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Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers -Part 3 – Focus on Who our Students Actually Are

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Braden with a nice Dorado, Ensenada dos Muertos, Baja California Sur, MX

One of the things that is rarely discussed in any meaningful way is the change in the student stream coming into contemporary engineering programs. Historically, when I was an undergraduate (I graduated from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, OH in 1982) engineering students were a mix of middle-class kids, along with the sons (there were basically no girls) of the unionized class of auto and steel workers whose parents were blue collar and employed in regional factories. There were some outliers. But mostly, my graduating class came from places like the Jersey Shore, or Brookpark, OH. What we had in common was working on cars, building model rockets, and drinking beer. One of our most memorable projects involved pirating the new-tech (for then) satellite TV signal off the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland. I was in a functional engineering fraternity, and we assembled a satellite receiver dish from a metal snow saucer, complete with tin can collector, and a 4.2 GHz downconverter. The picture was fuzzy. But it worked.

By the time I had graduated with my Ph.D., though, the picture of the standard engineering student had started to shift. The students that I taught at my first years at Washington State University (WSU) had metamorphosed from those hands-on students that we were, to more professional replacement. Now it was kids that likely had parents who were professionals, but were likely good at math, and were looking for a comfortable career at Boeing. My guess is that I’ve educated at least 500 students who have ended up at Boeing, and likely more. It’s honestly challenging for me to walk into any division over there and not have at least one (usually more) of the engineers being a legacy from my classroom.

Times changed yet again, to the almost-current students we have now. Before it was the “in” thing to focus on recruiting underrepresented minorities into our program, I was hard at work mainstreaming kids whose parents were primarily Mexican, who were farmworkers in the Yakima Valley. We are now approaching something like 33% of our current student population as being from “underrepresented” minorities. Except, by any demographic measure, they are NOT underrepresented. There is still academic cultural pressure to increase these numbers, but it is likely not possible. We have reached some psychosocial thermodynamic efficiency with this percentage (the population of minority students is now overrepresented for their demographic in the state) and any effort to do so will profoundly come at the expense of other students in the program, in a world of diminishing dollars. Compound that with the election of Donald Trump is the lightning-fast dismantling of DEI, we have the current mix from a race/ethnicity perspective that will continue.

And to make matters worse, we are still recovering from the dramatic de-socialization of the COVID years — the true “Long COVID” epidemic — as well as the transformation of all schools to functional prisons because of the ongoing fears of school shootings. To sum it up, the kids I teach now know little to nothing about engineering before they arrive at WSU, they are pathologically obedient, which means they suffer from extreme agency problems, and they simply have no conceptualization of what a functional mentor/mentee relationship might entail. They don’t even hit me until their senior year, which is a mind-blowing experience for them, with my radical expectations for self-motivation and actual production of results. I would love to tell you that kids come to my classroom knowing what to expect in my design clinic. But most, unless they’ve been informed in the pre-class, walk into the clinic program having no idea what the program is, how they might benefit, or even who I am. I’ve worked on all these things — part of my ‘brand’ is my title — Dr. Chuck. But even though I am a functional “institution at the institution”, the students really are oblivious. Forced through infinite cascades of fractalization, and unknowing due to the dismantling of authority in the modern university, they arrive in front of me poorly prepared for their capstone experience, which is supposed to be their transitional experience into the work world. It is a burdensome experience for me emotionally, and a “lift” I find that I do with increasing trepidation. Students have emerged from the Longhouse with some modest expectation of being coddled. Needless to say, that doesn’t happen with me.

And while I don’t coddle them, I often find that I am one of the first people to explain to them the fundamental virtues of a successful career. I do tell them that I am world-class, which initially makes them blanch. And then I tell them I have no intention of teaching students who do not have equivalent aspirations. They have been told for most of their career at WSU that they are second-rate, and even at this land grant university, suffer from a pandemic of low expectations. A range of companies, regional, national and international sponsor my program. I tell them that I will not tolerate them being second-rate — but I also give them the motivational structure on how to be world-class themselves.

Almost all of my students are in the 20-23 year old age group, and the good news is that their neuroplasticity saves most of them. But I have no expectation that the students showing up at my door will improve over time. It’s not a matter of SAT scores. It’s a direct consequence of grounding validity — that internal sense of a reality that comes from making direct stories inside their brain through interaction with their own hands and a problem. And this is a neurobiological evolution. Kids raised in a bubble, whether that bubble is in suburban Redmond, or Toppenish, WA, have little idea how to conceive of a life as an engineer at a factory. Those from poorer parts of the state are obviously far more disadvantaged than students from more wealthy areas. At least those students from middle class neighborhoods can conceive of a potential lifestyle. But you might as well be talking about life on the Moon to many. And for the kids in places like the Yakima Valley, their ambitions are to return back to that same place, whether there’s a job there or not. I have a hard time arguing for the current migratory lifestyle and “making it” with many young people, just FYI. But it’s deeper than that. There are actual different cultural patterns that play a role — virtually all of my male Mexican students are engaged by their senior year. Their fiancees are expecting marriage and children soon. So the “return to Mama” urge, which hits at 5-10 years for my white kids, for them is immediate.

The good news is that, regardless of the roughness of their preparation, most of the students go on to productive careers. The ending of the various DEI mandates will actually help the minority kids the most, as these things provide counterintuitive incentives to many hiring managers. Managers look at ALL new hires as a gamble. But a minority is an especially large gamble, because it will be very difficult, if not impossible to fire them if they don’t work out. My students from minority populations are absolutely not distinct in performance from my majority white/Asian populations. So DEI has created a burden on the minority kids for hiring that is exacerbated by a lack of what I call “social coding” — them not coming from the dominant engineering culture — that will be eliminated.

All this said, what should the future of engineering education look like, considering these generalized student demographics?

  1. I strongly believe in promoting programs like First Robotics in high schools, as well as all sorts of shop classes. None of these programs are controversial, and a class in auto mechanics can offer that brain/hand integration I discuss in this piece on the Neurobiology of Education and Critical Thinking.
  2. Engineering programs will always have a bias toward kids on the autism spectrum, as most early engineering consists of Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme rule following. I think that all potential students in high schools should practice more in team-based collaborative environments, with less emphasis on grades and more on production.
  3. Math will remain a weakness, but the way we teach math currently is wildly atrocious. If we would take a socialized approach toward teaching math, we’d likely see far more comprehension. A revolution is required in our pedagogy, based on students co-teaching students.
  4. One of the things that seems to be very difficult for people involved in educational development to understand is that young people lack the ability to engage in cross-paradigmatic and analogic thinking. The real fix for this is more interaction where students are shown manufacturing and engineering environments, as well as meaningful examples of how technology uses the various classical disciplines (math, physics, social sciences) early on.
  5. There should be far more summer camps for engineering and pre-engineering students. There will be no transformation of local educational systems in the near future. Some level of compensation could be achieved with these camps.
  6. Design and problem-solving methodologies should be included in all college levels of engineering. It would amaze people if they knew the proportion of analysis vs. synthesis/design in a contemporary engineering curriculum. We don’t have students build anything except nonsense simulacra of physical principles in most of our lower-level classes. Such a deficit must come to an end.
  7. We are going to have to have some classes on social skills and behaviors. Kids do not know how to manage mentoring relationships, or basic public etiquette. It’s not that they’re running down the block naked. But performance environments very quickly pick up on cues for like-minded individuals, and will exclude those that cannot deliver those cues. We can practice some of this in labs. At the same time, they would also benefit from being directly addressed.

It may surprise some subset of individuals outside the Sausage Factory that these obvious things (they seem obvious to me, at least) are not being done. But they aren’t. And if we have any intention of fixing our technical education pipeline, we are going to have to become student-focused. Right now, we sure aren’t.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers (Part 2 of a bunch!)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Baby Coho, Windblown, Salmon River outside White Bird, ID

“Manufacturing is insanely difficult. It’s under appreciated in its difficulty.” Elon Musk

One of the things I’ve found to be profoundly curious about the debate regarding fixing our educational systems is how so little discussion occurs around the people delivering the educational content to students. Sure — we’ll argue about topical lists, appropriateness of grade level with material, and such. And then things will then diverge into polemics on the various politics of universities in general (almost always very liberal) or perhaps the politics of individual faculty members.

It’s not that those conversations shouldn’t be occurring — but they will not get at the root cause of the deep problems inside our modern educational systems — especially those in higher education. At some level, we just assume that students are going to get trained, somewhat correctly, with various holes in their knowledge because they did, or did not, take a pedagogy class. FWIW — our Colleges of Education are largely train wrecks, so if you think you’re going to fix the problems in higher education’s pipeline by having everyone take a pedagogy class, I’ve got news for you. My favorite story at my own university happened a while back — there was an “active learning” class — where students were supposed to do exercises themselves, and the classroom would be run by the professor from “the back of the room” (as opposed to the “lecture/sage on the stage” model.)

The class was delivered by lecture.

And I can tell you as well, as the former President/Chair/whatever of the President’s Teaching Academy, no young professor ever called me to ask for advice, nor sit in their classroom. Education is simply an arbitrary venture at the contemporary academy, though I think it’s also fair to say that occasionally, a charismatic individual passes through and makes a temporary difference in how education is structured.

But trust me — nothing sticks. The REASON nothing sticks is that, unless there is a conscious intervention by an individual, Conway’s Law must hold. And universities are inherently rigid hierarchies, with an obsession with titles, and there is a chronic ‘regression to the mean’ phenomenon that goes on in the vast majority of the curriculum. How you lecture can matter, and of course, with the various physical sciences and engineering, you do have labs. But overall, it’s not just the elephant in the living room. That elephant is out roaming on the savannah, eight thousand miles away.

Bottom line — if you want to really change education in general, and engineering education in particular (what this piece is about) you really have to re-think what are the guiding principles that undergird your educational factory. Students are the pieces of work that are being programmed, and at least as much thought has to go into how you are going to create the machines that make those pieces of work as you do arguing about the list of topics. Right now, we don’t do much at all. I find it pathologically fascinating that even at my own university, I have yet to be asked to give a single guest lecture on education, even though I a.) have received university-system-level awards, b.) bring in healthy amounts of money from external sources, and c.) even headed up institutional level organs for improving teaching. My passing is literally a hole in the fossil record.

The problem with even saying that is from an academic perspective, from the primary Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme that the academy operates under, even making that statement is some kind of narcissistic sour grapes. I must be butt-hurt over all of this. Honestly, I’m not. What I do in my Industrial Design Clinic, where students work with real sponsors, on real work, with real deliverables, and real expectations, is more rightly called World Creation. The idea is more like a Live Action Role-Playing game (LARP), except the participants (the students) have no real idea that they’re in a LARP. They do know it’s a class, and they do know they have to accomplish real work or they won’t graduate. At least that’s what I tell them. The reality is that I create the motivational environment, buttressed by sufficient and plentiful resources, and a customer/mentor WITH appropriate process that they are cattle-chuted through the game, learning skills and finding appropriate partners, that the statistics of them NOT getting it done are extremely low.

But I got to this very evolved form of education after serious study AND soul-searching after a ton of work. The principal ethos evolved early. But I’ve been doing this for some 29 years — longer than virtually all my students (and some of the younger professors) have been alive.

So what are we doing now? When we hire new faculty, there are really only two primary criteria we apply before we hire. First is that they have “research” prowess and specificity of the area, and secondly, that they stand out from whoever is in the pool that they’re competing with. Occasionally, there might be a nod to some DEI concerns — but honestly, not much. The faculty in my department are mostly foreign born (Chinese/E. Asian, Indian/S. Asian, and from the Middle East) and we really don’t care much at the time of hiring if they have any industrial experience. We hardly bias anything to folks being American-born. We do think about their ability (it is discussed) to bring in research funding, because without money, they will not make tenure. And then we’ll have to start the process all over again. All things considered, I feel like we’ve been pretty lucky. I like our young faculty. But if there’s any illusion that we have anything other than superficial concerns about classes they can teach, when it comes to education, let me disabuse you of that notion.

What that means is we end up with the v-Meme-NA of our own social structure deeply embedded in our activities. How that manifests itself is shown with the basic characteristics of how Legalistic/Absolutistic systems produce knowledge. It’s Completeness uber alles. One of the most obvious is the number of credit hours we require students to take. I think we’re currently at about 131 hours, whereas our accrediting body only requires something around 95. We don’t teach meaningful synthesis/design until the senior year. Teaching early in the curriculum is almost all lectures, and considered a booby prize by all faculty. What that means is excellence in education early on is highly dependent on the instructor and their own independent ethos on how they deal with a classroom, which in the first two years is very likely to be large. A class in Dynamics, which is a very difficult subject for most students, will likely have 200 students in it.

How to sum this up? We really don’t care about the most difficult part of what we do — building and staffing the factory. Especially at the undergraduate level. And because of this, our reject rate (the number of students that do not persist) is phenomenally high — often, in various classes, over 50%. Imagine a factory whose waste was 50% of the raw material brought through the door. The mind reels.

And the research on all this is appalling. One of the things I absolutely do know about student retention is that if students feel like they are connected to the program, then they’ll likely stay and finish. But instead of meaningfully and deliberately constructing environments so that students are connected, we fractionalize ad infinitum. Working together is called cheating. And the various DEI excuses now definitely come to the fore, though the reality of my classroom, where students actually befriend each other and work together, belies this. Stupid research is historically done on team size, for example, where it’s decided that four is the optimal number of members. But if you look at the actual research where that number was generated from, it was from building marshmallow straw towers in the course of an hour, between strangers. It is literally insane (see earlier comment about how educational research is largely garbage.)

If we want to build an environment that actually links industry and the university in a meaningful way, we are going to have to hire with a very different set of expectations than any current Carnegie R1 institution (the categorization for top research institutions in the US) does. In order to run my clinic, I need on any given week the following skills:

  1. Knowledge of a broad range of topics, at a level where I can sort complexity quickly.
  2. The ability to negotiate contracts and conflicts.
  3. Some knowledge of adolescent/post-adolescent psychology, and the ability to identify the symptoms of various mild pathologies so I don’t over-react if someone’s having a bad day.
  4. Actual knowledge of developmental behaviors and goals for a range of both students AND collaborators. Anyone proposing creation of an educational environment that doesn’t understand what partners need, as well as students, cannot create anything that lasts.
  5. Sales ability to continue to recruit outside collaborators into the fold.
  6. Ability to map procedural steps to educational outcomes.

The biggest has to be to think consequentially. What this means is that one must own a large sense of responsibility if students in your LARP don’t advance past a certain level in an appropriate amount of time. It means you’ve built the game poorly, and you have to own it. We’ve constructed education as a very low responsibility endeavor for teachers. If the students don’t learn it, and it’s an accepted part of the curriculum, it’s the students’ problem, and they will be graded/punished appropriately. The beats will continue until morale improves. This is absolutely counter to the high performance environment one MUST establish if you want students to move through the game over the course of a semester. Further, the more fear you use, the less likely students are to come forward quickly with what’s actually wrong with your creation. At round one, it’s your version of reality you’re creating.

If I had to hire a faculty for starting something like Elon’s Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS), I’d probably split the percentages of people with industry experience and Ph.Ds about 50/50. I’d teach people how to construct meaningful customer relationships, because everywhere you look in making a true paradigm-shifting institution, your primary job is building and maintaining a large social network that has as its priority transfer of information across all its nodes. I’d train directly to these goals as well — and at least some of this is salesmanship and deal creation on an individual level. If you want to pull something like this off, you must have people who have profound, place-taking empathy. A heavy lift. I also don’t think I’d hire all but a few under the age of 35. Younger people developmentally are simply not at the stage where they could be expected to master some of the more complex social dynamics.

There’s more, of course. And there would be coffee. Because coffee is for closers.

Forks in the Timeline and the Future of the West

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 7 Comments

Countryside in Winter, outside Milton-Freewater, OR

One of the more interesting plot lines of stories, along the lines of musing about the Multiverse, is the alternate timeline idea. Of course, “what ifs” along historical perspectives are nothing really new. And as far as literature goes, my intellectual engagement with the idea probably goes back to Michael Moorcock and the Elric series. But more recently, I’m a fan of the TV series Community, which has lots of fun with this particular literary trope. Community is a show about the producer’s idealized community college experience, which seems fantastical in all ways as someone who has worked in academia for most of their lives. There are study groups, engaged individuals, and of course, hot women and men who occasionally sleep with each other. This does not resemble in any way, shape or form, the modern university, which is more akin to a modern gulag, where students stare disinterestedly at professors, work 40 hours/week outside their classes, and the only community-building ritual is football.

But that brings one to the notion of an alternate timeline. Community has lots of shows contained therein where characters step outside of themselves at various branching points, with dramatically different outcomes dependent on varying choices the cast members make in their lives.

And as go the cast members, one can draw parallels to nations. Across Western civilization right now, there are all sorts of nations, making all sorts of timeline choices regarding civilizational outcomes, that are far more likely to yield unpleasant ends, or civil wars, than a make-out session in a car in the community college parking lot.

In the most recent election in the U.S., Kamala Harris, VP under Joe Biden, ran a strong negative campaign based on turning the country more Woke, and lost to Donald Trump, who, with a preselected “dream team” of counter-elites, managed a modest win in the national elections. While Donald Trump, an elite himself, runs as a counter-elite, officially aligning himself with the Republican Party, a firm majority in that party still identifies itself with an elite globalist agenda. Make no mistake.

More importantly, Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of multiple paradigm-busting companies himself, maneuvered himself into a key role, along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, as chief advisor to Trump. Even before Trump’s election, Musk had spoken out against many of the Woke issues of the day, such as continued support of the war in Ukraine, Internet censorship, and the elevation of transgender rights. And consistently, both Trump and Musk have spoken out against the key Immiserators in contemporary society, which Harris had passionately embraced.

When Harris lost, it was a profound fork in the timeline for the US. Harris had promised more Internet and social media censorship, under the mask of fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation”, more enforcement of DEI policies, as well as control of AI development. The press had (and still is) lined up behind Harris. Even as I write this, a moribund economy is being billed by the mainstream media as the strongest in the last 20 years. It’s easy to get paranoid and assume that the financial press believes there will be a fall, and that will be blamed on Trump, even though the lag times for any economic policy implementation is at least a year or two. But regardless, Musk and others have been running numerous moments of grounding validity across the political landscape, from buying Twitter (now X) and wading into the various culture war agenda items like transgenderism, and DEI policies that I’ve explained are prime tools of the Immiserators. At least for the present, the United States is on the upward path toward increased personal agency, and less government. As an example, Trump himself announced the creation of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), eponymously named after a meme based on a Shiba Inu dog. DOGE’s job will be elimination of government regulations — a subject of a post in itself.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, an entire nation is in the middle of a horrific branch in their timeline involving a sex scandal where primarily Pakistani immigrants ran large rape rings targeting white, underage girls in a variety of towns, including Rotherham, Telford, and other towns in the north of England. Authorities from both the local communities, and all the way up to the top ranks of British governance suppressed the scandal on the basis of maintaining racial harmony by not naming or prosecuting the Pakistani perps. The magnitude of the numbers involved is mind-boggling. Some 7000+ rapes were documented through these rape rings even this year, with basically no law enforcement efforts to stop the crimes, as well as plenty of victim-blaming.

Initially, when I heard about these crimes, I was very suspicious of a mass hysteria event, similar to the early ’80s McMartin pre-school trials in the U.S. In that situation, children had been interviewed for ostensibly repressed memories of devil worship inside of daycare centers. All of it turned out to be false, and you can read about it at this link. Instead, what the rape rings are shaping up to be is a civilization-ending event. Musk is tweeting about it on X even as I write this, and the British high command is condemning him for bringing up the unpleasantness. Apparently, the behavior has been historic, and tracks with surges in immigration in Britain — even dating back to the early 2000s.

Both these events — Trump’s ascendancy, as well as Britain’s collapse, would be worthy of a book. But what they show in the context of this blog is how during times of Elite Overproduction, which manifests itself in multiple ways, where the number of chairs available for both elites and their children shrink, and the number of elites themselves grow, there is profound societal pressure on immiserating the larger populace. As I wrote in a previous piece, in the US, the trans issue quickly gained ground as an elite signaling device, and luxury belief that elites could communicate with each other that they deserved to win the game of Musical Chairs.

The fact they were creating a more oppressive, authoritarian social environment for the larger population they believed to be in their favor. But fortunately, the votes and the governance system was in place in the U.S. that hopefully this will stop peacefully. We were simply not that far gone. While the immiseration of the populace was indeed real, what was also true was that the actual grounding of the entire trans issue involved a minute number of people. The number of trans male->female athletes, while high profile, were/are still relatively small. It’s wrong and vexatious, but it’s not civilization-ending if a man posing as a woman wins a bicycle race. And DEI has been noxious, but once again, not civilization-ending.

Nothing gives that impression of the rape rings in Great Britain. There have been massive numbers of British girls raped in a systematic fashion, by primarily Pakistani immigrants. Incredible system failure, under the guise of Woke policies and ostensible racial harmony, has been covered up. And Musk, and the entire X platform, has given voices to both the advocates for the victims, as well, incredibly enough, to the proponents of the coverup. Predictable elites have called the non-prosecution of these heinous crimes a “noble cause” and any notion that the people responsible, such as Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, should be held to account as immodest and unfair. As I write this, the British press is in alignment against Musk, protecting obvious Immiserators. It can be argued that Britain, for all of its history, has a far more comprehensive culture of elites getting away with literal murder. So it’s no surprise that Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and even King Charles, have lined up with fellow elites to defend the mass immiseration scheme. The problem with all authoritarian regimes, de facto or official, is that the people under them can only take so much. Then, psychopathic revolution becomes the stock in trade. Talk about a grounding validity moment.

The other key element to note here is that both large scandals, in both the US and Great Britain, are at their core sex scandals involving sexual abuse of minors. Transgender surgery on youth is the one thing that has profoundly fired up the larger population, as well as access of grown men to women’s spaces so that sexual violence can more easily occur. In Great Britain, the massive size of the rape ring scandal, once again directed at children, is emergent out of elite desires for immiseration in this latest regime of Elite Overproduction. As I’ve written before, sexual abuse of children is psychopathic in nature. But worse, it has the growth effect of producing even more psychopaths. And those relational disruptors go on to create broader psychosocial devolution across societies. You want to destroy the collective conscience of a culture? Rape a significant number of its young people. That train is never late. And it arrives at the station hosting the Tribal/Magical v-Meme. Which is no way to run a large, multi-cultural contemporary society.

This plays into larger psychosocial trends in the collective psyche of all of Western society. We are at a point where we have not kept up the agency-driven developmental needs of our societies. As such, we see elites establish elite coding to sort their kids into the winners’ circle, and everyone else into the loser’s category. How we reverse this, and prompt what in the short term will likely manifest itself as decentralization is an open question. But at the U.S. has some breathing room.

In the U.K., it’s going to be decentralization, followed by relational devolution. Stay tuned.

Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment and Elite Overproduction

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

Cold Desert Rain, US 95 north of Winnemucca

One of the better pieces I’ve read recently is this one: titled Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, by David Samuels in Tablet Magazine. Samuels is obviously an Old Dog, and describes in detail the head game that the combo of David Axelrod, a communication specialist and marketing guru, and Barack Obama played on the American people — especially the American tech. elite, that led to the incredibly destructive political climate of the last 16 years.

The short version of Samuels’ thesis is that Obama, with Axelrod’s help, took Axelrod’s strategy utilizing permission structures,(the linked piece is pretty good!) that Axelrod had successfully used in various Chicago races (Harold Washington’s mayoral success is highlighted) to get white folks to vote for black candidates, often against their own interests. They did this by creating a false morality inside people’s value structures to make them believe that morally it was a greater good to vote against both their own interests, and their own grounded intuition. The closest analogy I can come up with essentially Obama’s and Axelrod strategy was the equivalent of unleashing an HIV virus on the natural belief immune systems that any cohort develops, that insures long-term cultural continuity. Once convinced that moral posturing and virtue signaling was somehow in their long-term interest. And it worked — something like 80% of white folks voted for Washington in the mayoral contest, as opposed to only 35% of African-Americans.

The problem with completely disconnecting any group of humans from what I call grounding validity — making sure what you believe has some actual, observable data to back it up– is that it has unintended consequences. My favorite go-to of an entire civilizational collapse due to a lack of it is the parable of the Aztecs, who obsessed on raiding neighboring tribes for human sacrificial tribute to make sure the Sun would rise by cutting out their hearts on the Pyramid of the Sun. Once you believe that level of bullshit, your civilization is uniquely fragile. And 500 badass Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, and accompanied by his translator and personal consort Malinche, proved the point. The consequences for ungrounding are wildly tragic. My fun statistic is that 95% of the Aztec genome is carried on the X chromosome. Which mean those conquistadores killed all the men and literally raped all the women.

What is great about this piece is it is obviously written by a pro, who can describe the ins and outs of how they actually did it, as well as the consequences of it coming undone. My analogy of why when these systems fail, they fail rapidly, is that ungrounded systems are prone to what we call signal drift — the difference between a signal with appropriate ground, and whatever the rest of systems and society decide to make up as true. This seems to have a pernicious effect on human brains. When you practice unreality, your brain gets worse and worse detecting reality. It simply doesn’t practice it. And what THAT means is that it is far easier for a cult (or national) leader to seize control and program people with whatever beliefs they want. Like 50 year old men wearing a wig have a right to enter women’s spaces. Or if you want to get into a women’s prison, and you’re a man, just tell the guard you’re a woman. But I digress.

The other thing that happens when you practice unreality, is that your belief system for navigating the actual world is prone, just like an electrical circuit, to arcing when it has to ground itself against actual reality. Arcing is inherently destructive (it’s how we weld metal) and there are sparks. I think it’s a worthy analogy — and we’re witnessing it right now in the aftermath of the Trump election. Samuels makes the point in the piece (and I agree with him wholeheartedly) that Kamala Harris was perhaps the worst presidential candidate in the last 100 years, and the permission structuring around attempting to force people to vote for her using racial and misogynistic guilt (she’s a woman! She’s African-American even though she’s not!) just couldn’t work. It was so unbelievable that enough of the electorate couldn’t just party line NPC it in. And she lost to a candidate who was widely reviled, and the entire press corps had fallen into lockstep of chronically attacking. The result was truly a silent revolution. Because of social shaming, you couldn’t even admit that you might consider voting for Trump without public ostracism. I voted for Trump myself, and still can’t bring up that issue with the majority of liberal friends I still hold. That’s majorly fucked up.

Where Samuels’ analogy falls apart, though, is that these types of outcomes and conflicts are literally occurring across Western civilization. The tendency that Samuels exhibits is to attribute the temporary success of Obama’s campaign to an amalgamation of old and new cunning, and particular individuals. If that were the case, though, we would not be seeing similar types of conflicts across a spectrum of countries, with different outcomes across a variety of countries. One might rack up conservative victories in Hungary/Orban and Italy/Meloni to nations that are in the process of re-grounding toward more appropriate national self-interest. As well, one might consider nations like France, Britain and Canada still in flux.

What is far more likely the overriding dynamic is that we are seeing Turchin’s Elite Overproduction in action across the globalist landscape. Elite Overproduction comes once every 150 years or so (do read Turchin’s book linked here) and happens when there just are too many elites’ kids, and not enough spots for them to assume the same social position as their parents. Why does that matter? If you look out across the political landscape, what we’re actually witnessing is emergent behavior, with the tools of elite manipulation being pulled out of the last century’s toolbox, and finally having the appropriate environmental conditions that they proved to be useful. And it’s U.S. – agnostic. Obama and Axelrod may be clever. But they are just men of their time.

Further, this also gives potential insights into how wider wars get started through Elite Overproduction. When you have too many people competing for too few chairs, then what’s not to like about a Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Turks? And the worst conditions for this kind of social virus are when you have an In-group and Out-group that hit the same point of Elite Overproduction at the same time. Then everyone’s raring to go.

If there’s a bigger lesson here, it’s that you’ve got to ground your kids — especially the elite ones — in reality. Or there’s a proclivity for elites to make up self-serving fantasies, and use lots of fancy words to project a preferred image of reality that has nothing to do with it. In our case, I feel like we got lucky by having a robust enough electoral system to elect Donald Trump, and his A-team level staff of advisors. Because the current crop of elites were converging on burning it all down. Or make us vulnerable to a modern day Cortes burning the ships at Veracruz.

P.S. — one thing that is interesting about Samuels’ take on all this is it links Turchin’s book, End Times, that I’ve written about with Rob Henderson’s Troubled — in particular his concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ — with the actual modality — permission structures — that’s a how-to for generating political anarchy. But the circumstances have to be right. Otherwise, the virality you need just ain’t there.

P.P.S. I’ve also recently been taken by Mike Benz. His Joe Rogan podcast lays it out. Another post-mortem way worth listening to.

Quickie Post — SpaceX and the Emergent Power of Memetics

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

SpaceX Starship Booster, post-launch

Today, October 13, 2024, is truly a momentous day. Why? SpaceX successfully launched AND recovered Starship V — the whole configuration, which included the heavy booster, AND the top stage, which will be the working part of their spaceship that will carry humans to Mars. Recovery of the heavy booster was accomplished by Mechazilla, the giant chopsticks-like device, while the top stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. It would have been great to have the top land on one of SpaceX’s recovery ships, but that will come in time.

There are lots of YouTube videos that portray the flight, and considering this was written in the AM of Oct. 13,, there will likely be more. Here’s one to get you started if you’re reading this early.

Launch and beginning recovery

Why were they able to do this? You have to go back to Conway’s Law and understand the memetic evolutionary step that SpaceX has taken — which is to launch full configurations, knowing that they could explode in full public view, to do what we call an All Up test. There is some complexity limit in such an advanced craft that there is no way to gain more insight nor understanding from component testing. Sooner or later, you gotta put it all on the line and Light That Candle.

But only a memetically advanced performance-based community can do this kind of testing. If Legalistic Authoritarian status-driven NASA blows up a ship on the pad, then heads inevitably will roll. The status blow to the operation is one that NASA simply won’t allow. Because the elites in the company look bad. So promotion of managers that will enforce that memetic standard end up getting promoted, as opposed to more enlightened and non-risk averse individuals. And in the current milieu, you end up with people who will NEVER get a rocket off the ground. Like this guy.

And people will fall into line under that kind of leadership. When status matters, and not performance, you might be able to make McKinsey happy. But you’ll never design the next generation of space flight. People know, for the most part, that they have to go along to get along. You get down to that “I gotta feed my babies” Survival v-Meme pretty damn quick.

It’s in the knowledge that an organization produces. Because that knowledge creates the design. You simply can’t bring in enough outside, or unknown knowledge to get your ship off the ground. It’s true for bacteria, and it’s true for spaceships.

If there’s a simple memetic takeaway, though, it’s this. Status-based companies will produce stasis, and incremental improvement, until capture by rule-gaming psychopaths. Performance-based companies will hit goals and design new things. Things can and will go wrong — but it’s your only hope of actually creating something new.

Starship is the result of a lot of hardcore, diligent work. Make no mistake about it. But it’s company culture, and importantly company structure that made today what it is. Congratulations, SpaceX. The future is starting to look like the future!

More Boeing Blues — Starliner, DEI, and Getting Saved by SpaceX

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Three cheers and one cheer more!

Two astronauts aboard the Boeing Starliner, a reusable space capsule design by Boeing Defense, have been temporarily stranded at the International Space Station due to maintenance and reliability problems with their capsule. NASA Mission Control decided to bring the capsule back empty, rather than risk potentially catastrophic failure of the capsule during re-entry, without question the most stressful part of spaceflight, when the capsule must plunge back through the atmosphere in a literal fireball.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the two astronauts who took the big vertical ride early June 2024, were sentenced to additional months in orbit on the ISS because of the mission failure, though when the Starliner was brought back through the atmosphere, it did touch down in September (uncrewed) successfully. Starliner was a program funded coterminously with SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, to the tune of $4.2B, while Dragon received $2.6B. According to Wikipedia, Boeing’s project had already exceeded its fixed price contract by $1.6B, indicating a major financial loss for Boeing.

There are all sorts of interesting top-level insights on the Wikipedia page, and I recommend reading it (I hadn’t until I decided to write this piece!) Of particular interest is receptivity to feedback from both the Boeing and the SpaceX engineering teams in the development phase of this project. The various mission failures along the path of Starliner resulted in the termination of Boeing Defense, Space and Security CEO Ted Colbert, who previously had been in charge of Boeing Global Services and CIO of the entire Boeing Company. From reading his resume’, Colbert had been rewarded with recognition that he was both African-American and an engineer multiple times in his career. I’m sure he was happy to play the DEI card in order to move up in Boeing’s chronic Game of Thrones hierarchy, and achieve entry into what many of us call Boeing’s Prince cohort. People at the level of Colbert wield a lot of power and authority. They get their own plane (and I’m not talking a Cessna 172.) I don’t know the exact number of levels in the hierarchy necessary to get to his position, but I’m guessing it is at least seven.

Was he hired because he was a black man? Well, that was probably a consideration. Boeing touts its DEI focus loudly, so I can’t really even understand why that would even be considered in a racist insult. That sword cuts both ways. But it’s just not interesting to me hanging the failure of Starliner all on one dude because he’s black. It really dodges the real blame of what different psychosocial systems produce. What does Conway’s Law really tell us, after all? Rigid psychosocial systems like the Boeing Company, at best, maximize incremental improvement and reliability. And at worst, reward the anti-risk-takers, who then propagate that attitude down the various levels of hierarchy toward a cult of new design mediocrity. Great for maintaining a legacy product line, maybe. Awful for producing anything new.

And Colbert didn’t take over Boeing Defense until 2022 — long after the various problems with Starliner’s problems with its thruster clusters were well-defined, if not understood. Sure — he didn’t fix them. But it’s not clear inside a massive, political rigid hierarchy, that he even could. What CEO, in a multi-stack hierarchical system, even does?

A better way of understanding the problems with Starliner, filled with status-driven infighting at the Boeing Company and its subcontractors, is to look at what SpaceX has done right. The answer is simpler than one might think.

SpaceX is willing to blow rockets up.

Why does this matter? One of the biggest challenges of complexity, that has been covered to death in the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, was the lack of what’s called “All Up” testing. All Up testing means putting the whole system on a launchpad, and launching it into space. Doing this recognizes that there is only so much information that can be gathered from reliability testing of components. Why? Components in a large-scale system can only have their respective interactions observed when assembled together and tested. Even then, there’s no hope of constraining complex subassemblies and gathering statistical data for the entire system. You can’t launch a space shuttle 1000 times (or a rocket, for that matter) and gain that kind of confidence. Sooner or later, you have to put it together on a launchpad and Light That Candle.

But rigid hierarchies crave that kind of security. Boeing and NASA have, in the last 40 years, enshrined a no-risk culture that simply is not feasible for pushing the boundaries of spaceflight. The key concept here is what’s know as “configuration control.” What that is is you know all meaningful interactions between the various subsystems before you move forward. And while some level of due diligence in predicting those interactions is certainly part of engineering excellence, the other part of this is realizing you can’t know. And this kind of epistemic humility does not emerge out of experts in rigid silos.

Colbert was not set up as a fall guy for DEI, though he was indeed likely given the position because he had proceeded up the hierarchical stack and had the resume’ for the position. And he was black. But just look at his Wikipedia entry — everything in his career pattern was about exactly what the v-Memes of the contemporary Boeing Company enshrines. And that ain’t risk taking. So metacognition dies, your organization becomes insular, and all your enemies are, of course, on the outside. Because no one on the inside would even bring up a problem before it would happen.

That’s what the death of metacognition looks like.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has been busy lining up rockets to blow up, knowing a priori that they would. And because of a young engineering culture, and an expectation that they are creating a learning organization, they’re successfully learning the boundaries of what they don’t know — which is what you need when you cannot a priori assess the limits of configuration control. Knowing what you don’t know enables you to cure your ignorance. And then push the system boundary continuously outward.

There are also some natural consequences of demographics that SpaceX has going for them. I’ve done a couple of projects with them (I’ve also done projects with Boeing) and the main thing that impressed me was how young their engineering staff was. Aside from a couple of my ex-students, I never dealt with anyone older than 30. Combine that with goal-based v-Meme thinking (we just want to solve the immediate problem any way we can) and deep Guiding Principles directions from Elon Musk, the founder (we want humans to be a multi planetary species) and you have a far more potent v-Meme structure than moving up one more click in a massive hierarchy.

Will Starliner ever be a successful competitor to SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule? I personally think that it will take a while, but yes. The v-Meme system at Boeing — a large Legalistic Hierarchy — has the ability to generate the information to cover the information space to make a space capsule. And in large part, their reputation for other lucrative contracts depends on it. But at what cost? We’re going to get some time/money comparisons out of this as far as the efficiency of psychosocial systems in generating and dealing with complexity. Right now, we’re easily at 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of SpaceX But the answer ain’t gonna be pretty for legacy organizational modes.

On Trump’s Assassination Attempt, Civil War, and Leaky LARPs

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Yosemite Fire Sunset, 2024

It’s increasingly hard to keep up with any cogent view of the news cycle, in these last couple of weeks in July. Short version — Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, PA. The breathless press first didn’t want to admit that Trump was shot, but then that was followed by an endless litany of calls for essentially civil war, especially in the subjunctive (“If Trump had been killed,” for all of those that weren’t forced to study Latin) and then followed on the heels of all this, the announcement by Joe Biden on July 21 that he was dropping out of the presidential race.

Screenshot from CNN after Trump was shot. Even then, CNN was attempting to monkey with the script

Everyone assumes that each of these events are independently momentous, finally, FINALLY leading to some Manichaean conclusion and Götterdämmerung, after which the world will be destroyed and born anew. History must have SOME inflection point, no? The press insists.

But no one’s asking any structural questions on any of this (except for a few voices like this blog.) If Donald Trump had died, how would that civil war actually have taken place? Other than gathering for meetings in the town square, or local park, with their pussy hats, or marching along avenues reserved by the multi-billion dollar entertainment mountebanks known as Black Lives Matter, Americans can’t hardly organize anything political. I have yet to be at a large rally where anyone was collecting names and phone numbers for future contacts. The Old Gods in both parties know this. But the show must go on.

And it does. Geography, as I’ve explained, is functionally dead, save for looting stores in Blue states. What you see on your computer screens, via TikTok, or X, is a postcards-from-the-edge approach to news. Some people manage to get together and break some windows. But more and more, what’s really happening is a slow slide into decay. I visited an old friend in Portland a little more than a month ago. There was some evidence of rioting activity present in downtown Portland. But the biggest sign obvious to me was the lack of shopping in what was once an energetic downtown retail district, as well as miles of dilapidated RVs parked along Lombard Street.

And fat people everywhere, of course. The national obesity rate has passed 42%. The real crisis is in the metabolic health of Americans, as well as a constant slide into poverty and homelessness. As well as the adaptive reality that if you’re going to live in a broken down RV, it’s a whole lot more comfortable to do it someplace where it is warm, and food is still relatively cheap. Folks have some eatin’ to do.

I still marvel at the people in the press claiming that the nation is on the brink of civil war. Wars are physical things, historically fought by young, healthy males. That’s just a statement of fact, with the truth of it aligned in our genes. When all your young males are fat, you’re not fighting anyone. Regardless of how many AR-15s you spread around.

And I still am impressed with the raw stupidity associated with calling January 6, 2021, an insurrection. Do people have any idea how utterly impossible it is to control anything from the U.S. Capitol? The elected officials on salaries of $200K, with a complete complement of near-slaves, in the guise of interns, can’t do it. Insurrections put different people in power that actually command some level of authority and respect. Not dudes with buffalo headdresses made from Gray Owl kits. It is a mystery to me how to get the federal government to do anything. How would the ostensible insurrectionists even know who to call to bark orders or threaten? I’ve said over and over that most people don’t even have any idea where their electricity or water comes from (give yourself a quiz and see if you can accurately answer that question before feeling smug.) “The Grid” is not a valid answer, though I’d be impressed if most people could even say that.

What’s really going on in front of our eyes is what I’ve decided to name a Leaky LARP. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing game, a combination of re-enactment, storytelling and gaming—players are given a role and act out their character’s actions within an overarching story, from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The reporters on said LARP are actually intrinsic, and important Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in the game. They certainly can’t comprehend the extent of complexity of modern society themselves. But they do know where they’re supposed to line up with the general story line. And they also know their paycheck depends on them delivering, through clicks and other measures of engagement on the Internet. So the story must be exciting.

The problem is, with all this “through a glass darkly” stuff, is that it’s like a fictional movie that leads with a trailer that says “this movie, while a work of fiction, is based on historical events.” Except those historical events are actually real, and are happening, and usually involve the harm or death of someone in the Real World. It’s all scripted. Until, well, it isn’t. Trump was nearly killed by a 20-year-old male (at least at this current time I’m writing) who set himself up as a LARP-player extraordinaire. The incompetent bureaucracy assigned to President Trump played their part as incompetent bureaucrats, replete with local law enforcement clowns, and DEI agent hires unable to holster their guns. Trump dutifully played his part as well, not dying, of course, but then standing up with the help of agents and raising his fist in the air and mouthing “fight, fight, fight!”

Of all the players in this Leaky LARP, Trump has known he’s a central figure, and his performance didn’t disappoint. Whether he authentically, instantaneously shoved his fist into the air, or did a great piece of improv. doesn’t in the end really matter. When someone nearly blows your head off, at least in my book, they get the benefit of the doubt. Fight, fight, fight it is. He was still a 30 degree twist of his head from getting his brains blown out.

I wrote a piece on Donald Trump back in 2016, right after he was elected the first time. It still holds up, and contains one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written. It’s solid, and I recommend reading it.

But in the larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution scheme of things, he’s just another relational disruptor inside a system declining for other reasons. 

And like a play based on characters violating the Fourth Wall with the audience, our LARP only occasionally grounds itself to the outside world in real terms. Bullets hit ears of presidential candidates. Small sections of major urban areas get turned into No-Man’s Lands, with looted Walgreens, or spin-out competitions in intersections. And while the line may seem blurred between fantasy and reality, the other truth is that people actually die, and lives are wrecked in the context of those grounding moments. As Melania Trump’s letter to the American people elegantly stated, Donald Trump has a family too. Regardless of which part of his brain center lifted his fist into the air.

If there’s a takeaway from this, it’s that we need to pay more attention to the backdrop, and less to the scripted moments. Shit never stopped getting real. And it would behoove us to focus on the long line of trailers on Lombard St. in Portland, or the fat folks waddling through the local Walmart — or Food Co-op. Not nearly as exciting — but a telling signal in a pattern of nationwide decline.