion of developing that leadership with empathetic ladders.  One of the main directions of Confucius’ wisdom was that leaders should be virtuous — embodying the positive side of a people’s culture.  Very wise indeed, in that modeling triggers mirroring behavior across an organization, and as such, makes more people inside the company act in a virtuous manner — even in the short term.

Yet people acting virtuous is alone not enough to guarantee wise, or humane actions.  Many cultures have constrained their virtue to their in-group, and that lack of larger empathy has been documented in the genocides of other out-groups down through the ages.  I am sure the returning Crusaders enlisted by Pope Innocent III in his genocidal campaign in 1209 against the Cathars, made famous by the pronouncement of the abbot, Arnaud Amalric, quoting “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius  (kill them all — God will know his own) felt virtuous.

Bumping up to the Legalistic v-Meme,  wisdom becomes embodied in process.  Our Constitution is a great example of long-time wisdom embodied in both specific rules and guiding principles.  It contains the beginnings of starting the exploration of the unknown, and development of metacognition.  By establishing bodies of individuals, such as the three branches of government, the Constitution essentially established a data-collecting sensor network and larger collective intelligence exercise that could evolve as American society changed.  There’s also no question that there is long-time wisdom embodied in our penal code, dating back to the Code of Hammurabi and the Ten Commandments — ‘thou shalt not kill.’  Yet with a fully developed legalism, laws, processes and rules can also metacognitively develop.  Circumstances, lost in long-time integration, on whether someone should be punished for killing someone (self defense being, for example, an exception) start to emerge out of the collective.

Understanding things from this viewpoint can also show the profound lack of wisdom in bodies like the Supreme Court upholding the Citizens United case about corporate money in politics.  By hijacking the collective through repetition of belief-based messaging favorable to a corrupt business class, validity of solutions applicable to a larger population takes a dive.  Not very wise indeed, and a major source of information constriction that may well bring down our society in the U.S.

If we had to finger the main problem with developing  a more comprehensive wisdom in the lower v-Meme structures, it goes back to metacognition — knowing what we don’t know.  As was discussed here, Authoritarian structures just don’t do ‘not knowing’ very well — it directly goes against the concept of authority, as well as the power and control dynamic.  Admitting that you don’t know is a pathway to down migration in the power structure.  And over time, you end up with an organization that has metacognitive shrink wrapping — the only knowledge possessed in the organization is what is already contained inside.  There is scarce interest in finding out what you don’t know.  That’s not the route toward supporting the expansion of wisdom, which necessarily has to be associated with an open-mindedness toward changing circumstances and addressing validity.  Understanding this is also an insight into how collapse is fundamentally incorporated into any Authoritarian societal trajectory.  The lack of wisdom, or ability to acquire it, is built into the v-Meme NA.

Legalistic thinking does better than Authoritarianism, by giving the potential to create governing bodies with processes that can tackle those unknowns and turn them into knowns.  That gives Legalistic systems built-in metacognitive processes.  The problem with these systems is that in order to establish their authorities, they’re not so hot on imagining circumstances where Legalistic approaches can’t work.  Their metacognitive deficit is understanding that you can’t create processes to cover everything, and there is a constant tension between passing another law to achieve a potentially more pure result.  Any Legalistic system fundamentally has to have rules that constrain itself — the Constitution, for example, reserves certain powers to individuals in the Bill of Rights, or it will end up constraining personal agency out of the system.  And any system that, to paraphrase Clint Eastwood, can’t know its limitations, or makes it so difficult to change itself, is going to hit wisdom ceilings.

A great example of this might be the Deepwater Horizon crisis involving the blown oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.  There’s no question that BP and Transocean are deeply legally culpable in the largest oil spill in history, and should be held accountable for their crimes.  Rules were broken, and 11 people were killed.  But more rules that don’t include formulation with participation by the culprits are likely not the answer toward preventing the same crisis again.  In the world of deep water drilling, it’s simply impossible for the regulators alone to have the technical knowledge to create a legal framework that could work.  That knowledge rests only in part with the people doing the drilling.  And barring a higher expression of wisdom — banning deep water drilling altogether and redoubling our efforts toward renewables — there is going to have to be a participatory process that includes understanding the existence of unknowns, which, precisely because they are unknowns, can’t be preemptively regulated.

For businesses moving past the Legalistic v-Meme, crossing the Trust Boundary, and into the Performance v-Meme, some recognized metacognitive processes start popping up.  Everyone in business school learns about SWOT — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  Strengths and Weaknesses can be tied directly to self-knowledge, and as such can serve as a source of wisdom.  Opportunity is directly tied to a limited validity — can we make money on this? And Threats, while at some level tying back down to Survival, also force an organization to look outward toward things they don’t know about.  How’s that for metacognitive development, and potentially an increase in wisdom?

If we stay at the Performance v-Meme level, we can dramatically increase the sophistication of our metacognitive reach, and through that become aware of larger issues involving our business.  Couple that now with a desire for product validity, and it’s inescapable that we have to fold customers into the mix.  Relating to those customers drives our own empathetic development, and the coupled rise in both knowledge and awareness, if we’ve scaffolded that with some long-time stories (don’t destroy the planet!), some basic virtuous authority, and a moral code, can lead to a wise organization.  And we can keep growing and evolving this by using such tools as Lean Startup, nicely summarized and developed by Techstars Managing Director Zach Nies.  There’s too much to talk about, but for those looking for a great introduction to Agile thinking, the webpage lays out tools that now promote a process for developing both metacognition and validity.

On his Impact and Uncertainty page, Zach walks an organization through a process that identifies four paths for taking action:  Obvious, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic.  It’s not surprising that these four bins map to four different v-Memes.

1.  Obvious — Authoritarian.  Obvious things to do are the result of compacted limbic knowledge inside an organization, and while they may involve complexity, solutions (though potentially laborious) are down on the automatic level.
2. Complicated — Authoritarian/Legalistic — involve going outside for experts, who in the technical world are likely complex rule followers and algorithmic thinkers with very specific, already discovered knowledge.
3. Complex — Now we’re up in the Performance/Communitarian space, where multiple solutions, heuristics and such are going to drive more complex empathetic interactions and trade-offs.  In the process, it is inevitable that specific unknowns will be discovered, as well as undiscovered countries of knowledge.
4. Chaotic — what’s awesome about this category is it is the beginning of an expression that there may be a higher awareness that an organization doesn’t possess.  It’s not directly stated, but the path forward Zach recommends is a good one — plan exploratory actions (great for increasing metacognition, validity, and potentially wisdom) and execute them.

What’s above this in our Spiral/Empathetic Development world?  The self-aware company builds into it a knowledge of its own bias that comes from its past through a deep understanding of how it got to be the way it is.  Boeing is a great example of an uneven application of this awareness in its leadership team.  It’s hard to imagine Boeing NOT making a passenger hauling solution that isn’t a tube with a couple of wings hooked on the outside.  Former CEO Jim McNerney, a card-carrying relational disruptor if there ever was one, announced publicly in 2014 that deeper, more fundamental research was not in Boeing’s cards, and that the company would focus on reaping the harvest of work with the advances in composites from the 787 and applying them to the 777x.

At the same time, external pressures forced deeper soul searching inside Boeing regarding its competitive position with Airbus.  Boeing’s planes had a prestige and performance edge, but that edge wasn’t enough to always guarantee a sale.  Airbus has had a manufacturing cost advantage, and now Boeing is attempting to overtake Airbus in this arena with construction of a new facility in Everett.  I don’t have that many friends with news from the top to understand completely the decision making process, but change is afoot.

What could be the next level of evolutionary tools?  There’s much to write on that, but here’s a preview — truly understanding information flows inside a company, and the level of empathy/information coherence in networks inside an organization.  Every organization has a formal org chart. But I’ve yet to see one that documents social capital, and how that plays out in an organization (probably because that would be perceived as an explicit threat to the titles on the org chart!)  Such a deeper understanding would help maximize validity of product to the customers and stakeholders, by showing exactly who understands and empathizes with the customer, and how information is aggregated into the product.  In the process of doing that across an organization, one sees what one really knows, and what one really doesn’t — more benefits for metacognition.

Other factors will certainly come into play. That understanding can’t be complete without a deep history of understanding trauma inside an organization.  Trauma also will shape our approach toward unknowns, and through that, receptivity to metacognition.  Large failures may prevent explorations of avenues for advancement that may not have been possible 30 years ago, but with fundamental technological change, should be explored now.

There’s no question that the process will also drive development of the people inside the organization, making them more empathetic, and hopefully data driven in their actions.  While larger organizational meditations have to have some limits in scope, a modest amount of soul searching can uncover root causes that stifle innovation, as well as unearth ways that products created, and processes needed affect others on the outside.  A great example would be the hunt for replacement substances for coltan inside cell phones.  Awareness of terrible death and conflict inside the Democratic Republic of Congo, the primary source for Coltan — truly WWIII for Africa, with over 6 million dead — spurs on research efforts, sustainable sourcing, and regulations so our cell phones don’t have to be coated in blood.

Metacognition and validity — and an appropriate focus on both — will drive wisdom.  The only thing holding us back is our understanding of ourselves, and the willingness to take that collective leap.

Further Reading:  I’d be totally remiss if I didn’t mention the B-Corps movement, which attempts to externally guide companies to larger levels of empathetic development, validity and wisdom.  Much to unpack — but the link is a start.

Here’s also another link on how philosophers view wisdom.  It’s fascinating that the models presented do not directly address not knowing, and as such are Legalistic v-Meme limited, as would be expected from the majority social structure philosophers sit in.  But they are making progress.  This link also is great scaffolding on attempting to make some advancement on the subject of wisdom.

One more thing — it’s going to be a future piece — but the Wise Organization is much more robust in the face of a Black Swan event.  Because there is an awareness that events out there can be unpredictable and not knowable by an organization’s experts, there is a capacity to a.) build in robustness, and b.) adapt more rapidly than an unwise organization.

 

 

Marble Canyon, Grand Canyon, Arizona, March, 2009

My debating/collaborating/empathizing partner, Jake Leachman, is really knocking one out of the park today, so I thought I’d point folks toward his stuff.  It’s NOT trivial, and it sure helps if you have a physics/thermodynamics background.  But it’s a great first step toward stepping along a mathematically grounded, guiding principles path toward understanding human evolution.

Here’s the link.

What’s the backstory here to all this stuff?  Here’s the short version.  If you accept that this post is true — that at some level, the Master Equation of Culture + Structure = Behavior creates what one sees in the world today, then one of the big questions that comes up is “well, what makes structure and how does THAT work?”  My materials science colleagues work on this all the time for everything from steel to ceramics.  They make plots called phase diagrams that look like this.

Iron-carbon phase diagram, courtesy of Sebastian Brosen

What this particular plot tells you is what happens (behavior) to iron (structure) when you heat it and add some carbon (culture).  Dependent on the various conditions, the metal changes phase and becomes the stuff we use for all sorts of things, including low-carbon steel, cast iron, and such.

What about human societies?  We have some characterization of the different phases of humanity — that starting point is Spiral Dynamics.  Empathy characterizes the bond strength/information transfer and coherence between individual actors in a society.  So what happens when you cook a bunch of people with different cultural influences?  How do we reach those breakpoints where we move up the Spiral and evolve?  Can we make a phase diagram for humanity?  The diagram above is only two dimensions (carbon % and temperature.)  How many dimensions would you need to capture the actual behavior of a human community?

Asking these questions is important, as Jake points out.  Currently, psychological research has a repeatability in their various experiments of about 50%.  Understanding human behavior solely from the Legalistic v-Meme isn’t taking us where we need to go.  When I look at the engineering education research, I also find it discouraging.  No big questions get asked — and the small questions aren’t really worth answering.  Clearly we need a paradigm shift in how we approach understanding ourselves.

What does The Matrix really look like?  Jake takes a great first shot at laying down the thermodynamics of human change.

 

Field of Sunflowers, in the Burgenland, Austria

The link below is a stunning modestly long post regarding conversion to the Amish faith/way of life that is perhaps the best piece of evidence I’ve read about how Authoritarian Legalism limits empathetic connection.  The Amish, or Plain Folk, live in a highly prescriptive world that denounces modernity, to different levels.  The current perception in the modern zeitgeist is that group cultures must, by definition, be more empathetic.  This extremely accurate piece shows the real trade-offs that happen with low-empathetic group dynamics. Not surprisingly, some of it is not very pretty.

Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish?

I do realize that this is a long read (it’s even listed as such!) but worth it for those attempting to understand how temporal, spatial and energetic scales are truly calibrated by levels of empathy and social structure.  The bottom line in this piece?  Don’t go to church, or break an edict — even those with lifelong attachments get thrown out of the church.  When structures limit empathetic development, the in-group/out-group dynamics are tremendous.

Further Watching:  The movie ‘Witness’ with Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, about investigating a murder in Amish Country captures some of the conflicts and beauties in an extremely entertaining and watchable movie.  The movie won Academy Awards for Original Screenplay and Film Editing.  Highly entertaining, and believable.

Paper wasps — the Pantanal, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, 2006

Every now and again, folks send me stuff about empathy.  Such was the case with this piece below, a short animation published on the Atlantic ‘s website, and titled Against Empathy.  The video is put together by the animator, with content and narration by Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom.  It’s pretty short (less than 3 min.) and in it, Bloom equates empathy to selfish moralizing. In the course of the video, he knocks charitable giving, saying that empathy leads to people giving small amounts of money to lots of charity, which causes the various charities to lose money, instead of the ostensibly dispassionate, non-empathetic giver who is a more effective altruist.  Bloom goes on to say that charities don’t know what they’re doing in the context of fundraising (he knows, but not them) and that empathy is fundamentally impulsive and destroys consequential behavior.

There’s more — he also points to leaders psychopathically using empathy against us, and then says that having empathy starts wars, which end up in lots of people dying.  If we go to war against ISIS, he argues, it will be because of empathy and wanting to help the people in Syria.  But there will be many more victims than people save, and we essentially won’t care.

Oh boy.

I could spend a whole lot of time refuting point by point what Bloom says — but what’s more interesting is to dig beneath the surface and attempt to understand why he’s saying what he’s saying.  And that context is far more interesting than writing a long soliloquy on nuance in the context of Bloom’s argument.  At the same time, it’s important to spend just a little time with his various points so you don’t think I’m dodging the argument.  Here goes!

1.  Bloom defines empathy as the rush you get from instantaneously connecting on an issue or thing that prompts impulsive behavior on your part.  There is no duplex information flow in Bloom’s definition — it’s just one way, and it’s all about you.
2. Bloom is pretty clearly anti-agency for anyone but himself — at least in the context of his argument.  If you’re giving $5 to the Heifer Project, it’s not about helping the Heifer Project.  You’re an impulsive slave to instantaneous emotion (simplex again) and need to be told by your more rational betters how to give money.
3. Not even charitable organizations know what the right thing to do — they are running fundraising strategies that must lose them money.  A more logical authority needs to tell them how to really help their cause.  There’s only one reason for doing what they’re doing when soliciting small donations — that is increasing the size of their bankroll — and they’re doing it wrong.
4. Empathy causes war because it creates an in-group with people across the world who we ignorantly decide to save, and then we kill them through our good intentions.
5. Therefore, empathy is bad, and you need to disconnect from people around the world if you really want to be a moral person.

What do I have to say on the topical information above?

1.  Empathy is far more complex than a rush one gets in isolation.  It is all about connection, and doesn’t exist without another actor in the equation.  That’s not just my opinion — it’s all the other empathy researchers out there.  It is true that my empathy pyramid is my own representation of evolutionary empathy.  But it’s all based on stacking and arranging the research of others for a systemic and systematic perspective.  Bloom is being manipulative and conflating empathy with sympathy, and a defective, egocentric, potentially narcissistic sympathy at that.
2. Even in low level v-Meme systems, empathy is a function of personal agency.  Higher forms of empathy require more agency, which means more filtering/resistance/data processing when an Expert from the Outside tells you what to do.  We’ll get around to talking about why Bloom might be doing what he’s doing below.  He is the Expert from the Outside — a professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. If you’re status-based, why should you believe me over him?  Or believe anyone besides him?
3. There are many reasons that charities solicit small donations — chief among them for receiving large matching grants from foundations wanting those charities to expand their outreach and grow their donor pool. Some of it involves direct outreach and growing their member base that read their magazines and literature, which may come in handy in lobbying state governments in all their myriad forms.  There are literally thousands of reasons for NGOs to take loss leadership on one type of fundraising in exchange for social capital in another.  And Bloom brings no data showing that even his main point is even valid.  Even on the surface, his main point doesn’t hold up.  Organizations that lose money over time go out of business.  But he’s big on using his authority once again to get you to believe him, and deprive the NGOs of agency.  Time to remember W. Edwards Deming’s favorite statement — “In God we trust.  All others must bring data.”
4. Vanishingly few wars are started by enlarging in-group dynamics to include the people we are attacking.  Nation-states start wars because their leadership have effectively created the target nation as an out-group that deserves whatever it gets.  We attacked Iraq because our government declared that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Millions of people in the U.S. took to the streets to keep the Iraqi people inside the In-group, and NOT make war.  In the current situation with ISIS, attacks by Western powers are triggered by terrorist attacks, which create profound in-group/out-group dynamics that enable leaders to launch counter-attacks.  It is true that pleas for sympathy (not empathy) come from leaders of belligerents, but they are almost always ancillary to the real motive — a lack of empathetic connection to the population we are attacking.
5. A perversion of the Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme is the moralism that says empathy is bad.  At some level, Bloom constructs his argument around the idea that empathy is as he has defined it — an impulsive, egocentric squirt of go juice in the limbic system — instead of the broader accepted definition of empathy, with mirroring behavior, affective and cognitive empathy that is used in the psychological community, or my evolutionary model that links all these things together.  Yet he is still using this to say that ‘this is connection’ . And by arguing against it, he causes a person who may want to do the right thing to mistrust their feelings and perceptions.  What that causes is, of course, a loss of agency, and a willingness to accept both the opinion of an authority, and the control that comes along with that.  Don’t trust your own mind.  Let your betters do the thinking for you.  Like him.

What is more interesting about this piece is not that argumentation and refutation.  What is far more interesting (at least to me!) is how he would construct the argument, and why he would say it.  That, of course, has to come out of his own brain wiring and the social/relational structure he resides in.  Once we understand that, we can understand him — and why he would make the argument is he is making.  And then you can decide whether you want to believe him or not.

To start, it’s pretty clear that Bloom is speaking with the voice of the Authoritarian v-Meme.  He’s the psychology professor at Yale, he went to school at MIT, he’s written a bunch of books, and as such, he gets to create definitions out of thin air.  He’s ensconced deeply inside an Authority-based system — not just any system, but one recognizable around the world.  That creates powerful effects from the Principle of Reinforcement, regardless of the self-referential peril in all of it.

As far as creating coherence with his larger community of psychological professionals, that’s not his job.  At Yale, he’s supposed to be a thought leader. He’s deeply concerned about people connecting, because when people connect, that has the potential to diminish his authority.  As an Authoritarian, he’s not likely aware of this — it’s just what they do — but it comes out of deep automatic programming in his own brain.

And standing up and saying something like Empathy is Bad, and the Root of Our Problems in the world — well, that will get attention.  Getting attention will increase his status, and that will make him even more of an expert. It’s hard to believe that he hasn’t read any of the empathy literature — there’s a lot of it, and that likely makes his position deliberate.  But there’s no hay to be made by standing up and saying ‘Empathy is Good’ because, in general, this society, at this point in time, wouldn’t remark upon that as a unique opinion. That’s not going to get you on any talk show, or sell many books.

And while it’s true Bloom is taking advantage of the general public’s lack of specific knowledge about empathy, and using his authority to assert a different definition and follow on with ostensibly immoral acts, it doesn’t mean that the public’s beliefs are wrong.  What I’ve found giving talks to different audiences is that people’s understandings regarding empathy are incomplete.  When I organize my stuff and present it to them, it makes sense.  At some level it matches their experience — after all, it’s not their job to stare at a wall and think about this stuff, going over and over it to make sure the categorization is consistent.  That’s what I do.

What’s always fascinating, though, about an Authoritarian projection of any concept is what it tells you about a.) how that person views other people, and b.) the extent of their own limited subset of behaviors that they project on others in conveying an understanding of a social phenomenon.  This is where Bloom gets pretty scary.  The only reason Bloom can see for charitable giving is narcissism and self-pleasuring.  Altruistic behavior can only exist in the context of a lack of emotion and connection.  Forget real attachment — that doesn’t exist in the rabble.  That soldier that threw himself on the grenade didn’t do it because he loved his buddies and was profoundly empathetically connected to them through a series of traumatic experiences.  He did it because he thought it would feel good.

And one of the likely reasons that Bloom is advancing the thesis that connection is bad?  It makes people feel bad.  And when people feel bad, they become passive.  And passive people are far more easy to control.  That allows more of that Authoritarian v-Meme to dominate, regardless of the fact that Bloom himself won’t necessarily be the benefactor of that control.  That’s the thing about v-Memes — they want to propagate, and they have lots of agents out there doing the propagation.

One can also see how Bloom’s argument maximizes reliability — which is a key element of Authoritarianism in general.  If someone does something good, it’s because they got an instantaneous buzz off of it.  No need to get to know someone more deeply, or understand the longer history behind their thought process.  The passage of time doesn’t exist in Bloom’s projection of his world onto yours — so as the Authority, it doesn’t exist in yours either.  You have no agency, and therefore, no consequence.  It’s simplistic, right/wrong thinking — empathy decreases morality.  Being connected makes you more immoral in your actions.  And why?  Because he said so.

But it fails the basics of validity — is something an obvious, demonstrable outcome of whatever theory one has.  Authoritarians like Bloom almost always have no problem with this, as they believe they control the truth inside their own head.  But the reality of empathy, which this entire blog is devoted to, is far more complex.  Going full Zen dualism on you, empathy, as the primary factor in information coherence, can lead to good or bad consequences.  And those are dependent on observed time and spatial scales, which, as has been discussed, empathy manifests developmentally.  Getting to the objective truth of any action, as philosopher Ken Wilber has discussed, is profoundly difficult.  It’s not just categorizing a feel-good moment.  But that level of complexity, with its mix of independent agency and external forcing, is apparently outside Bloom’s ability for comprehension, at least with regards to empathy.

One of my favorite stories for illustrating exactly the larger dynamic of why empathy is threatening to Authorities is the story of Boko Haram’s kidnapping of the 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria.  I’ve discussed this earlier here, but it’s illustrative, and worth a re-tell.  Most people are familiar with the story, but the short version is this:  Boko Haram, a radical, tribal Islamic militant organization operating in northern Nigeria, kidnapped 276 schoolgirls with the intent of distributing them to their fighters as wives.  The world found out about it, and it dominated the news cycle for months.  The girls were never released, but the event spurred international engagement in resolving Nigeria’s situation that continues to this day.

How does empathetic development matter in the case of Boko Haram?  100 years ago, a group like theirs might kidnap girls and no one anywhere in the world would know.  Fast forward fifty years, and now a cultural anthropologist — an authority — might be on hand to tell us that such kidnappings were routine, though this one might be anomalous in its size.  Such an expert would also likely tell us that this was a manifestation of the culture in the area, and we would be engaging in cultural imperialism if we became outraged.  In today’s world, though, with the Internet and mass connection, a large and varied data stream is being sent into every household regarding the incident — from Facebook and Twitter to the more traditional news organizations.  Even Michelle Obama posted a photo and hashtag #bringbackourgirls on her Twitter account.  No longer would the academic authority’s sole opinion hold up — that somehow this was acceptable as a cultural/externally defined manifestation of behavior.  The global public had decided it was wrong.

That doesn’t mean the collective intelligence is always long-term moral, and certainly there is room for discussion.  But one thing that is abundantly clear — collective intelligence, empathetically connected, is a profound threat to the Authoritarian v-Meme.  So should it be any surprise that one of the last bastions of perceived international Authority — the faculty at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world — might send forth an emissary to wound the empathetic development beast that they perceive is threatening their existence?

If anything, Bloom’s thesis and lack of integrative ability should be one more wake-up call to the academy.  Regardless if Bloom publishes his book or not, the emergent trends are all on the side of more empathetic connection.  And understanding this, in my opinion, with its shades of gray, would be a much better use of a developed mind.