Three Sigma Systems

NYT 8/31/2010 – Trapped Chilean Miners Forge Refuge

“…at 62 years old, Mr. Gómez is the oldest of the 33 miners trapped nearly half a mile underground here and has become the spiritual guide to his men…” Aside from Mr. Gómez, there is Luis Urzúa, the 54-year-old shift leader who organizes their work assignments, is helping to map the path of their rescue hole…”

I can think of no situation more likely to reduce a human being into a whimpering terrified animal greater than that of being buried alive almost 3000 feet underground. Given the generally accepted view of the economics of human nature we should expect initial panic to give way to a King Rat scenario in which the strong prey upon the weak and thereafter, even the strongest give in to the paralysis of terror and hopelessness.

But nothing of the sort is happening among the 33 Chilean miners trapped a half mile below the surface of the earth. What is happening is that these desperate men are acting out their human nature, which is to confront the challenges that life has placed before them with purpose and method. Given the problem they face, they have created a leadership hierarchy that defers to the wisdom of the eldest among them (Joseph Campbell’s “Gray Beards”). These elders have embraced the task assigned to them by willing followers, of focusing the group’s thoughts, deliberations and actions in ways that help them survive.

This self-organizing principle, in which human beings come together to confront the challenges that life puts before them with shared purpose and method is the essence of human nature. Over the millennia the forces of natural selection have built this modus operandi into our genome. This is what human beings do naturally —-unless that is, they are constantly bombarded with messages that intentionally obfuscate the nature of the challenges they face and systematically promote fear and loathing among them.

The misguided “sciences” of psychology  and economics base their sales pitch about human nature on the idea that humans function as economically self-interested individuals. But the economics of human existence are meaningless when regarded in terms of individuals. It is only in terms of our relations with one another in addressing life’s challenges, that human survival becomes possible. Then again, as Dr. W. E. Deming was fond of saying, “Survival is not mandatory”.

Current events should make it abundantly clear that the human race is in no less dire straights then the Chilean Miners buried deep in the earth. We need to stop listening to the “King Rat” claptrap that’s being dished-out in generous portions and come to grips with the challenges that life is putting before us. Once we do that, all that remains is for us to do what comes naturally.

Theory underlies ALL human experience including every seemingly raw observation or assertion of true fact. Theory is the vehicle of all conscious experience.

Simply put, theory-making consists of setting forth an assertion, no matter how trivial or grand, in which we claim “If this, then that”. In other words, theory is prediction.

My theory of consciousness is that it is rooted in our genetic predisposition to construct theory (Darwinian). The structure of theory is narrative. Theory is “story” that we tell to, among, and with others, real and imagined, as in our imagined “selves”.

The construction of narrative (i.e. theory), is no more mysterious than the behavior of birds gathering twigs and bits of string to shape into a nest in which they will thereafter reside, along with their developing offspring.  Instead of twigs and string, we gather up our self-created vocal and gestural material and shape it into symbolic-narrative nests of varying utility, in which we reside, and without which we are not and cannot be conscious.

Every conscious being comes into existence in the context of theory shared by others as narrative, and thereafter in continuous interaction with others and the substantive world at large. It is in this complex ongoing interaction of story-tellers predicting their way through the world that theory comes to be accepted and taken-for-granted. Theory that comes to be taken-for-granted (e.g. Self-evident or “proven”) forms the foundation for the edifice of subsequent theory we construct continually.

We cannot extricate ourselves from theory — we cannot be conscious of ourselves from outside our narrative nests. I think of this as a “belief barrier” that we can only overcome by practices designed to give-up self-awareness (i.e. Non-consciousness). OOOOM!

In the business of formal theory-making that we call modern science, the predictions made — the “if this then that” stories told — can never be proven for the simple reason that in prediction, the totality of all possible future outcomes is unknowable. A theory can be falsified by one disconfirming outcome, but never proven.

But as we approach the belief-barrier, the falsification of theory that forms the foundations of our consciousness threatens our very conception of the socially constructed self. To actually break the belief-barrier would be to descend into incoherent madness — a bird’s nest distorted into useless form —rather than sublimely pure awareness. An individual bird of a nesting species who, for whatever reason, becomes incapable of building a functional nest, is incapable of surviving, and so too for the conscious creature who becomes incapable of constructing a narrative nest.

This helps us to understand why down here, near the belief-barrier, theory often stands despite repeated falsifications in practice. The coherence of our symbolic narrative nest is of paramount importance and evidence-be-damned, such coherence must be sustained at all costs, lest the story-teller be plunged into incoherent, suicidal, madness.

The boundaries of theory-making down near the belief-barrier are circumscribed by what “works” as prediction, more or less, but also by the symbolic material itself. Like twigs and string, the structure of “if this, then that”, prescribes a form that is self-limiting and self-bounding, but infinitely variable within those limits.

In consciousness, we cannot overcome the belief-barrier but we can characterize it. In doing so, we can eschew illusions of truth and proof that restrict our ability to improve the form of our nest with purpose and intention, while sustaining our nest’s functional coherence.

I believe that the process of theory-making down near the belief-barrier is universal in nature and can be both described and explained as a whole. These essential elements transcend the variety of forms regarded as “proven” that continue to confound our inquiry.

People often ask why the work of W. E. Deming and his mentor, Walter Shewhart, figure so promintenlty in my thinking about the nature of human endeavor and the human enterprise as a whole. My answer is that these two men recognized that the human faculty for predicting the future is what sets we humans apart from all other creatures. Prediction is the bread and butter of our existence and the quality of our predictions determines whether we live or die. Deming and Shewhart understood that our principal aim in acting must be to reduce variation, and thereby, increase predictability.

Our penchant for prediction is more than a hobby, it is a genetically hardwired obsession that causes us to imagine patterns, cycles, and rhythms in all events related to our activities. To our minds, the regularities of events, real and imagined, are the keys to predictions by which we organize our actions along useful lines. We call these patterns “systems”.

Based on this understanding, Deming and Shewhart both concerned themselves with methods for recognizing useful and meaningful patterns and, given our limited powers, for reducing the variability of those patterns in order to enhance our ability to predict the outcomes of our activities.

Two articles in todays NYT deserve our attention. Both deal with instances in which we, who rely on predictability for our survival, have by our own misguided actions, increased variability and thereby reduced predictability.

In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming

Double Dip? A Tipping Point May Be Near

Everything varies, but it is not the direction of change that matters most but rather, the range of change that threatens our survival as a species.

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…

NYT, August 2, 2010 – “F.B.I., Challenging Use of Seal, Gets Back a Primer on the Law”
The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: “Failure to comply may result in further legal action.”

What sets human beings apart from all other creatures is their penchant for investing inanimate things with transcendent power. In the early going the behavior of prehistoric man was shaped by animistic beliefs in which symbolic power was vested in the things of nature. Inspired by cautionary tales about the consequences of hubris, told and retold generation after generation, mountains, plants and animals, the clouds and the stars, where all vested with the powers of prediction, retribution, and forgiveness. These symbols served to shape man’s relation with nature into a moral whole that actually worked!

Incessantly innovative, it did not take a very big leap for animistic man to begin manufacturing his own transcendent symbols. These man-made symbols were also vested with power, but not the power of the natural world, but rather the power of men. Man’s MANufacturing of symbols marked the beginning of history, in which symbolic artifacts came to signify, legitimize and sanction differentials between human beings.

The symbolic power of manufactured artifacts — shamanic trinkets, totems, religious paraphernalia, badges, cash money, numbered accounts, and WMDs for example —  does not reside in the real and practical use of these artifacts, powerful though such use may be, but in imagined meanings experienced as inhering in these objects.  Once such objects become vested with meaning, their intrinsic meanings convey power to those who are able to possess and monopolize them. By this means, their possessors become able to exert dominion over others merely by displaying such objects. It stands to reason that if these manufactured symbolic objects can be readily reproduced by unauthorized agents, the system by which possessors exercise power and control over others is in serous danger of collapse.

The great revolution of the 21st Century is the ability to reproduce symbolic artifacts with great accuracy and ease, and to disseminate them at little cost. This is why for example, the U.S. Treasury has gone to such great lengths to protect the powers vested in our currency against high quality copying machines — an exercise in futility as Bernie Madoff proved and Goldman-Sachs continues to prove. It is likely that, in our digital age, the horses have already left the barn. Today the symbolic artifacts that embody power are readily counterfeited.  A fake Rolex and a fancy car purchased on no-down-payment credit can open locked doors. Need the powers of a Ph.D degree? Try here. Want to wield the priest’s cross? Go here. Want to flaunt the emblem of a United States Senator? Talk to Mr. Green. Need to instill fear and loathing with an FBI badge? Go here.

For better or worse, the legitimized power that resides in manufactured artifcats is fast becoming obsoleted into meaningless gibberish by technology. In a new age of constant con, the symbolic power that is generated by virtue of shared meanings invested in manufactured artifacts, can no longer be trusted. Perhaps we are in need of a new paradigm by which to organize our relations. Maybe there is a way to move forward towards a system of shared-meanings vested on our creative powers rather than in mystical objects of our own manufacture.  Such a system would not be built upon our belief in the power of our artifacts but upon the power of our responsible relations with others. This idea is not really all that novel.

“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“

Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.

T. S. Eliot, “The Cocktail Party”

To love and be loved and to hate and be hated are two sides of the coinage that makes us real. Love and hate do not exist on a quantifiable continuum. We do not love a little less or more nor do we hate by degrees, inches, or yards. Our experience of love and hate makes us real because, at great risk to our “self”, we give ourselves over to the others we love and hate and allow them to become a part of ourselves. Loving and hating is being and becoming.

It may be that half the harm that is done in the world comes from the hate that is the flip-side of love but the other half most certainly comes from that absence of either that attends our futile, risk-averse struggle to think well of ourselves by measures of gain.

Jeffery Rosen has written a stunningly thought provoking article in the NYT Magazine: “The Web Means the End of Forgetting“. He wrestles with the nature of human memory and the construction of self. Lest you think that such concerns have little importance in the conduct of your everyday affairs, consider Rosen’s observation that…

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants.

Rosen toys with the idea that as we tread the Web each of us leaves behind a trail of digitally fossilized footprints. Our trail, so fossilized, will inevitably be used by others who wish to decipher our habits and thoughts, to corner and categorize us for their own purposes.

What might others make the trail we leave behind? How will this or that record of moments past — a picture, a written paragraph, a voice or video recording — be used by anonymous hunters browsing the Internet with the aim to decode and classify us?

How fearfully discreet should we be, lest we become defined and damned by a digitally fossilized artifact created in some unguarded moment and interpreted by those with their own agenda?

A search of the Web reveals an ancient snapshot, originally taken in 79 AD Pompeii. It was captured by the superheated ash from Mount Vesuvius. The indelible image captured presents us with one frozen moment in the lives of two citizens of Pompeii. Is their ungouarded moment sweet or obscene? What conclusions might a human resources specialist draw regarding the character of these two people? Should they be hired?

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!

In a worthy July 4th NYT blog entry, “Friendship in an Age of Economics“, Todd May , a professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, gives himself over to some rather random thoughts on the nature of friendship. He draws upon Aristotle’s classification of relationships — those of pleasure, those of utility, and those that are true — and concludes of the true that:

We might say of friendships that they are a matter not of diversion or of return but of meaning.

May’s “true friends”, are those who sit by his bedside without clear ulterior motive. These friends have a purity of motive that makes their friendship more complete. He quotes John Berger:

“We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.” To be able to sit by the bed of another, watching him sleep, waiting for nothing else, is to understand where else we might be.”

Friendship is the wellspring of meaning. Our friends are the ones who are there with us over time. They are the ones who provide us with the looking-glass by which we come to possess a sense of who we are as we do the same for them. Friends are those who continue to feel “you” and make you, for better and for worse, amidst the ebb and flow of ever-changing events. Friends are there with you, renewing you constantly, and you are likewise, there with them,

I have decided that it is not motive that determines the  nature of friendship, it is time. Friendship is a sustained jam session of call-and-response. Friends are the partners who make up your friendscape. They are there with you time and time again, creating you as you create them.

Without friends, our sense of participation  —- our sense that we mean something — fades away. This fading is called loneliness, and in my experience there is too much of that in our culture of self-justification, self-aggrandizement, self-esteem, and solo performances.

In an age of rationally motivated economic self-interest, friendship is under continual assault, in part because we are indoctrinated with the idea of motivation and in part because we have built a society of predation rather than collaboration.

To experience friendship requires that we accept others for who they are — we let it be. The obstacles to friendship are in our minds as well as in the nature of our “caveat emptor” economic relations. We have engineered a society of lonely self-interest.

In today’s NTY article, A Disaster Reaches Beyond the Gulf Coast” got me to thinking about how the BP disaster that is currently unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico has placed the people of the region, and our nation at large, in a double-bind.

On one hand, the people of the region are confronted with the reality that profit hungry enterprises will despoil their environment for  generations to come, destroying everything in the region that makes life worth living. On the other hand, they are terrified that those same greedy enterprises will be stopped, causing them to lose the jobs, income, and cheap fuels that the activities of those greedy enterprises offer.

This is just one more example of the conundrum of Me-space versus We-space that is currently polarizing and paralyzing our nation.

Me-Space

ME-SPACE

Me-Space is a tiny place viewed by digging down to a narrow vantage point with “Me” at its center. The deeper I dig downward and pull inward, the tinier my Me-Space becomes. I divide my space again and again, until my “Me” stands alone, surrounded by alien”Me’s”. Me-Space is a place of danger and fear in which I build walls to protect who I am and what I possess from others who want to rob me of all that is rightfully mine. In Me-Space everyone who is not “Me” is a threat. I shutter my windows. I arm myself with guns and bullets and lies. I close my mind to subversive ideas. I dig-in, hunker down and defend my Me-Space.

WE-SPACE

WE-space

We-Space is a very large place that can only be seen when I climb upward to the highest and widest vantage point I can attain. The higher and wider my vantage point, the larger and more encompassing We-Space becomes.  The world seen from We-Space dwarfs me and my Me-Space with its impersonal immensity and awesome grandeur.  It is a world in which my puny “Me” can only survive and prosper as a member of “We”. In We-Space there are only the hopes and dreams “We” share and the possibilities “We” conceive as we confront the challenges the world puts in our path. It is a space that is anchored in a fundamental faith that human beings can prove themselves worthy so long as they continue their striving to climb ever-higher to see ever-wider.

Living in Me-Space leads with absolute certainty, downward toward greater loneliness, vulnerability and eventual oblivion. We-Space, on the other hand, offers no such promises. The fate of human beings remains ever uncertain. But in We-Space there is a universe of possibilities in which the challenges before us provide we human beings with ample opportunity to prove ourselves worthy .

BP Notes:

In Me-Space, the BP disaster as one in which I assign blame to alien “Me’s” who infringed on the rights of “Me”. In We-Space, I realize that the BP disaster is one that “We” made inevitable by lounging irresponsibly in Me-Space and allowing self-interested Me-Space profiteers to undertake risks that would at some point, inevitably despoil both Me-Space and We-Space.

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Memorial Day is just around the corner. It’s a day set aside for us to remember and to contemplate Americans who gave their lives in the service of American values. It’s a good day to think about just what it is that we Americans value most.

We all know that the media loves to whip Americans into a frenzy over the senseless loss of life that occurs when an airplane crashes, a mine collapses, or a psychopathic street thug kills. So why is its that, when more than when 30,000 Americans die violent and horrible deaths at the hands of other Americans, the media and the nation hardly take notice?

In 2009 who was responsible for the violent carnage that dwarfed all other blood-letting in America, and took its greatest toll among our youngest and brightest?

A. Military actions such as our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

B. Natural disasters like hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes?

C. Drug crazed junkies and dealers?

D. Industrial accidents?

E. Murder and mayhem across our nation?

ANSWER: None of the above came close.

Click HERE for the data!

The murder of somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 Americans year in and year out is just BUSINESS as usual, and that says something profound about American values, don’t you think?

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.

Why has the United States become a nation who’s political body politic has become dominated by greedy and self-absorbed misanthropes? The answer is in the numbers and the history. According to Gallup, almost 50% of all American’s of voting age (18 years) are over 50 years old. These voters are the “Baby Boomers” and they have dominated the national demographic landscape since the halcyon days of post WWII America.

The Boomers were conceived and raised in a United States that by default,  came to dominate the post-WWII world with industrial and military might. With our shores unsullied by the ravages of world war and our industries intact and unchallenged, the Boomers plopped into the scene on the back of a plan for rebuilding Europe and Japan as client nations and for the defense of the “free world” against the godless “Reds”. In their most formative years, Boomers were indoctrinated in the self-evident belief that they were the shinning embodiment of truth, justice, and freedom, otherwise know as “The American Way”.

When you are born and raised in such a historical circumstance, your sense of self-righteousness and personal entitlement become etched into the bedrock of your being. If “Conservative”, you see you mission as a defender to the American Way. If “Liberal”, you see yourself as a font of enlightenment and the bearer of goodness to the downtrodden and uneducated. Either way, the Boomers were born to be right and put upon this earth to save the world with their global Marshal Plan.

The Boomer’s “plan” for the world underwent numerous revisions that paralleled their age. Let’s take ride down Boomer Lane. Read more…

Deming’s SoPK acronym is a shorthand for a theory of human action that explains why some methods do not work and why others do work better in the course of business and other human enterprises. It is a theory that stands in opposition to other theories. This opposition can be regarded in the same sense that the Copernican Heliocentric model of the universe stood in opposition to Ptolemy’s Geocentric theory of the universe. But the implications of the new awareness inherent in SoPK are, excuse the pun, earth shaking.

As with Copernicus, whose theory cast humanity out from its central position in the universe and thus undermined the foundations of human consciousness, SoPK (taken as a whole) undermines the idea that humanity can determine the “true” nature of the world, and thus transfers the burden of responsibility for the future of humanity from the “natural” or God-determined order of things, squarely onto the shoulders of enterprising humans. Read more…