Question Everything

Why we should be concerned

[This post is a bit out of the ordinary questioning blog. A friend and fellow blogger had suggested I 'bank' a posting or two for when I go on holiday. This is part of an essay I worked on some months ago and I thought it might at least be interesting in the context of this blog thread. So here is something to think about. George]

Some people think I am an alarmist. I have expressed deep concerns about the challenges presented by global warming, peak fossil fuel production, and over-population. I have asked myself often, why has my concern grown so much of late? It is true that the potential consequences of these phenomena are devastating for human civilization, if not the whole population. But why am I more worried than ever?

While pondering that question I began thinking about things I learned while in the Navy onboard a ballistic missile submarine. I was an enlisted man; having gotten a warning that I would soon be drafted during the Viet Nam conflict, and having no desire to join that brouhaha, I enlisted in the Navy and dropped out of college (I had had an interrupted education and under the rules of the draft I was on the eligible list - can't tell you how I knew my number was up, but let's just say I was lucky in who I knew!). I ended up driving submarines, which was actually a great way to serve the country and learn quite a lot.

In college I had taken calculus courses and had an intellectual understanding of the meanings of derivatives and integrals, but that was just book-learning. In driving the sub I learned first-hand what the meanings of velocity and acceleration (first and second derivatives), and the accumulation of mass over time (integral) were. And those lessons, I realized, apply now to what is happening in our world.

Driving a sub involves three basic components that have to be coordinated. Subs operate in three dimensions, like an airplane, but have another aspect that airplanes don't, namely buoyancy (actually gravity and lift are sort of like this aspect but air speed is the key control for staying up). It is necessary to adjust buoyancy as well as distribute the weight of water taken into tanks to create a neutral buoyancy condition. So there are three operators controlling the submarine's depth, direction, and pitch. It would take a long time to fully describe the complete operations of a submarine, so I'll direct the reader to the excellent Wikipedia article for further reference. Instead I will focus on just one of the operations to make my points.

The 'sail planes' (some subs have bow planes) of a ballistic missile submarine are used to fine-tune the depth of the boat continuously. The planes operator has a stick that is pushed forward to trim downward and back to trim upward. At normal operating speeds these fins are effective in terms of reasonably fast response to stick movement and changing the depth. However, the objective is to maintain a steady depth with as small an excursion up or down as possible. And that is where the skill is tested.

Submarines are big, heavy bodies operating in a viscous fluid environment. They are slow to respond to any control motion due to their inherent inertia. And this is the critical factor. Once a control signal has been issued (changing the angle of the planes) it takes a little while before the boat starts to change its depth. If an operator puts too much angle on the planes the boat can overshoot its target depth and then the operator will have to position the stick in the opposite direction in an attempt to stop the overshoot. This, if you can imagine it, can and does often lead to an oscillation where the boat goes up too much then goes down too much relative to the desired depth. Newbie operators have this problem until they get used to using the instruments provided (this happens in sub school using a simulator for training).

The instruments include a depth gauge, obviously, which reads out the absolute depth. But there are two more gauges that are essential to controlling the sub. The next gauge is the rate of change of the depth, or the velocity up or down. This gauge tells you how fast the sub is raising or falling. So your depth might be five feet below the target depth and the rate of going downward could be 0.5 feet per second. This information is useful in knowing how much to pull the stick back to not only slow the rate of descent to zero, but also to anticipate that the boat will start back upward again. In order to gauge this anticipatory signal — the slightly greater position of the stick that will ease the descent rate to zero and then turn it to a gradual ascent, is the acceleration rate, or how fast is the rate of change, itself, changing.

A skilled operator can use the three gauges to just barely tweak the stick forward or backward to keep the sub at desired depth with a minimum of error. That is, under circumstances of no disturbing forces like currents or waves the sub can run steady. The problem is that when there are forces operating on the sub from without, it is much more difficult to keep it within reasonable bounds near the desired depth. It takes a great deal of skill to use the gauges correctly to keep the sub from oscillating up and down. Sometimes, in the worst-case conditions (heavy wave action for example) the operator looses control and the sub will oscillate wildly up and down. It is not generally a problem to go much below desired depth (unless you are operating in shallow water) but it is a big no-no to breach the surface during operations. In my day the 'Soviets' were always on the prowl looking for our subs and just letting the sail (conning tower) pop out of the water could give away our position. So that was a big problem. You could tell you had a problem when the accelerometer was pegged (at its maximum reading) and the velocity meter was, as a result, moving toward an extreme (in the same direction). You could watch, in despair, as the depth gauge just kept moving up. At that point, no matter how hard you pushed the stick forward you just simply weren't going to prevent a breach. The momentum was too great and you were screwed (at least potentially if any Russians were about).

So what does this lesson in the physics of inertia and the calculus have to do with our current challenges and why I am so worried? It turns out there are direct correspondences between the dynamics of these challenges and the submarine's control problems. Take global warming as an example. The burning of fossil fuels puts CO₂ into the atmosphere and ocean. This is like the control signal and the sail planes angle. The angle corresponds to the rate of emissions. But these bodies are huge and have a slow response in terms of greenhouse heating and acidification, respectively. There is considerable 'inertia' to overcome in both of these cases. That means that once the input signal starts to have an effect (e.g. temperature rise) it will take a carefully tuned counter signal to slow the rate of change. Temperature is like the depth of the sub. Once it starts to rise you need to know the rate of rise and the acceleration in order to correct the signal and keep the temperature at the right level (sub at depth). Our problem is that we are just looking at the depth gauge (average surface temperature) and guessing about the velocity or acceleration. Thus our original estimates of when we might expect to see real problems were based on insufficient information. And it looks like we were really wrong!

Our first derivative information on heating is now coming from the study of ice melting at the poles and in glaciers. And guess what? The information tells us that the velocity of increase in temperature is higher than we thought. Moreover, we are now getting acceleration information from the year-to-year melting rate, which is much higher than originally estimated. The glaciers are melting at a faster rate than we can explain by the temperature alone. So the accelerometer is showing a positive result, the velocity meter is in very positive territory and we know for a fact that the temperature is higher. As an experienced submarine driver who learned to watch all three gauges to estimate the corrective signal it looks to me like we are headed for a breach of the surface — a point of no return, so to speak.

The peak oil phenomenon shows a similar pattern. If we look at the rates of change in oil production (extraction and delivery) globally, we see not only the level of oil production but also the decrease in velocity of production. Furthermore, some sophisticated analysis by oil engineers and geophysicists provide evidence that the rate of change in production itself is changing. It is decelerating such that we should expect the velocity of oil production to go down more rapidly and soon. At the same time the world has seen a dramatic increase in demand for oil with the economic growth of China and India leading the way. In this case you have two interacting rates of change that are headed for collision.

Finally, look at the population rate. This one is interesting in that there are indications that the acceleration of growth has already diminished toward zero. That is a good thing given that the absolute level is already above the carrying capacity of the planet without the energy subsidization of fossil fuels (e.g. in growing food). But the velocity is still fairly high and even though it is about to go down due to deceleration of the births-minus-deaths numbers it is still going to drive those absolute numbers toward an excess of 9 billion people by 2050.

So what makes me worried? I look at these first and second derivative signals as a clue about what to expect from the absolute values we will be contending with in the future. At the rough indications we have for these clues it seems to me that the rates are going to take us into breach territory much sooner than anyone may have expected. About ten years ago when I started a concerted effort to study the science behind global warming and peak oil, I believed the then estimates of when calamity would strike as being reasonable. It wouldn't be in my children's lifetimes; we were talking about hundreds of years before the climate would drastically change. But now the evidence from velocity and acceleration information strongly suggests otherwise.

It's hard to grasp the significance of velocity and acceleration until you've sat at a sub control panel and watched helplessly as the depth gauge swirls toward zero (breach) even while you push the stick forward frantically. People have a hard time imagining the implications of exponential growth and how quickly things can get out of control when you don't pay attention to the derivative signals. But I fear that is where we are now.

I wish our so-called leaders had driven submarines. Unfortunately, I don't think they are even aware of our depth, let alone how fast we are rising.

Holiday vacation time

I had hoped to get another posting about questions in before taking off on holiday but it doesn't look like I'll be able to do so.

Today is my favorite day of the year, and the holiday I celebrate is about the the passing of the winter solstice. From here on the days get longer. By symmetry of course, my least favorite day is the summer solstice. But this is only relational. Every day I am alive I celebrate something!

One of the things I will always be happy for is the ability to wonder why things are the way they are. Every day that goes by I find my curiosity and questioning leads to some new, even if very small insight. It is a growing sense of understanding the world that I celebrate.

Sadly that sense of understanding is leading me to conclude that the human species is in for a very rough ride in the next hundred years or so, possibly as little as fifty years.  Even at my age I expect to see the beginning of what I think will be the next major stage of evolution on this planet. Indeed, I think I have already seen the more subtle aspects of the beginning. My questioning our current view of education in the prior two posts was directed at one of the more subtle ones. If my observations are correct, then education is killing us! We need to explore that a good deal more.

My plan for this next year is to share in this blog the questions I have asked. I will also share some of the insights I believe I have gotten for what they might be worth. Even though there have not been many comments, my blog stats indicate a growing readership. I hope that more people will share their questions and insights in the future. I would be loathe to claim I have answers for my questions even if I feel I have some insights. My further hope is that some of you will have good questions (with responses from others) and perhaps some suggestions toward further insights.

So for now, whatever you might be inclined to celebrate over this start-of-winter holiday, or even if your culture ignores the western world's obsession with stuff-acquisition at this time of year, I hope you have a happy solstice.

George
PS. Southern hemispherites: Sorry that your days are now getting shorter!

Back to critical thinking among faculty

I'd like to return to a theme in the 10/8/07 blog, that I too often see faculty members fail to use critical thinking when they are outside of their own domain of expertise. Before I start let me hasten to point out that I realize that what I will be saying cannot be applied to every person who teaches. When I use a term like faculty to describe something negative I do not really mean everyone in the faculty are guilty. As I mentioned before, a blog is not a venue for careful, nuanced argument. So I tend to generalize (generally unfairly!) just to raise questions or make a point. I apologize in advance to my colleagues if I sound too harsh or critical. Its just my way of getting some issues on the table!

By their domain of expertise I mean their discipline and I am specifically referring to their conducting research in that field. One could not advance professionally unless one does indeed exercise critical judgment in research. So if a faculty member has, for example, made tenure then by definition they have demonstrated a keen capacity to exercise critical thinking, assuming, of course, that the tenure process is selective enough. So, in the area of advancement of knowledge discovery, I feel it is safe to say that PhD's do practice what they preach and walk the walk within their expertise.

In that prior post I suggested that it was outside this realm of expertise that I frequently find other faculty and myself (too often I fear) failing to exercise critical thinking, and thus failing to have the same rational judgment applied to matters not involved in their research. I mentioned resource allocation issues (the infamous budget process) that seems to trigger more emotion-laden decisions. But there is one other area that faculty participate in where the failure of critical thinking is manifest often enough to make me question the whole education enterprise. And that is teaching.

In the last post I pointed out that education is overly concerned with teaching our young to become specialists. This is to the extent that we keep producing specialists who cannot recognize their role in the larger world except as someone who practices their specialty. So my big question here is: If educators are exercising critical thinking in the big picture of what education is for and how are we doing, then why hasn't the anomaly of uneducated citizens not understanding fundamental issues and voting against their own long-term interest been recognized (by the educators) and fixed? In other words, why hasn't it been obvious to educators that the system is dysfunctional and it needs to be made right?

Well to be fair certainly a number of educators have noticed the anomaly. And they have attempted reform. But most often what they are responding to are the calls from the commercial sector, with me-too responses from legislatures and other governmental groups, that claim our graduates are not really educated when they leave school. Now this is generally interpreted as not ready to participate in the job market. The claims seem to be bolstered by evidence of lower math, science and reading capabilities showing up in standardized testing. So educators chime in with various approaches to reform to try and shore up the system. They, as a rule, don't ask more fundamental questions. They assume that the way education is organized and what it is attempting to do is fundamentally given and what we really need to do is focus on tweaking things to get it right.

After eighteen years working as an insider in teaching in higher education, and having given ~22 years of my life before that to becoming schooled, and after raising two kids who went through both private and public ed schools, I no longer believe this is true. I suspect something far more radical is needed.

When PhDs start working on the education side of higher ed, I think critical thinking about what education should be goes out the window. PhDs believe in disciplinary-based education because that is exactly what they got. And if it was good enough for them... you know the rest of that argument. PhDs also never get much exposure to the psychology of learning as it might impact teaching. They go through their careers assuming that they know how to teach because they are emulating their teachers. They certainly feel comfortable with the course content since that covers their area of expertise. But when it comes to the whole area of psychology of learning and its applications to education, most seem not be very informed or even care that they are not. For too many professors the easy way out is to complain about how unprepared the students are - pushing the blame down to secondary ed. It isn't that this isn't true; I can attest to the fact that way too many students are not prepared for college level work. But it is the case that college education shares a large portion of the blame, since primary and secondary teachers are trained in the colleges. And guess what. They are trained as specialists in the modern version (and view) of education. Unfortunately this is more often about crowd control and modularizing knowledge bits.

One of the most conservative institutions in the world is the university. It has been organized the way it is, it has been teaching the way it does, for a long time. And, to listen to discussions among faculty and administrators, the general feeling is that it will be so into the future. In other words, we have been successful at what we do and we assume we will continue to be successful doing so long into the future. And that is where I think critical thinking is most absent. Will the future be the same as the past with regard to education?

Should we continue educating students to become narrow thinkers? Shouldn't we educators be exercising critical thinking outside our profession? Shouldn't we all learn more about the way the rest of the world works and interacts with our professions? Shouldn't we be able to find better leaders than the current crop of admin/legislators and would-be's?

Is the Modern Version of Education Killing Us?

My question today is: Why can't educated people see what is happening to the world?

The first premise is that most people are educated (in the developed world anyway). They go to school for 12 to 16 years in many instances. With all that schooling you would think they would look at something like the global warming issue, be able to follow the basic science (not that they would understand the more arcane aspects of the actual science necessarily), and use critical thinking to realize that we do, in fact, face a tremendous problem. But we have witnessed the unfolding of a slow motion awakening to reality (although I'm not sure we are there yet) with much gnashing of teeth and denial aplenty.

Why has it taken so long to get the schooled public's attention let alone convince the populace that anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are causing the earth to heat up? My suspicion is that all that schooling never prepared the populace to be able to judge the veracity of such a phenomenon. In spite of requiring science classes at all levels of education, people were not able to read and understand the articles, say in Discover Magazine or Scientific American. Nor were they able to use critical thinking skills to assess the claims, particularly regarding the use of computer models. The knee-jerk response was to disregard the evidence from an area they simply couldn't understand.

I claim there is sufficient evidence in this issue, politics in general, and — don't get me started on — evolution vs. creationism (intelligent design) that support the idea that our modern form of education is failing miserably in its purpose of producing educated citizens. Stories of native Inuit with at most a high school education, but a rich knowledge of their environment, realizing that something was going wrong with the climate in their areas abound. How could partially educated (by US standards today) people see what fully educated people seem unable to see?

This idea is not new, or isolated. Let me quote you from David Orr's "Earth in Mind."

The conventional wisdom holds that all education is good, and the more of it one has, the better. The essays in Part One challenges this view from an ecological perspective. The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth. If one listens carefully, it may even be possible to hear the Creation groan every year in late May when another batch of smart, degree-holding, but ecologically illiterate, Homo sapiens who are eager to succeed are launched into the biosphere.

Orr's first chapter is entitled, "What is Education For?" Part One is entitled, "The Problem with Education." He generally concludes that education should be for increasing wisdom, especially in terms of understanding how nature works and our role within the biosphere. The rest of the first part of the book provides a stark critique of why education is not fulfilling that purpose. In his view education should produce graduates who can successfully operate in the world as a whole, not just the local economy. In other words, wisdom comes from understanding the really big picture of life. Unfortunately, modern schools are not designed to foster wisdom by increasing understanding of the whole world.

Fundamentally, education, as practiced in the United States and increasingly in the developed world, is geared to produce specialists and professionals. It is organized around disciplinary subjects and is primarily concerned with producing graduates who are ready to enter the job force. The arguments for this, clearly reasonable from the advent of agriculture to well into the industrial revolution, were taken as axiomatic by economists. The first argument stems from the efficiency gains one recognizes by becoming adept at specific skills. An expert can get the job done more efficiently and effectively than a novice. All well and good. The second argument admits to the limits of human learning and knowledge stores. It effectively says that no human can know everything so it is better to learn a lot about one thing than a little about a lot of things. Generalists aren't effective, specialists save time and resources. A slam dunk for economics.

There are just a couple of problems with these arguments. First, are they really true? Consider the effectiveness/efficiency argument. Maybe as long as what is being produced is relatively simple, like manufacturing an automobile, each operation can be reduced to a point where if a worker performs only that operation then that is efficient. But doesn't the overall efficiency depend on how well the managers designed the whole process? Then what about complex processes that require adaptive responses from the participants. In today's high-tech world more and more work is accomplished in interdisciplinary teams wherein each team member must be proficient in several different areas. It seems to be more true now that real value added comes from systems integration, not a reductionist mechanism.

The second argument — that a human mind is limited in capacity — sounds reasonable on the face of it. It is true that one human mind cannot know everything. So it would seem to make sense that specialization is the only viable way to educate people. Only this argument misses something very important in the actual structure (or architecture, if you will) of knowledge. Namely, it does not take into account that there is a fundamental form of knowledge that is common to all fields and disciplines. This form is part of natural human thinking but is, like folk psychology or folk numeracy, very approximate as delivered in the human brain. It needs explication to become broadly useful as a basic scaffold for learning more domain-specific knowledge. A claim I have taken lately is that if students were educated in this explicitly, they would have a solid basis for learning virtually any discipline they chose much more efficiently. Moreover, if they found it necessary or desirable to change to a new discipline later in life, the fundamentals would still be there to provide transferable knowledge and skills.

The knowledge of which I speak is Systems Science. If you follow this link you will find a description and explanation of how systems science can achieve these objectives and why. My assertion is that learning the basis of how things and concepts are actually organized in the world provides one with a good basis for learning many other kinds of knowledge. Systems science is a form of meta-knowledge that is applicable in everything else. The argument is that everything in the world is a system and systems are themselves composed of sub-systems, hence knowing the nature of systemness is a basis for knowing how anything works. See also: Systems Theory on Wikipedia.

If true (and read the paper to see why it very well might be true), then an education based on systems science would be a better approach. It would encapsulate all that we think is important about general education while providing rigorous treatment of interdisciplinary knowledge. It would prepare students for much deeper disciplinary learning later. And most important, it would get them thinking systemically about their world and their place in it. It is also the case that thinking systemically involves thinking critically. This is what Orr wants to achieve and it is what humanity needs to face the future wherein the problems are all systemic (and global) in nature.

So it turns out that the main reasons given for siloed disciplinary education, which includes professional schooling, are not hard constraints determining that our current approach to education is the only one we can use. I haven't addressed the issues of motivation to learn and timing of learning, nor issues like assessment of learning. All of these take on a very different appearance in a systems science based approach to education as you might imagine. I haven't approached the subject of personal satisfaction and empowerment that go with understanding, but I think these are areas to explore in some future post.

Back to the original question. The reason educated people cannot see the problems or understand them rapidly enough to do something about them is that they have been trained to be specialist, reductionists. They learn to become experts without ever understanding how their body of expertise integrates with everything else in the world. They are blinded by their knowledge, not freed by it. Worse, they are told this is the way it should be and the only way it can be.

Doesn't that need to change?

Are we really educating people?

Here is a question I posed before in a different guise. If we are doing such a good job teaching critical thinking skills in schools, why is George W. Bush President of the United States? Why, indeed, are three quarters of the Congress where they are? Both the Executive and the Legislative branches of government in the USA are at all time lows in public opinion polls. And from where I sit I think I agree with the polls.

The competency at judgment for these people has been tested many times over the course of the last seven years and, as far as I can tell, they have uniformly failed to make wise choices. This is not to say I think the prior administration or the past legislatures have done much better. But the situation now stands out in deep relief because it is so starkly bad. Yet here is the thing I'm really on about: a sufficient number of the populace in 1999/2000 actually thought GWB was pretty OK such that the race was close enough to be ultimately fought in the Supreme Court and handed (in my opinion inappropriately) to Bush. Then in 2003/2004 the actual vote went to Bush (unless one thinks Ohio was stolen). So is it the case that a significant number of adults in the USA were brain-dead in those two races? Judging by the results (think Katrina and the continuing debacle in Iraq) they either made a huge mistake or were easily fooled.

And that is what I wonder about. If people in this country were actually capable of critical thinking would Bush have been elected — hell would he even have been a nominee? This question is important because there was, I think, ample evidence at the time that he was an incompetent, double-dealing liar. He'd been a lousy governor of Texas and a failed businessman. His speech patterns, eye twitches and other mannerisms (including his fake drawl and swagger) should have triggered some kind of negative emotional reaction one would think. They did in me and whenever I have such a reaction it triggers my intellect to start making careful observations and assessments. I was dumbfounded that Bush actually won the nomination and then got enough votes to get within striking distance. But what really got me to wondering is that after all the evidence of idiocy and lying from the first term, people actually voted for him again. I imagine John Kerry has really been smarting over that one.

So back to the point about people practicing critical thinking. Do they as a rule? Do people look at, for example, media statements or other political claims and start asking questions like: "OK where is the evidence? How strong is the evidence? Are there counterfactuals that should be considered?," etc. Or do they say things like: "Aha, that proves my point! You see, I told you that was so! O'Reilly said it and it sounds right to me!"

Another aspect of judgment is having some knowledge base from which to draw hypotheses about the claims being made. Take, for example, the debates about global warming or evolution that have raged in this country. We can sort of understand the motivations of the extreme claimants. For example the oil companies have economic motives for trying to obfuscate the issue of global warming. The religious extremists have a vested interest in people 'believing' the Bible literally. But what about the vast majority of people who are not necessarily proponents of these anti-science sides of debates, but nevertheless allow that there might actually BE a debate. That is, they are so uninformed about the science behind these issues that they don't realize that the dinialist or extremist claims are hogwash! The mainstream media has been criticized roundly for giving 'both sides' an equal amount of time in these non-debates. No one seems to be exercising either critical thinking skills or reality checking with science.

Now, if we were doing such a great job in education, would this be the case? Would there be 'debates' about evolution vs. creationism?

My final barb here may piss off a lot of my academic colleagues and I can only preface this with an "I'm sorry, but..." and an "I am just as guilty myself." The fact is that most academics that I know, when they are involved with decision making outside the confines of their academic discipline, frequently do not exercise critical thinking themselves. In other words we talk the talk but often do not walk the walk. I have witnessed too many times, usually in meetings involving ad hoc committees meant to solve some resource issue, or other complex governance matters, faculty members putting aside all pretense of critical judgment and evidence-based argument in favor of emotionally-guided choices.

Now let me hasten to say that this is possibly only human! I have caught myself too often having an emotional response to some issue and falling into this trap of abandoning critical thinking for more expedient argument. As academics we tend to rely more heavily on rhetoric than logic in these cases. Our arguments sound good, but they have little substance in general. I know that it is not easy to maintain a cool, rational head in all matters, especially when my job is going to be affected. But here is where I part company with and have issues with many of my fellow faculty (and I should add more generally the administrators!): They generally do not recognize that they are not thinking critically when challenged with the observation. I would guess that most faculty, if approached with the assertion that they failed to think critically, too often, outside of their discipline would be aghast and insulted (which is one reason I try not to point it out in specific cases). Yet I assert that if they simply reflected for a bit on the possibility that they are failing to practice that which they preach, they would begin to be more observant in their future decision behavior. I suspect that this would lead to far more critical thinking in practice.

Of course this sounds like painting with a broad brush when nuanced strokes are more appropriate, and I certainly acknowledge that my criticism does not blanket every faculty member, in all instances, etc. The medium of a 'quick' blog doesn't allow much more than an overview. So I don't want to sound like I think no educators ever exercise critical judgment outside of their discipline. But I do see it happening often enough that I think it is a problem.

If we, as educators, believe our job is to instill in students critical thinking behavior and to educate them in reality-based knowledge for use in doing that thinking, then we had better practice what we preach. Indeed, as the most vocal advocates of critical, knowledge-based thinking, we have an obligation to excel at this in our everyday lives, not just when we are doing our disciplinary research. And that applies very much to the post-secondary levels of education. What about primary and secondary education? Not everyone goes on to college. What kind of critical thinking skills and knowledge are instilled in high school?

In my next tirade I will continue this theme about education and how we may have it wrong by looking more closely at the whole concept of disciplinary-based education and especially professional schools. My suspicion is that we have put way too much emphasis on preparing people to be cogs in the wheel (or bricks in the wall if you like Pink Floyd). Perhaps, in the day, it was a good move for society — in the tradition of Adam Smith's famous example of the specialization in the pin factory. But I suspect it is now beginning to have an adverse effect in an age of knowledge integration and interdisciplinary progress.

We'll see.

Where we go from here

My posts so far have been ranting more about the need for people to ask questions, probing questions, about their own and others' beliefs. I tried to extol the virtues of question asking when there seemed to be a difference between what our beliefs told us to expect about the world versus our observations about the actual state of the world. I've also hinted at the idea that a large majority of people in this world don't get to this question asking because they actually don't observe a discrepancy and so are not motivated to wonder why. For example, someone who believes there will be a 'Rapture' at the 'end time' may look upon global warming as simply more evidence that the end time is near. In other words, beliefs more generally modify our observations rather than the other way around.  This, of course is what we mean by observational bias. And not too many people ask themselves, "Am I guilty of this bias?"

To recap:

1. The standard model of how the world would evolve to a better, more equitable, more egalitarian, more wealthy state doesn't seem to fit what we actually observe.
2. Indeed, with:
   • global warming induced by anthropogenic CO₂,
   • peak energy production due to careless husbanding our fossil fuel resources,
   • growing disparity between the wealthiest and poorest and growth in absolute numbers of poor/underfed,
   • depletion of critical stocks like fisheries and forests
   • add to that what appears to be a growing fascism in the United States of America, the world-acknowledged home of the brave and the free,
   • etc.
3. It is becoming obvious to all but a few recalcitrants that something is going wrong.
4. When things are not going the way you expect you had better re-examine the basis of your expectations.

And since nothing seems to be working out the way any of us expected, we'd better ask a lot of questions about the beliefs we have that formed the basis of our expectations.

Some of you may remember the science fiction tales in the Forties and Fifties in which we would all have flying cars and personal robots. The future looked oh so bright because science and technology were on a roll. Did anyone see the Disney productions showing nuclear energy as the miracle energy source of the future — so cheap that we could throw away meters? Did you see the one about space travel and Werner Von Braun? I was a boy when these shows were produced. I really bought into the vision. And as a young man, watching Neal Armstrong walk on the Moon was awe inspiring. Even as late as the Nineties after living in and being a part of the Information Revolution, the Internet and the 'new economy', I was assuaged that any questions I had developed (such as is unlimited growth really a good thing?), were off-base. The world was getting better. Look! We beat the Soviets didn't we? With good ol' capitalism.

But now I'm kicking myself that I didn't keep asking the nagging questions. What no one, myself included, realized was that the apparent working of the system was based on the free flow of fossil fuels. It took so little energy to obtain massive amounts of energy that we basically took it for granted. In a future post I hope to speak to the reality that energy is the currency of the economy, just as it is the currency of the ecos or Gaia. But for now I will just assert (and you can question the assertion) that energy flow was and is the critical factor in what appeared to be a world evolving toward the promises of ages past. The reality of what happens when energy flow is diminishing is starting to sink in.

So my plan here is to re-raise some of those nagging questions and raise the discussion to see if there are mistakes in our beliefs that account for the current state of affairs.

For starters, in the next installment I will be looking at what we call education in this country (USA). I am now convinced that we really got this one wrong and that a lot of our problems stem from this fact. I will offer the evidence of how things aren't working according to plan (beliefs), ask the questions, and provide some evidence to support the idea that we need to change the way we do things. We'll see how it goes.

Ideologies and faith

Ideology is actually a misnomer.

Words ending in -ology usually refer to a disciplinary study, like biology or ecology. The suffix is generally interpreted as 'study of.' The root of the suffix, 'logos' is Greek and actually means many things, but generally something like 'word' or 'thought'. I have no idea when or why the pre-appended 'o' got stuck on, nor how it came to refer to the study of some subject, but that is what it normally means.

Ideology might have started, once, as the study of thoughts and concepts, but today its use seems to be to designate a constellation of thoughts and concepts that are related but not necessarily internally consistent, and not generally examined by the holder. Specifically ideology has come to refer to a system of thought that provides explanation for how the world works (or how it should work). In this sense, ideologies are beliefs and moreover, seem too often to be taken on faith.

A typical ideology might be a model of politics and governance, a model of economics, or a model of human nature. Good examples of the latter are the Rousseauian (noble savage) view of humans as innately good vs. the Abrahamic religious view of original sin. And as you might suspect from the list here, there seems to be a meta-ideological framework that tends to bind versions of each of the above under a single umbrella. It seems to me that conservatism and liberalism are major foci for seemingly related versions of these. After all if you think humans are inherently evil as a result of religious doctrine then you more than likely also think that humans need strong (moral) governance or a ruling class and that economic distribution of wealth is based on privilege and hierarchical order. In other words you are a conservative.

But my questions involve the why of holding these kinds of beliefs. Especially I wonder why the holders of such beliefs do not regularly question the basis of them. All too often, it seems to me, people, for whatever reason, acquire a dominant ideological stance and then rarely ask themselves why the have adopted it. If you hold a particular belief, say about the nature of humans, where did it come from? Where is the evidence to back up your belief? How strongly do you hold said belief?

Take the belief in free market capitalism. There are really two different but related beliefs here. One is that a market is the best arbiter of distribution of resources. Markets with free flow of information are far superior to planned distributions in that they rely on the 'wisdom of the crowd' rather than a know-nothing planner. The other idea is that capital formation — the aggregation of capital needed to start and maintain an enterprise — will flourish in a free market where entrepreneurs can take risks and realize rewards. These ideas work together to produce the market economy.

Now there is certainly evidence that this mechanism works in many cases. So the ideas can't be wrong outright. And, indeed there is negative evidence in the collapse of the communist planned economies of the former Soviet Union and what is happening in modern China that capitalism is at least a better system. But is it the best system?

The problems that this free-wheeling belief in profit-motive, economic growth, and letting the markets arbitrate everything has landed us in a precarious state. True, we have material comforts and lots and lots of toys. But to what end? We've ignored the so-called externalities. We've unleashed chemicals that do not naturally occur into the environment. We've churned out so much CO2 that it now impacts our climate with weather anomalies and biological consequences. Has the market-based, capitalistic economy really served humanity well?

There are so many people who still believe that a growing economy is the best approach to achieve a high standard of living. Indeed, the way standard of living is defined in many peoples' minds is based on how much stuff we have. It is related to the square footage of our houses (more than my parents). Economists define a healthy economy as one that is growing at some particular percentage rate per year - a compound rate. They claim recession is bad — and accompanying job losses are bad if there is no safety net. So people are conditioned to holding onto this seemingly obvious ideological position. Ask anyone. They will tell you they are certain that the capitalistic market economy with attendant growth is the best kind of economy. They believe it firmly.

What makes someone ideological? They don't question their assumptions and the core of their beliefs. They take the core ideas as axiomatic (though not rigorously of course), that these are above examination. But why? Is it human nature? Is it that we've grown up so indoctrinated with these cultural memes that we turn around and make sure to indoctrinate our youth (and at this seasonal holiday time we have super-indoctrination)?

One would think that in light of the growing obvious failures of the market system (and don't get me started on the credit markets and financial derivatives), and the failures of good judgment in the capitalistic (driven by consumeristic demand) approach to creating so-called wealth, and the now imminent threats to our very existence due to the excesses the mechanisms permit, we would be questioning these assumptions vigorously. But such is not the case. Instead the general sentiment is: How can we make a profit on going green? This runs all the way from disingenuous greenwashing to sincere beliefs that investment in alternative energies will not only profit the investors but save the world.

I'm calling that belief into question. I'm not so sure the market/capitalistic way is going to salvage the human race and lead to a bright future. I strongly suspect there is another way that is modeled on natural ecosystems. We need to ask questions about that.

What are Beliefs?

If people base their actions on what they believe to be true, and if their actions lead to increasingly destructive behaviors — both individually and collectively — then it seems we should be asking some penetrating questions about the veracity of those beliefs. I have several favorite kicking-boys of my own to be explored in future posts. But the dynamics of beliefs and actions raises a whole series of other questions for me having to do with what beliefs are, in the first place, and why many people cling to false beliefs when shown evidence that contradicts them.

While modern neuroscience is a ways away from detailing what a concept is in terms of how a representation gets encoded in neural tissue, it has raised some very interesting ideas along these lines and these lead to very good questions. We do know that what is held in the human mind is reflected in a pattern of neural firings, particularly in the neocortex. Certain patterns are substantially replicable from one brain to another which is why people can share understandings and meanings. The pattern of firing when one person is viewing, say, a dog, is very similar, but not absolutely the same as another person viewing the same dog. Far more about perceptual similarities and differences than I could ever hope to cover here is just starting to be understood in some detail.

But the point I am interested in is that all so-called knowledge is actually only active and learnable in terms of these patterns of encoding in neural tissue. In other words the world can only exist in a 'known' form inside mind of each individual. It doesn't even matter so much what the objective reality is since there will be as many variations on common themes as there are minds/brains to observe and encode reality.

I am no relativist in the Continental philosophical style. I assume there is some kind of objective reality. But I also know how noisy and imperfect brains are at capturing the needed detail to be able to claim that any one brain has captured that reality. So in that sense, it doesn't matter.

One way to interpret this is that all we have in our minds are beliefs, some explicit — the concepts we think about — and most implicit — the concepts that lie below the surface but contribute to our decision making nonetheless. Beliefs are just the concepts held in our brains and there is no necessary correspondence between the encoded representations and reality as it is. Of course for most day-to-day living and experiencing those concepts will tend to be reasonably good representations of reality.

Beliefs can be justified if they do more closely correspond with objective reality (the correspondence theory of truth). One way we suspect our beliefs correspond with reality is if our actions, based on those beliefs, lead to successful outcomes. Another way is when we compare our meanings and interpretations with other people who seem to agree with ours.

How do we acquire justified beliefs? For most of life, the acquisition of beliefs is based on learning from experience. But there is a caveat in this process. It turns out that what we already believe goes a long way to filter the experiences we have at a subconscious level. We tend to look for evidence from experience that supports our already held beliefs and that kind of positive feedback simply increases our confidence that our beliefs are justified. In other words, we can deepen our biases even when we are wrong in some beliefs we hold. Ironically we believe (in the sense of having conviction) in our beliefs.

Science provides a way to avoid the pitfalls of private beliefs being believed to be knowledge. Science is external to any one individual and even when it is thrown off base by any given individual's failures to adhere to the process, it is self-correcting in the long run. Knowledge gained by scientific pursuit is something of a gold standard for beliefs. And this is what makes it so threatening to many people. When scientific knowledge provides evidence that is contrary or non-supportive of one's beliefs, for example in a doctrinal explanation of creation and human nature — the bedrock of religious faith — many people would sooner discard the scientific knowledge as change their beliefs.

And that I find curious. Why is it that many, perhaps most, people are loath to change their minds about some forms of belief when the evidence from reality shows they are wrong? Why will some people prefer to retain an outmoded idea when all of the evidence is against them? It isn't just religious beliefs; there are a wide range of beliefs about the way the world works, on some grand scheme, and what is the nature of humans that fall into this category. Ideologies, in general, are not much more than faith-based beliefs that the world works in some particular way. For example we are rapidly coming to face with the fact that market-based capitalism is producing huge problems on a global scale and not producing real human happiness. Why are so many people unwilling to even consider questioning the basic assumptions of neoclassical economics when the problems are mounting daily? I would like to know, because unless they become willing to do so we are headed for mass extinction.