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.
For eons, these wandering communicative apes didn’t think in terms of “values”. They lived where the tire meets the road. No excess wealth and little margin for error. Do what works or die. Theirs was a kind of an ultimate pragmatism.
As we look at this pragmatism from the outside, it is clear that the problems of survival were for these naked wanderers, completely economic. When you think about it, Shewhart’s two economic mistakes were pretty important to these vulnerable wanderers. To predict, they needed to decide if animals arriving at the waterhole in the morning was a common and therefore, predictable event, or if something special was going on. If common, they could camp near waterholes and harvest the bounty. If special, they might take advantage of the assignable event and move on, or maybe they might try to assign and reproduce the special cause to trick the animals to come down to the waterhole. In any event, one set of actions would always be superior to another. One prediction is always more efficacious than another. An economic decision is required, given the aim to survive in a dangerous and uncertain world.
Deming said, “Pencil and paper for construction of distributions, scatter diagrams, and run charts to compare small groups and to detect trends, are more efficient methods of estimation than statistical inference that depends on variances and standard errors, as the simple techniques preserve the information in the original data.”
I doubt that our ancestors used “pencil and paper”, but they surely did counts and correlation studies in the form of estimations, looking for tell-tale patterns that signaled difference between common and special cause. We can assume that among those tribes that did survive, the patterns and trends they surmised were useful, even when they determined that their chanting ceremony (a randomizer?) the night before the hunt caused the hunt to be successful. After all, when regarded over time, if their theories didn’t work, they would not have survived.
As useful as it is, the ability to create theory and collaboratively predict — to imagine the future — brings with it some very interesting baggage, which taken as a whole, we call “mind”. Foremost in the process of “mind” is the construction of an imaginary world made up of discrete, causally interacting parts (reduction) and among these imagined “parts” are the others among us and ourselves. One object is “us”, the people. And in a process of further reduction, each of us individually, becomes an actor on the world and an object of action in the world. We become both a user of tools and tool. Others work on us, and we work on others, and we work on ourselves. Each of us becomes a causal, mortal, temporal being living amongst others more like ourselves than not.
This process of objectification is a necessary concomitant of the emergent mind. You can’t “think” without it. It is in this separation that we conceive of “values” as predictive constructs shared among the communicative members of our community. If “value” represents the economics of making decisions in order to optimize our system and methods for surviving, then our “values” represent our adoption of certain sets of ideas about value-based economic decisions that we come to see as more or less universally valid and operating independent of any given situation.
If we take a moment to work from a theory of our emergent minds, certain objective statements of “values” start to become self-evident because “value” is reliably and predictably lost when those “values” are not acted upon. For example, the interdependent nature of the collaborative action that makes me, “me”, you “you”, and us “us, suggests that killing and cheating our fellow community members is not very useful. Value is lost because such behavior contributes to the dissolution of the community. If an individual acts to betray this axiomatic value, the community will act to punish the bad actor. In “conscience” we will even act to punish ourselves. Better than punishment though, is the strategy of teaching our young that the welfare of others in the community as a whole, is an overriding value to be embraced as a matter of belief and to be affirmed and reaffirmed in ritual. An ounce of prevention is more valuable than a pound of cure.
One of the problems we observe is that killing or harming a member of our community depends on where we draw the boundaries of “our community”. For nomadic tribesmen, it was pretty obvious. Rarely seen “outsiders” were viewed with considerable suspicion, so much so that the tribal word for members was often, “human beings”, and outsiders were non-human beings.
So the definition of values and adherence to those values depends on that which is defined as our collaborative community — the human beings vs. the non-human beings. Who’s in the lifeboat with us? Who are the others who’s values, theories, and actions we depend upon? Who’s in and who’s out?
The faculty of “mind” works for us and against us. This is no more that saying that bigness for dinosaurs was at one point, an advantage, and at some other point, a disadvantage. But we have a leg up on the dinosaurs. Once big, they could not make themselves un-big. We on the other hand, can think about our thinking, how it works, its pluses and minuses, and shape our minds and our actions with the aim to optimize the value realized by our adaptation. To begin with, we must come to terms with the idea that there is no true value “out there”. The guidepost for our actions resides in our capacity to survive though collaborative effort that continually allows us to create new knowledge by which to address the challenges presented to us by our ever-changing world. Upon further study, it will be seen that this symbolic process is one that is founded on shared aims (values) and intentions, driven by difference and diversity, and resolved in collaborative action that produces new difference in the world and ourselves — over and over again. This is PDSA.
Footnote: The transformation of the concept of economic, from a problem of optimization to a problem of maximization, arose in a political context and was used to rationalize certain disproportionate relations of wealth and power that reliably and predictably produce conflict within our communities (increased entropy). Extremes of disproportionate wealth and power could only emerge once human tribes stopped roaming and started to carve up the world into pieces of material owned by some and not by others. This is the historical process by which the idea of private property came into existence and was handed down though a legalistic process of inheritance. In it’s current incarnation, “economic” refers to imagined external “natural laws” that govern relations between human beings based upon the idea of rational individual actors who are “motivated” to maximize their personal gain (ROI). This is referred to today as the very math-centered and “scientific” “micro-economic” theory that suggests that in a perfectly unfettered market, the sum total of all rational behavior will be a perfect predictor of exchange value. “Macro-economic” theory is built upon micro, but tends to adopt the position that the math of micro cannot create perfect models due to problems of complexity. Note that the psychology of individual “motivation” (a reduction) is the key to this explanation of economics. It is very, very, different than the explanation of the process of human enterprise suggested in this essay.
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The Value in Values
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).
For eons, these wandering communicative apes didn’t think in terms of “values”. They lived where the tire meets the road. No excess wealth and little margin for error. Do what works or die. Theirs was a kind of an ultimate pragmatism.
As we look at this pragmatism from the outside, it is clear that the problems of survival were for these naked wanderers, completely economic. When you think about it, Shewhart’s two economic mistakes were pretty important to these vulnerable wanderers. To predict, they needed to decide if animals arriving at the waterhole in the morning was a common and therefore, predictable event, or if something special was going on. If common, they could camp near waterholes and harvest the bounty. If special, they might take advantage of the assignable event and move on, or maybe they might try to assign and reproduce the special cause to trick the animals to come down to the waterhole. In any event, one set of actions would always be superior to another. One prediction is always more efficacious than another. An economic decision is required, given the aim to survive in a dangerous and uncertain world.
Deming said, “Pencil and paper for construction of distributions, scatter diagrams, and run charts to compare small groups and to detect trends, are more efficient methods of estimation than statistical inference that depends on variances and standard errors, as the simple techniques preserve the information in the original data.”
I doubt that our ancestors used “pencil and paper”, but they surely did counts and correlation studies in the form of estimations, looking for tell-tale patterns that signaled difference between common and special cause. We can assume that among those tribes that did survive, the patterns and trends they surmised were useful, even when they determined that their chanting ceremony (a randomizer?) the night before the hunt caused the hunt to be successful. After all, when regarded over time, if their theories didn’t work, they would not have survived.
As useful as it is, the ability to create theory and collaboratively predict — to imagine the future — brings with it some very interesting baggage, which taken as a whole, we call “mind”. Foremost in the process of “mind” is the construction of an imaginary world made up of discrete, causally interacting parts (reduction) and among these imagined “parts” are the others among us and ourselves. One object is “us”, the people. And in a process of further reduction, each of us individually, becomes an actor on the world and an object of action in the world. We become both a user of tools and tool. Others work on us, and we work on others, and we work on ourselves. Each of us becomes a causal, mortal, temporal being living amongst others more like ourselves than not.
This process of objectification is a necessary concomitant of the emergent mind. You can’t “think” without it. It is in this separation that we conceive of “values” as predictive constructs shared among the communicative members of our community. If “value” represents the economics of making decisions in order to optimize our system and methods for surviving, then our “values” represent our adoption of certain sets of ideas about value-based economic decisions that we come to see as more or less universally valid and operating independent of any given situation.
If we take a moment to work from a theory of our emergent minds, certain objective statements of “values” start to become self-evident because “value” is reliably and predictably lost when those “values” are not acted upon. For example, the interdependent nature of the collaborative action that makes me, “me”, you “you”, and us “us, suggests that killing and cheating our fellow community members is not very useful. Value is lost because such behavior contributes to the dissolution of the community. If an individual acts to betray this axiomatic value, the community will act to punish the bad actor. In “conscience” we will even act to punish ourselves. Better than punishment though, is the strategy of teaching our young that the welfare of others in the community as a whole, is an overriding value to be embraced as a matter of belief and to be affirmed and reaffirmed in ritual. An ounce of prevention is more valuable than a pound of cure.
One of the problems we observe is that killing or harming a member of our community depends on where we draw the boundaries of “our community”. For nomadic tribesmen, it was pretty obvious. Rarely seen “outsiders” were viewed with considerable suspicion, so much so that the tribal word for members was often, “human beings”, and outsiders were non-human beings.
So the definition of values and adherence to those values depends on that which is defined as our collaborative community — the human beings vs. the non-human beings. Who’s in the lifeboat with us? Who are the others who’s values, theories, and actions we depend upon? Who’s in and who’s out?
The faculty of “mind” works for us and against us. This is no more that saying that bigness for dinosaurs was at one point, an advantage, and at some other point, a disadvantage. But we have a leg up on the dinosaurs. Once big, they could not make themselves un-big. We on the other hand, can think about our thinking, how it works, its pluses and minuses, and shape our minds and our actions with the aim to optimize the value realized by our adaptation. To begin with, we must come to terms with the idea that there is no true value “out there”. The guidepost for our actions resides in our capacity to survive though collaborative effort that continually allows us to create new knowledge by which to address the challenges presented to us by our ever-changing world. Upon further study, it will be seen that this symbolic process is one that is founded on shared aims (values) and intentions, driven by difference and diversity, and resolved in collaborative action that produces new difference in the world and ourselves — over and over again. This is PDSA.
Footnote: The transformation of the concept of economic, from a problem of optimization to a problem of maximization, arose in a political context and was used to rationalize certain disproportionate relations of wealth and power that reliably and predictably produce conflict within our communities (increased entropy). Extremes of disproportionate wealth and power could only emerge once human tribes stopped roaming and started to carve up the world into pieces of material owned by some and not by others. This is the historical process by which the idea of private property came into existence and was handed down though a legalistic process of inheritance. In it’s current incarnation, “economic” refers to imagined external “natural laws” that govern relations between human beings based upon the idea of rational individual actors who are “motivated” to maximize their personal gain (ROI). This is referred to today as the very math-centered and “scientific” “micro-economic” theory that suggests that in a perfectly unfettered market, the sum total of all rational behavior will be a perfect predictor of exchange value. “Macro-economic” theory is built upon micro, but tends to adopt the position that the math of micro cannot create perfect models due to problems of complexity. Note that the psychology of individual “motivation” (a reduction) is the key to this explanation of economics. It is very, very, different than the explanation of the process of human enterprise suggested in this essay.
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Instructional Design Consultant