Three Sigma Systems

Slater OR Orr?

NYT, August 9 2010 – “Fed-Up Flight Attendant Makes Sliding Exit“

After a dispute with a passenger who stood to fetch luggage too soon on a full flight just in from Pittsburgh, Mr. Slater, 38 and a career flight attendant, got on the public-address intercom and let loose a string of invective. Then, the authorities said, he pulled the lever that activates the emergency-evacuation chute and slid down, making a dramatic exit not only from the plane but, one imagines, also from his airline career.

We know he’s crazy because he didn’t ask.

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Been there, done that!

Over the years I have had ongoing discussion with my friend and colleague, John S. Dowd about Israel’s plight in the Middle East. He argues that Israel’s miliary responses to the threats that surround her are only making her situation worse as world opinion increasingly sides with the plight of the Palestinians. I argue that Israeli concessions and accommodations with various national, tribal, and extra-legal interests will never appease all or even most of her adversaries, at least some of who who will never relent until the Jews are “driven into the sea”.

I contend that, at its root, of the Israeli conundrum is not about Middle East real estate. It is about the historical events, predominantly European, that led to the creation of Israel itself. It is about a 2000 year history of anti-Semitism in which the Jew was cast as the “other”. This protracted real-world passion play provided the impetus and legitimacy for the ongoing exclusion and brutalization of Jews in Diaspora throughout the Christian world and culminated amid the ashes of the Holocaust and creation of the Jewish state of Israel. The Jews and the state of Israel are not just one more case of the illogical or problematic drawing of national boundaries by which one group gains more and another group gains less. The creation of the state of Israel was a Christian attempt  to compartmentalize the real consequences of the Jew’s role as “other” in the mythic narrative of Christianity.

John sent me a link to a series of conversations between Christopher Hitchens, the noted atheist-intellectual, and Atlantic Magazine writer, Jeff Goldberg. Hitchens’ facile thought process succeeds in making some key points that have been particulary difficult for me. If you are interested in the process by which consciousness is constructed as well as the problems of the Middle East, you should find it interesting. Note that the interview is published in segments so you will need to click additional links to hear them all.

My reply to John after viewing the interviews, follows the video link.

John,

Interesting (and a bit gut wrenching). On the whole I have not been a great fan of Hitchens, if only because his arguments, with which I tend to agree, leave off where I begin. Read more…

“There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson

The difference between science-based and faith-based approaches to explaining the world is one of degree rather than category. The scientific method is undeniably powerful but we should always remind ourselves that it is in fact, faith-based.

The faith-based nature of scientific inquiry is instantly apparent to us when when we consider the familiar axiom that although a theory can be disproved, it can never be proven. As we move forward in the process of constructing knowledge, the explanatory edifices built by those who profess to follow the discipline of scientific method, are based upon belief that is deemed to be increased by degrees with each experimental or experiential confirmation of predicted outcomes. It is of practical rather than metaphysical consequence that all “scientific” belief is falsifiable and therefore always conditional, but this methodology of negation in no way obviates nor diminishes the seminal role of belief in all “scientific” assertion!

If we take a bit of “time” to consider the implications of this well accepted but often overlooked axiom of scientific inquiry, those of us who want to explain consciousness scientifically must grapple with the nature of belief itself. Our intentions, the questions we ask, the efficacy of our investigations, and the measurements we make, are all bounded by the circumstances of our existence and the narrative by which we make sense of our circumstances.

So we can say that scientific inquiry is efficacious in terms of our circumstances, aims and intentions, but we must also recognize that what we “discover” (better said, what we “construct”) will vary with the circumstances, aims and intentions that constitute our socially constructed, faith-based reality narrative.

We construct our world as intentional actors, based upon our belief by degrees in our theories tested in terms of the efficacy of our actions as causal agents. The tautologies of mathematics notwithstanding, the strength of the scientific method lies in pragmatic falsification of theory but that process is in itself, subject to the conditions of belief that bound our inquiry and govern our assertions.

At some point in all scientific reduction, we will always encounter an impenetrable belief-barrier that constitutes the fundament of our consciousness in which we always tell the story of how I, you, and we are, were, and will become.

See my post: “The Blinding Stupidity of Unconditional Belief“

In a recent interview conducted at the University of Oregon, Seymour Hersh (no relation), a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist who writes for the NYT and New Yorker, invokes the Quaker wisdom that the moral imperative of the journalist is to “speak truth to power”. As I see it, the Quakerism applies to more than just journalists.

Hersh goes on to discuss two subjects of great interest to me: the myth of objectivity and the reality of our futile wars of adventure that prove most tragically, that we do not learn from history! I see his comments against a backdrop of ideologues and fools battling over petty self-interests in which we become caught up in deadly games of lies and deceits that render us helpless in solving the problems that threaten our survival as a nation and a species.

For a breath of fresh air, watch and listen to this interview.

Jeremy Rifkin gives a provocative lecture, supported by some entertaining graphics, in which he asserts that the human species is essentially defined by it empathic powers.

In other words, the process of evolution has selected for human nature that “feels” with others and thereby enables us to bridge the physical boundaries between individuals. The faculty of empathy allows us to synchronize our actions in dance, music, conversation, and in building in infinitely creative ways. We humans, as a whole, have survived 50,000 years because we have, for the bulk of that time, behaved in a manner that made us effectively greater than the sum of our parts.

I am largely in agreement with Rifkin. Our penchant for constructing the world though knowledge is based in our empathic interactions with one another. Our very consciousness depends upon our ability to share symbols and experience shared feeling about our constructs.

So why have we come to embrace the “scientific” ideas proffered by social Darwinism, that the nature of the human condition is rooted in every man for himself? The answer to this mystery is as simple as “follow the money”. Who stands to gain from this false science?

Rifkin’s thesis is that we must make an effort to organize our society in a manner that promotes empathy. It may be even simpler than that. Maybe all we need do is systematically remove the obstacles that have been placed in the way of doing what we do most naturally.

Thanks to John Dowd, who called this link to my attention, along with his comment: “You will like this.  I’m not buying it, but you will agree with it.”

He was right. I do like it!

Merlin is an old time master. He can appear either as an old man with a long gray beard or as a young child, and it’s an important motif that appears in many, many mythologies You see childhood and age are eternal conditions. Between childhood and old age you live in a historically conditioned reality. In mid-life you are doing the jobs of your society. These are all historically conditioned roles, so people in midlife are culture bound. They are bound to their cultures.

The child — and there’s really only one child in the world — is a new and spontaneous living organism. When old age comes, we have done our bumping into this and that and all problems of the world. Our bumpers fall off. Our headlight go out. But looking across the great curve of a lifetime we have infancy and old age …. and so the one who can guide us in terms of transcendent rather than simply historical wisdom, is either the old man or the child.

Transcribed from Joesph Campbell lecture, “Power of Myth, the Grail Legend”

I have just finished reading “Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan” in the New Statesman. The article, by William Dalrymple, is the most definitive contemporary analysis of our doomed military enterprise in that far off land, that I have read up to this point.

One element of the story grabbed my attention. The tribal people of Afghanistan look to their gray-beards for insight and direction in their struggles with adversity. The author writes.

“The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the grey-beards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before.”

I have traveled a great deal of the world, including Afghanistan, and I have come to appreciate the way in which some cultures value the wise counsel of their gray-beards — their Merlins. In our society, the culture-bound calculus of loss and profit has supplanted the transcendent wisdom that comes with age (we only need ask). We tally our winnings in a zero-sum game of profit and loss rather than value the quality of our lives as responsible and honorable members of an enduring community of fellow humans.

When gray-beard Dr. W. E. Deming was asked about methods for becoming successful, he always answered, “By what measure?”

Although I can find no authoritative figures for our NATO solider-to-Muslim kill ratio, one blogger estimates it at least 30 to 1, but probably much higher, he says. These numbers are quite profitable and one would think that our adversaries and their families would be ready to give up the fight, but it seems that our adversaries are using different accounting methods.

Where are our gray-beards when we need them?

Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA), lies at the heart of Deming’s theory of human enterprise. People are often tripped up by his formulation, thinking that it is merely a shorthand for what is commonly thought of as the “scientific method”. Not so. The scientific method imagines that we can progress toward an increasingly accurate picture of the world, while PDSA asserts that we can continuously improve the efficacy of our actions in relation to our aims.

In the former, we are observers of the world. In the latter, we are creators of the world. In his “The Saviors of God”, Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of “Zorba the Greek”, put it this way.

THE SOUL OF MAN IS A FLAME, a bird of fire that leaps from bough to bough, from head to head, and that shouts: “I cannot stand still, I cannot be consumed, no one can quench. Lie in ambush behind appearances, patiently, and strive to subject them to laws. Thus may you open up roads through chaos and help the spirit on its course. Impose order, the order of your brain, on the flowing anarchy of the world. Incise your plan of battle clearly on the face of the abyss.

THE ULTIMATE MOST HOLY FORM OF THEORY IS ACTION. Not to look on passively while the spark leaps from generation to generation, but to leap and to burn with it! Action is the widest gate of deliverance. It alone can answer the questionings of the heart. Amid the labyrinthine complexities of the mind it finds the shortest route. No, it does not “find” – it CREATES its way, hewing to right and left through resistances of logic and matter.

I keep telling myself that I will swear off making references to the good works of W. E. Deming, the only truly great management consultant who actually challenged business leaders to think beyond their next feeding opportunity, but that has proven easier said than done.

The launching point for Deming’s theory for doing business was to develop clear aims and then pursue those aims with what he called, a “constancy of purpose”. Among the aims he advocated was for a business to profit by way of creating valuable products and services, as defined by customers, and to create jobs, and stay in business — long-term. It’s not about what the world out there is, it’s about the world as you intend to make it.

“Long term” and “constancy of purpose” go hand-in-hand. Without long term constancy of purpose, we can only react to the momentary vicissitudes of the marketplace — the ever-present variation that signals nothing of great importance. In constancy, we give ourselves the time to refine our aims and methods, not in manner that guarantees “success” but in a manner that guarantees that we will make forward progress. It is by asserting a steady and constant pressure that challenges, even those that seem the most intractable, can be overcome. Without constancy of purpose, the varying winds that buffet us daily, drive us along a random course, further and further from the solutions to the problems that we deem most important.

The idea of a constancy of purpose in the American enterprise is an anathema to corporatist oligarchies who feed off a perpetually confused and increasingly apathetic citizenry. This is why they are so quick to champion less government, less regulation, less organization, less critical thinking, and less constancy.

Today, the polls are signaling the resurgence of the political philosophy so loved by predatory corporatists — every man for himself. It is fast becoming the common wisdom that the Senate will turn Red and the Congress will turn Redder. The explanation for this is that the winds that have been buffeting our nation over the past year have been fanned by corporate interests to such an extent that the herd is stampeding — the predator’s dream.

I am probably pissing in the wind when I suggest that you, the American electorate, need to settle down and think about your aims and the constancy of purpose needed to make forward progress regarding those aims. The havoc wreaked on the American purpose over the past 30 years cannot be undone in one year. The resurrection of the great American middle class — the land of the free and home of the fearless — will take more time and dedication than that.

It’s time to start thinking about the November elections and toward turning out the vote of all who believe that the United States of America is about a nation united in a constancy of purpose despite the buffeting winds. We are here to make a better world.

As we all know, the idea that the process of knowing is limited is not in the least bit new. Human beings, a knowing species, has knowingly intuited this since the faculty of knowing first arose.

As far back as we can see, humans have employed various techniques for filling-out and tempering their knowing though the systematic use of ritualistic practices. These practices share one thing in common. They all try to drive the conscious knower toward a non-causal, non-temporal, non-knowing state of awareness. Meditation, chanting, wandering (e.g. walkabout), drumming, casting the coins of the IChing, contemplating the paradox of a Zen Koan, prayer, and singing in church, are all examples of techniques for coming closer to what is called in Zen, the Satori produced by “letting go”. In a sense, all are randomizing techniques that help us to listen for, and hear, the voice of the process.

So I think that the paradox of being human is that the faculty of knowing, which is so crucial to our survival, cannot become profound (e.g. SoPK) when knowing is divorced from the awareness that can only be realized by “letting go”. And “letting go” can can only be achieved in practice — in “doing” and in “acting” (pDsA).

We can say then, that the wonderful and very useful faculty of knowing is in itself, limited, and that the challenge we knowers face is to develop techniques by which we can “know” in better, more useful ways.

The history of humankind can actually be written in terms of the transformations that have occurred in our techniques of knowing. Kuhn called these “paradigmatic” transformations. Shewhart and Deming, among other contemporaneous thinkers, were working towards just such a transformation, in which ubiquitous variation in systematically observed events can be differentiated from events that can be, from an economic standpoint, addressed in terms of assignable causes. Their methodology addresses the limits of knowing directly by, given our aims, providing signaling thresholds by which we can make best guesses between that which can be causally reduced, from an economic standpoint, and that which, all things being equal, must be “let go” —at least until we turn the PDSA wheel around again in a new time and new context.

So what should we make of our “let go” awareness? What is really “out there”? Clearly, we cannot know, but it seems that we can feel it and when we let go, that feeling is something that we share in “common” with other knowers on some empathic level. I do not believe that it is helpful to “assign” qualities of temporal causality to the feeling-awareness we experience in letting go, lest we fall into the trap of “knowing” something that is inherently unknowable.

CAUTION!
The following is a satirical essay intended to educate the reader in the absurd practice of labeling others. See “labeling theory“.

As every gardener knows, if you want to grow a beautiful garden you have to get out there and pull out the weeds. In America today, it is clear that many believe that the same is true for creating a beautiful society. No one understood the importance of weeding the garden better than the industrious and well organized Nazis who developed a system to identify weeds by affixing colored triangular patches to the most undesirable species. It makes sense that we should look to their pioneering efforts for guidance and then build on their accomplishments.

Nazi Weed Labeling System

The Nazi Weed Labeling System

Yellow triangles were used to identify Jews who everyone who was not a Jew agreed, were smart and cunning disciples of Satan, motivated by greed. It also helped to know that they killed Christ.

Red triangles were used to mark dissenting politicos who undermined the beliefs of true believers.

Green triangles were used to identify the habitual criminals who routinely stole, robbed, conned, and otherwise cheated good citizens.

Blue triangles were used to identify foreign laborers who lived and worked on the margins of society for low wages but enjoyed none of the rights of citizens . Today we call them “wet backs”.

Pink triangles were used to identify homosexual men and other sexual offenders such as pedophiles and chronic masturbators. Women were exempted, presumably because they’re “hot”.

Purple triangles were used to identify religious dissenters like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Bible Students, Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, and had they been around, chanting Hari Krishnas, I’m sure.

Black triangles were used as a sort of catch-all for “a-socials” including anarchists and other generally disagreeable types.

Brown triangles were used for genetically inferior types such as the mentally retarded, alcoholics, vagrants, prostitutes, and “work shy” malingerers. Gypsies and Slavs were included in this group.

The ingenious identification system also allowed for the combining of triangles to mark various varieties of weeds. For example, a black triangle superimposed over a yellow triangle was used to identify an normal person who consorted with Jews. They were known as “race defilers”.

Interestingly, no triangle was used to identify sub-human dark-skinned people, presumably this cost saving measure was adopted because dark-skinned people could be readily identified without the aid of an identification triangle.

Toward the end of WWII, the Nazis realized that they had just scratched the surface of their weed labeling system’s potential. With the war nearly at an end, and their demise a foregone conclusion, they rushed out a last minute catch-all legislation called the “Community Alien” law which focused more on undesirable behavior and less on racial criteria.

“A community alien is: (i) anyone who, by his personality and way of life…  shows himself unable to satisfy the minimal demands of the national community by his own efforts; (2.) anyone who (a) from work-shyness or frivolity leads a useless, spendthrift, or disorderly life … or (b) from a tendency or inclination to…. minor criminal offences, or from a tendency to disorderliness while drunk, grossly violates his duty to sustain the national community, or (c) persistently disturbs the general peace through irritability or pleasure in quarreling, or (3) anyone whose personality and way of life make it clear that their natural tendency is to commit serious crimes.”

You’ve got to admit that when it came to gardening, the Nazis were as committed as it gets, but in their rush to finish their good works, they ended up painting with too broad a brush.

Today we are are not under the same time constraints as the Nazis. Not only do we have more time, but we know so much more. We no longer subscribe to Nazi-like racial stereotypes — well mostly not — but we have become very adept when it comes to identifying and labeling people who exhibit weed-like behavior. In the light of our more sophisticated knowledge, we can use the power of labeling to make a better world. Below, I offer a more enlightened “Enhanced Weed Identification Guide and Labeling System” so that good Americans can go about greening their nation with greater precision and compassion. Read more…

In a previous post, “Economic Transformations” I tried to demonstrate how the meaning of the concept “economic” is problematic. I suggested that the roots of the concept had to do with the “process” of husbanding and management of resources in order to optimize their production, distribution, and use among communities of people — family, tribe, organization, state, etc. The implicit aim of this process is to assure survival of the group in the long-term (sustainable).

Now I want to consider the above in terms of two ideas that are commonly used to mean different things: “value” and “values”. More specifically, we tend to think of “value” as an exchange measure — an accounting of the worth of things. We think of “values” as the meaningful guideposts that “should” take precedence over exchange “value” , and govern our actions in terms of our belief in what is right and good.

Start with Darwin and think about how some puny naked apes emerged out of the chaos of random genetic variation to spread across the planet in a very short period. As with all other living creatures, their behavior was rooted in a “will” to survive, at least long enough to procreate. (Darwin does not try to explain why the drive to reproduce exists, nor will I.) In their little nomadic tribes, some among them acquired the ability to communicate among themselves and thereby work collaboratively to form predictive theories, adopt and use methods, and revise those methods for hunting, in gathering, in distributing food and other resources, and in shaping their wanderings. These communicating predictive creatures were our ancestors. They were “selected for” based upon their ability to work more collaboratively, more theoretically, more able to accurately predict, than others, and so too, their offspring. Read more…

The following article was called to my attention by Dirk van Putten.

“Odds Are, It’s Wrong: Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics“

The author claims that “…a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics.”

Of course the author is wrong. It is not the statistics that lied, it is the misusers and abusers of statistics who have spread fallacious ideas, intentionally and unintentionally.

The fascination with numbers goes back a long way in human culture. Numerological correlations with observed events have been integrated with sacred mythologies as far back as we can see — the Egyptians, the Druids and the Mayan’s, for example. — but it was not until the secular revolutions of the 17th and 18th century that this numerology came to be accepted as the principal instrument of truth-saying with respect to the nature of “reality”. Read more…

In today’s NYT Opinionator, Stanley Fish offers an essay entitled “Pragmatism’s Gift”. The essay, which is a bit academic but nevertheless quite good, concludes that:

“When pragmatism tells us that there are no first principles, it not only disqualifies itself as the source of guidance and justification; it disqualifies the whole enterprise, at least in its more ambitious forms. What it leaves are the pleasures of doing philosophy, the pleasures of thinking about thinking freed from the burdensome expectation that we will finally get somewhere. Now there’s an advantage and a gift to boot.”

I have seen this “end of purposeful philosophy” argument before and always find it a bit curious. If anything, it seems to me that the Pragmatist’s view of the world is the beginning of philosophy if only because it sets before us the enormous task of justifying our intentional actions in human terms. Instead of asking what is the “true” nature of reality, we must ask, what does it mean to be human?

The practical value of Pragmatism goes well beyond its intuitive elegance. At the very least, the benefit of the Pragmatist’s constructivist view of the world is threefold.

1. The view explains why our illusions of certainty (ideology, dogma, and natural law) are being dis-confirmed in scientific inquiry and why our delusions of certainty have produced our history of perpetual conflict.

2. The view transforms our conception of a world that is limited by divine and/or natural laws into of world of possibilities based in intentionality.

3. The view opens the door to a methodology humans can use to get “unstuck” and move forward to improve their enterprises — To muddle through better. (W. E. Deming summarized this methodology as PDSA.)

In other words, Pragmatism places the onus of responsibility on we humans, as intentional actors in the world, rather than on metaphysical beings and “natural laws” that supervene our actions.

NOTE: When you read through the comments following Stanley’s essay, it is interesting to see that even though his first paragraph is intended to dispel the common understanding of the term “pragmatist”, most of the commentators still don’t get it. Pragmatism is a very simple idea but it is immensely counter-intuitive.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

Chogyam Trungpa

My wife is a Physical Therapist. She has explained to me that walking upright, which is a means of locomotion most fully expressed by human beings, is actually quite remarkable. The process is one of taking a stable system and intentionally driving it into a state of instability — falling — and then regaining stability, over and over again.

First we stand. Next we hurl ourselves forward into a fall. We then catch our fall and regain our stance. If you watch a human infant learning to walk, you will see this instinctual process unfolding quite clearly.

The process of knowing (of creating knowledge) is very similar to this. We construct a stable explanation of the world and stand on it. As the world changes beneath our minds, we fall. As we fall, we struggle to reconcile our explanation of the world in order to reassert a stable stance.

In ideology and dogma, we try to cling to a stable stance — a truth — from which we will no longer fall and from which we need no longer move forward. But the world does not comply with our attempts to avoid our fear of falling. The world changes beneath our clinging minds and, sooner or later, we must fall despite our best efforts.

Since the world is always changing beneath our minds,  the length of the fall we will take in knowing will be greater the longer we try to avoid falling. The danger of relying on ideology and dogma increases over time. History is filled with tales of fatal falls.

There is another option though. We can chose to master the art of knowing in much the same way we master the art of walking.

Like walking, the process of knowing — this falling forward —- goes unexamined in our everyday experience. To change this — to depart the habit and master the art —- we must be letting go in much the same way as the infant learns to walk by falling. To move forward, we must step off the brink of our belief, stepping into the fall, and trust that we will survive. In this way our knowing becomes more powerfully useful given our aims and intentions. Our journeying minds can then take us where we chose to go!

I call this process surfing the wave of knowledge creation.

THIS IS BIG, BIG, BIG! Believe it or not, on Saturday, December 5th, our very own DoD (Department of Defense) will be taking time off from their busy Afghanistan build-up schedule to launch ten 8-foot red balloons at various locations around the United States for the DARPA Network Challenge.

Are you up to the challenge?

BUT WAIT! That’s not all! They are offering $40,000 to the first person who locates their balloons and reports back to them with the correct latitude and longitude for each one.

You heard me right! I said $40,000. If you don’t believe me, click HERE to get the word from the bureaucrat’s mouth.

Read more…