Question Everything

Knowing/Thinking - Strategic

A Matter of Degrees

In my last blog, “Knowers/Thinkers,” I explored some ideas about systems thinking and depth and breadth of understanding (knowledge). In that post I was interested in what I might call an individual's knowledge profile, a graphic depiction of the depth of a person's knowledge in a number of “aspects” of the world. I claimed that systems knowledge and thinking leads one toward a balanced, or level, depth of knowledge on most or all aspects, with the average depth dependent on a person's native learning abilities and their life experiences. In this post I want to now consider how this relates to another sapience mental capacity, the ability to think strategically.

As with the depth of knowledge measure of systems thinking, strategic thinking comes in degrees. Every morning when you consider what you will have for dinner later, and pull something out of the freezer to thaw out while you are at work, you are thinking strategically. That is you are planning for a future state of affairs that you will have some control over. The time horizon for such thinking is one of the measures we use to determine how good a strategic thinker some one is. Do they think simply about tomorrow, or next week, or ten years from now? And do they do it routinely or only sporadically?

Another element in strategic thinking is the capacity to evaluate most or all of the factors that should be taken into consideration when thinking about the future state of affairs as the forces outside of one's control impact the thinker's world. This is a link with systems thinking. If one is a strong systems thinker one has the capacity to model the whole system much better than someone who's knowledge profile dips low in key aspects of the world.

I should probably hasten to say that when I use the term knower/thinker I am not just referring to conscious thinking and explicit memory. Most of our thinking and knowing is going on under the hood, so to speak, in subconscious mind. A vast volume of the neocortex is devoted to processing activity of which we are only occasionally and dimly aware. Our mental models (concepts), embodied in neural circuitry that has been adaptively wired through experience, are working backstage to make sure our conscious thinking is properly guided. Most of our knowledge is tacit rather than explicit, yet it influences our use of explicit knowledge more than most people are aware. An intuition is a vague consciousness of our tacit model of how the world works whispering to our conscious thinking process. Even more powerful and subtle influences from tacit knowledge guide our thinking. Much of such guidance is emotional or mood-influenced, an evolutionary holdover from our reptilian ancestry. The paleocortex interprets our feelings and tries to integrate them with sensory perceptions of the current state of the world. The neocortex provides a substantially greater capacity to model the world as we have experienced it. And that model is the basis of projection into the future. Much of strategic thinking, as with systems thinking, is subconscious mainly, but with veridical models of the world, the intuitions will guide conscious strategic thinking well.

Strategic thinking is supported further by the individual's experience with many different environments — lets call them ecosystems. There are many different kinds of ecosystems (and I include cultural ecosystems in this) on this planet. Exposure to many different kinds provides an individual with new information that bolsters learning, both explicit and tacit. Each ecosystem can be characterized by its complexity (a subject for another post some day). A strong systems thinker can quickly adapt to multiple kinds of systems because the principles of systems are universal. A wobbly knowledge profile person will have difficulty seeing the universality of aspects for which they have shallow depth of understanding.

One of the most dominant dynamics of complex ecosystems is the fact that they evolve as long as free energy is available. So one kind of system can actually evolve to become more like a different kind. This is similar to the concept of succession in ecosystems in the wild. If a person only had experience with a grassland environment, that person would be poorly prepared to survive in a climax forest! Therefore to develop the ability to think strategically, the thinker has to have a notion of what the various systems are actually like and how they evolved. Figure 1 shows a graphic representation of a single knower mapping their knowledge depth profile onto a number of different ecosystems.

 

Figure 1. An individual with a stable knowledge profile experiences different ecosystems. The higher the system boundary the more complex that system. Typical individuals only experience, directly, a low number of systems or parts of systems. They do not have the breadth of experience to judge whether an ecosystem is evolving into something else.

 

Different kinds of ecosystems are represented by various colors. Complexities are represented by the height of the boxes. The graphic represents what a single person's knowledge profile would look like relative to each kind of ecosystem. The average person probably experiences a very limited range of ecosystems in their lives. And they may not be able to generalize what they learn in one system to another. If they are not a systems thinker (as developed in the last blog) they do not possess the ability to grapple with evolutionary changes in the ecosystem in which they have lived. Think deep south conservatives as the culture around them changes and they rebel.

Limits of Knowledge - Time and Space

We each live a finite amount of time in a finite space. It is difficult at best for any knower/thinker (K/T, henceforth) to experience all conceivable ecosystems and thus develop a general understanding of common characteristics between them and how they might differ along common but variable dimensions. And eighty to one hundred years doesn't provide enough time to accumulate all possible knowledge even within the environments one is exposed to. We are, all of us, constrained to acquire knowledge that is at best a subset of all there might be to know. Systems knowledge helps out in the sense that it is universal and therefore can be used to interpolate across the gaps in our specific knowledge if the gaps are not too significant.

Figure 2 tries to capture the constraints. It partitions the universe into three domains relative to the K/T. These are shown as circles around the K/T of increasing radius. The inner (green) circle encompass the region of the universe that the K/T can, with minimal effort, directly perceive. This is represented in Figure 1 by “a person's range of perception”. The blue circle just outside of that is called the “radius of conception.” This corresponds with “A person's range of experience.” in Figure 1. This constitutes the systems in the world that the K/T has had some kind of experience with, either directly through perceptions, or indirectly through recordings of someone else's perceptions. For example, I have never been to the Great Wall of China (and don't expect to), but through the miracle of photography and writing I have been able to develop a reasonably good model of this wonder.

 

Figure 2. Limits of knowledge are imposed by time and space constraints. An observer (K/T) has a limited lifetime and a limited radius of travel and perception in order to experience the various ecosystems in Figure 1.

 

The outer circle (gray) represents all of the rest of the universe not either perceived by nor conceived of to the K/T. Needless to say these areas are not drawn to scale! The boundary between the blue and gray areas represents the limits that a K/T has with respect to knowledge acquisition. It is different for everyone. And the actual contents of the green and blue regions vary for everyone. This corresponds to the situation depicted in Figure 1 where a single individual (the K/T) usually only has experience over a limited number of ecosystems or even a limited range within her home ecosystem.

The radius of perception is principally constrained by biology - our senses. But some people have learned to use instrumentation to enhance the range of perception so as to expand the boundaries. The radius of conception is similarly constrained by biological factors, the inherent levels of intelligence and sapience. But there seems to be a much higher variance in the population in these factors and thus we see a truly astounding variety of radii in conceptual space. Some people are much better at assimilating information from sources other than direct experience, and that are successful in constructing reasonably accurate models of the world from it. Systems knowledge and thinking seem to help in this regard.

Figure 2 also shows another aspect of knowing and expanding one's conceptual space to at least infer some knowledge about the otherwise unknowable universe. The small gray circle in the “environment outside what one knows” represents processes outside our ordinary conception that nevertheless are not completely unconnected to things within our conceptual space. These are unseen and unknown forces that have an impact on processes for which we have conceptual models. While the K/T at the center of these radii is not able to directly experience (perceptually or conceptually) anything outside that boundary, the things within the conceptual space may be able to do so. Thus there is a chain of causality from outside our space of experience. Something that happened a very long time ago and that had an impact can have a more recent impact on something of which we are conceiving now. That is, the world of the K/T changes inexplicably.

Our sciences of cosmology, chemistry, quantum physics, and evolution (etc.) are all involved with deriving through inferences a much larger space of conception than any one human can do on their own. Thus the blue circle for humanity is so much greater than for any one person. Society as the K/T has an enormous blue circle. Once not that long ago the forces beyond our ken were attributed to super beings, gods, and the like. We made up stories to explain the world we saw (which was pretty small by comparison) and how it was affected by agents in the gray circle. Today we have learned how to not make up stories except for those that have a chance of being invalidated by our scientific methods. We have learned to see into the deep past (astrophysics, geology, evolution et al). We have learned to see into the unseen small (cells, biochemistry, chemical kinetics, quantum mechanics). And we have learned how to make predictions about the future state of affairs based on what we see in the past and the small.

Unfortunately we still have difficulty with meso-scale phenomena! We are just starting to come to grips with visible and recent developments (the social sciences, neurobiology, psychology, economics, etc.) Predictions are not as reliably made. Though we have learned how to generate scenarios from computer modeling. That is something anyway. This finally leads us to strategic thinking. Various K/Ts show a range of capacities to see into the future and based on understanding of the present and how it got to be the way it is from an understanding of the past, generate scenarios for the future as prelude to judging actions that might be taken now to influence the outcome (which scenario plays out). A strategic thinker can go a long way with just the models in her head, but a much longer way still using the assistance of systems models in a computer. Donella Meadows, et al, come to mind with their Limits to Growth work.

History, Present, and the Future

Space and time are indissolubly intertwined. As I just wrote, expanding the space of one's understanding (or that of society) involves expanding one's time horizons, especially into the past. Strategic thinking is, simply put, an ability to see into the future, not as in using a crystal ball to predict specific future events, but to see the big picture of the state of the world in some distant time. The strategic thinker is anticipating a range of possible futures that are, in some sense, ranked by likelihood. Chess is a game of strategic thinking as there are many possible outcomes by different routes and those outcomes can be influenced by what the player anticipates and actions she takes to enhance the probability of a favorable outcome.

There are many ways to derive how historical paths have led to present states. Historians had long wondered what events led to the fall of great empires, or led to wars. They believed that understanding the events would lead to avoiding such catastrophes in the future. Marketing directors often ask what the track record of a product has been to try to understand what its future earnings potentials will be. These kinds of predictions make the errors of linear thinking. Historians thought cause and effect were straightforward, the one preceding the other. And marketing directors, along with most economists, believe trends can provide accurate predictions. The use of linear regression to determine future profits is pretty much de rigor in those circles.

But that isn't the way the world works. The world is full of surprises. The world is process, not events. One cannot use linear thinking to work out the future. But there are a few dynamics that can be reliably mapped onto processes and can produce repeatable (or recognizable) states of the world. The strategic thinker understands such dynamics and uses those to establish a trajectory for the future given the current state of affairs. It is easy to become skilled in this. One only needs to apply the dynamics to post-dicting history! The patterns are readily revealed.

For example the dynamic known as the logistic growth (or development) curve for systems with resource constraints (effectively restricted in some flow), such as using up a non-renewable resource, is for all practical purposes a law of nature. This is the law that obtains for human societies and accounts for the failure of states and empires (where the resource is essential to support the complexity of the society). It is a guaranteed outcome that negative feedback will eventually bring the system to a halt in terms of its expansion. If the flow rate simply backs down then the system might get lucky and enter a steady-state. For example, if our societies could learn to live off of real-time solar flux (without further damaging the ecosystem) then it is conceivable to have a low energy flow-through society that would be sustainable long into the foreseeable future. But if the flow continues to decline then the system is in overshoot and will dramatically collapse. That, unfortunately, is most likely our path into the future.

 

 

Figure 3. An ideal growth curve for systems is logistic, the S shaped curve. Unfortunately when the critical resource continues to decline (the balancing loops continue to increase in strength) the system doesn't level out; it goes into exponential decline.

 

Another dynamic that we are slowly coming to understand is the psycho-dynamics of overcrowding or stresses from population density increases above a threshold. There is still a great deal of controversy surrounding the degree to which people are negatively influenced by density stresses. Recently, however, there is evidence that the variability in stresses felt by individuals, say living in a city, were somewhat moderated by perceptions and beliefs, especially the belief that somewhere else there existed an escape - the countryside perhaps. As our global society becomes more connected to media that reports 24/7 on the rest of the world it has become clear to most that whatever respite they imagined must exist actually doesn't we are seeing more effects from density stresses. It may be too early to draw any conclusions or build models, but researchers have begun to ask questions like, “is society becoming more uncivil?” and for good reason. It is getting hard to ignore the rudeness and self-centered attitudes that so many people are displaying. All you have to do is drive down the freeway and pay attention to driving behaviors, especially when people are merging onto the road.

This dynamic resembles criticality in systems. A pressure builds up. Many frequent, small releases can be seen, but occasionally a medium-scale release (disruption) occurs. And more rarely, large releases can effectively reset the system. Is our social milieu such a system?

The Eusocial K/T

In the past I have called attention to another dynamic that is gaining greater recognition in evolution theory, the emergence of cooperativity among heterogeneous individuals (both inter- and intra-species). Cooperating aggregations turn out to be better at competing with other aggregates for resources. Evolution favors better cooperation within, even as competition between rises. The selection for better mechanisms for cooperation eventually leads to systems that hit on the idea of internal coordination as being more efficient as aggregates (now we should call them systems) get bigger and more complex. Coordination eventually leads to a hierarchical cybernetic system that handles operational, logistical, and tactical coordination that interoperate to the benefit of all participants. But it was not until the evolution of the modern human brain that strategic coordination (with its generation of scenarios and choosing of “strategies” to ensure being better off in the future) became realized in the internal hierarchy. Humans became the first biological entity to be able to think about the distant future and do so with models derived from the past. Even though strategic thinking in this form emerged in our species, it was still limited in scope for any one individual. But at the same time that evolution was selecting for brains with some strategic thinking capabilities it was selecting for greater cooperation between human beings. As if to recapitulate the processes that gave rise to eukaryotes, multicellularity, symbiosis, and colony formation, humans took the path of eusociality (see the Bibliography below for readings on this phenomenon).

And if the pattern of past socialization phenomena holds humans social groups have been recapitulating the tenancy to follow greater cooperation with emerging coordination. Our hierarchical governance systems, as flawed as they are, represent the first trial-and-error steps to a hierarchical cybernetic system, similar to those that produced the successes of all those prior socializations.

In other words, the human species is on the way to becoming a more unified social system — an individual. While we were still evolving through group selection, we called these social systems tribes. And they were relatively loose aggregations of mostly related individuals but sharing through communications and trading specializations. Tribes competed against one another when times were bad and resources scarce. That archeological record is becoming clear. But just as clear is the record of inter-tribe trading and cooperation during good times. It probably all comes down to macro-economic factors, like the availability of free energy.

But the evolutionary trend had been established and should some humans survive the impending bottleneck event they are likely to once again form up in tribes in which intra-group cooperation will out compete those groups of selfish individuals. Furthermore, those tribes that develop more effective coordination mechanism (presumably because they grow in size and complexity in the far future) will fare better still, becoming more efficient and effective in living. The tribe will become the K/T of interest. Should they develop structures and functions that, like the brains of individuals, process collective strategic thinking and should they discover how to efficiently exploit real-time solar energy without disrupting the environment, they will be poised to become the next major transition in evolution, a super intelligent, eusapient system of systems. A super-species.

Bibliography

Bourke, Andrew F.G. (2011). Principles of Social Evolution, Oxford University Press, USA. New York.

Calcott, Brett & Sterelny, Kim (eds, 2011). The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited, The MIT Press, Cambridge. (see Smith & Szathmáry below).

Nowack, Martin A. & Coakley, Sarah (eds. 2013). Evolution, Games, and God: The Principles of Cooperation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Smith, John Maynard & Szathmáry, Eörs (1998). The Major Transitions in Evolution, Oxford University Press, USA, New York.

Wilson, Edward O. (2013). The Social Conquest of Earth, Liveright, New York.

Knowers/Thinkers

Parsing Knowledge of the Universe

In the below figure pretend that the blue box represents the total amount of information available about the Universe. The red line across the middle represents the limits of how much of the Universe humans can model and know (The Realm of Possible Knowledge). We can obtain and have knowledge representations for everything below that line. The reason the line demarcates a subset of the totality of the Universe has to do with the limitations of human knowledge representations and our ability to access them holistically. Note that the Universe is a whole and not really divided into discrete knowledge domains.

But humans, the only beings present on Earth capable of converting Universal information into knowledge representations, have tackled the job by parsing knowledge into domains (subjects) and sub-domains (and recursively sub-domains within those). It is the only way we know how to encode and represent knowledge. The Universe has physical, chemical, biological, and many other aspects as shown in the figure. Individual knowers, however, tend to be limited both in depth and breadth of their understanding.

 

Fig. 1. We humans have parsed the universe into knowledge categories and then proceed to explore these categories to one degree or another.

 

The wavy lines in the figure represent the depth of knowledge in various domains. I've made these lines continuous to acknowledge that in reality domains really do meld along multiple aspects. Roughly the order of the aspects in the figure represent a kind of increasing organization complexity from left to right.

I imagine the bottom such line (red color) as representing the depth of knowledge acquired and maintained by the average US citizen. Of course the exact shape of the lines for any individuals depends on what that person is interested in and pays attention to. It doesn't seem to matter whether the average person has a high school diploma or a baccalaureate degree in some subject. Woefully, note that the line is generally pretty shallow and only rises toward the right as ordinary citizens seem to understand how to behave with one another and they definitely know how to use technology. Still their understanding of the Universe is shallow. Toward the left end I suspect most actually fall close to zero depth.

By comparison I've included two more lines representing more highly educated individuals. Someone who gets a Master's degree (purple line) in a subject (biological aspect domain shown) has a somewhat deeper understanding of that aspect but otherwise fits the same basic profile as the average person. Their continued emphasis in education and their presumed higher than average intelligence increases their depth slightly but not that much. The black line represents a knowledge profile of a presumptive PhD graduate (again in biology). Here we see a marked increase in depth for that aspect which, owing to the amount of underlying knowledge needed by a PhD in biology, includes much deeper than average knowledge of physics and chemistry. But beyond that the PhD, with the highest level of education available, shows a very narrow band of truly deep understanding and in only that one aspect.

The dashed lines (one red and two black) across the box represent different levels of idealized systems knowledge. The red line suggests a relatively deep level of knowledge and the two black lines represent somewhat shallower levels. But they are all systems knowledge, just at different depths of understanding. They are not strongly wavy lines for the simple reason that a systems thinker does not really “specialize” in any one aspect of the Universe in the ordinary sense. They see the Universe as a connected, whole, dynamic system so every aspect of it, while having unique characteristics, is still integrated as a totality. Systems thinking is broad and relatively even in depth across all aspect domains. It is as deep as the talents (intelligence, persistence in discovering, time devoted to learning, etc.) of the individual allow. The red dashed line is an extreme possibility. Occasionally a broad polymath might emerge with a line more like the somewhat wavy yellow line. This is a bit more realistic in having more depth in some areas and a little less in others. Some of the most powerful systems thinkers have been “experts” in aspects toward the middle, e.g. biology or ecology, where systemness appears in its strongest forms (living systems, ecological systems, social systems). But their breadth of knowledge is paramount to their grasp of that systemness.

The Average Knower

The shallowness of the average human's knowledge line is the fundamental problem. This amounts to profound ignorance of how the world works compared with the amount of knowledge available and needed to understand the world. It leads human beings into over reproducing, over consuming, and over trashing of the planet. Even when they hear that, for example, our activities are polluting the world, they can process the words, but not the deeper meaning. They do not understand how things are connected and their depth of any knowledge is abysmal. And that is why they fail to act on the information. They do not really understand.

The question is open as to how much education could fix this situation were that system itself fixed. The education process and the system that organizes and runs it are broken, and I think beyond repair. I subscribe to a suspicion, however, that in the end the problem is really one of innate ability. While there is obviously variation in the strengths of brains for learning and using knowledge, I maintain that the average level (and the bulk of a normally distributed set of mental attributes) is nowhere near commensurate with what is needed in the modern world and given the mass of knowledge that we have already garnered. The average person would rather party, watch professional sports, and be entertained by the media, than read a science book and spend time thinking about what they learned. They almost never give thought to how seemingly disparate phenomena are nonetheless interconnected in some way.

As I've indicated in the above figure, even additional amounts of education do not necessarily turn someone into a systems thinker. Indeed, it may drive them further into a niche while creating barriers to broadening their understanding. No PhD got tenure by being a generalist thinker. The system is rigged to create narrow knowers. Many of us probably know PhDs whose lines would dip below even an average person's aspect knowledge in certain realms!

People, in general, know a lot about social interactions, primarily because an awful lot of it is built into our brains by evolution. Most people today know a great deal about various aspects of technology because that is the milieu in which we live and work. But they know next to nothing about the physical realities of the Universe. They are almost wholly ignorant of the connection between money and energy, for example. They cannot understand how all the wonderful chemical cleaning agents are poisoning our world. Even if they accept the claim, they really don't know why.

Fitness for Humanity

The Universe is humanity's environment. It is true that we are semi-isolated on planet Earth. There is not a lot of material flow through the planet as a system. Everything we have in material needs to be recycled driven by the engines powered by solar, tidal, and geothermal energies. But our Earth system is open to both energy (solar flux) and information flows. We have evolved into informavores extraordinaire in biological terms. We look at the stars and interpret the messages we get from them. And the information content of those messages causes us to change.

Every species that has ever existed derived its fitness (its fit into its econiche) from being able to process messages from its environment — the parts of it that were affective for that species. The better processors had the advantage in terms of both direct competition for resources and cooperation with others to auto-organize a new level of complexity and gain a super advantage, for example by exploiting completely new resources. In biological terms this led to higher reproductive success for whatever genetic mechanism led to the advantage and thus the evolution species. What is humanity's fitness? How good are we as information processors? How much knowledge have we realized and exploited to improve our fitness in a increasingly complex world?

Our fitness will shortly be tested in the extreme. My money is on the systems knowers/thinkers as the most fit information processors. It won't play out as those thinkers having more kids than others over a long period of time, and those kids having more kids and so on. It will play out as they will be the last people standing when the environment changes so radically that the average kind of knower/thinker fails to figure out why things are happening and fail to connect the dots in order to anticipate the problems in order to preadapt to what they bring.

Being able to use information from one aspect of the Universe to understand how another aspect is going to change (for ill or good) will be seen as that which raises the fitness of the possessors such that they will be able to have children while all others are simply not able to survive. It won't be pretty. And most of us will essentially end up as the dinosaurs of our hominid kind. But it will be evolution and that is all we can say about it, I think.

Can Democracy Work in the Absence of Sufficient Sapience?

What is Going On in Washington DC?

If it weren't so tragic it would be funny. I'm not worried about whether or not the government stays shut down, or even that the US should default on its promises. The return to recession is not going to be prevented by avoiding these possibilities. It is baked into the cake. No, I am worried about the implications of some of the most “powerful” people in the world acting like absolute idiots (on all sides). I see no evidence of even a small smattering of sapience in any of the decisions being made in Washington. In my opinion the Tea Party members of Congress are demonstrating the antithesis of sapience right now. But I see nothing in the balance of the Republicans or the Democratic leaderships either. And the president doesn't get a pass either. The US government is broken because those people are there because of the democratic process that led to their selection.

What is most worrying about it is that the citizens who sent them to Washington seem not to have a clue. The people get the government they deserve.

In Feb. 2008 I ran a series of posts critiquing democracy and how it works as a system for choosing who will participate in the governance process. The first, “Might we have gotten it wrong about democracy?”, asked that question and examined a microcosm of democratic governance in the form of academic institutions. It considered how real people make decisions in situation where they are expected to have the competence (or so they think) but do not, in fact. I examined the way in which the academy's “shared governance” model is failing to work. Using this microcosm as an example of the larger problems with democratic (or representative democracies) politics and governance. I concluded: “...government would work if people were wise.” If they were wise they would be able to meet the minimum requirements for an electorate to choose capable people to represent them in their governments.

The second post, “How is representative democracy working out for us in the modern world?,” pointed out some of the cognitive issues that produce obstacles to a viable democratic process. A big problem is the cognitive load, or overload, that modern people under due to the complexity of modern society and especially technology. I said, “The concept of democracy depends on citizens who understand the issues and the way things work.” The modern world is overwhelming to the vast majority of citizens. The coping mechanisms that have been adopted by so many have made it impossible for democracy to work.

Finally, I posted “If not democracy, then what?” In that post I introduced an alternate way to look at governance from the perspective of hierarchical cybernetic theory (and mentioned how it operates in many natural systems). In a separate series of posts, “Sapient Governance,” I followed up with a description of that alternate perspective. In all of these I have given evidence that the current system is failing badly given the context of the modern, technological world, overpopulated world. I have argued that the real underlying cause is that humans only evolved a primitive level of sapience (the attribute that makes us different from all other animals) that is simply inadequate in this world. Democracy depends on capacities in the electorate that are simply not being met, and the people they are sending to office are no better able to make good judgments.

A Knowledgeable, Informed, and Thoughtful Electorate

Democracy can only work if the electorate has these capabilities. Granted that the environment has a lot to do with how these are actualized. For example, to be knowledgeable depends somewhat on the education system. I say somewhat because I know many people who survived the modern school-based education system and came out knowledgeable in spite of it! A fundamental aspect of sapience is sensing that you do not know and then seeking information that helps you self-educate.

Nevertheless, the education system is responsible for literally squashing curiosity in the young minds while training them to simply memorize what will be on the test and calling it education. Notice I said the education system. There are many fine and capable educators out there who understand this problem from personal experience. But the system determines punishments and rewards to teachers. In the university we have student evaluation surveys at the end of each term. Students fill out a bubble sheet of Likert scaled questions meant to evaluate how the teacher has done and the quality of the course. Aside from the many obvious criticisms of this approach (its validity in measuring quality of teaching and curriculum) administrators rely on the outcomes when deciding on those rewards and punishments. The high schools have done a great job of teaching students that the game is actually teach/learn to the test, which is actually fairly straightforward and devoid of any real cognitive work on either the teacher or the student. When they get to college, they expect the same sort of system, one they now know how to game for the coin of the realm - grades. The most common question I get from freshmen is, “Is this going to be on the test?” The most common complaint I get, even from juniors, is that my courses are not structured enough (take a look at my syllabi and tell where they get that notion). The fact is that many of my colleagues seem to have acquiesced to this game and especially in order to get tenure and promotion they teach from the textbook to the tests. Those students generally give better grades to their teachers! Fortunately for me, I got tenure before the No Child Left Behind (at the bottom all alone - keep them all there) mentality with its standardized tests providing the measure of success, had yet had a major impact on students' attitudes. The student evaluations from that time reflected that many students appreciated the greater rigor of college and expected to have to work at thinking and integrating knowledge. My scores while still an assistant professor reflected that. Even then, administrators were happy to take the expedient path of evaluating teaching on the basis of this one measure.

We now have seen several high school graduating classes come to college after the NCLB-standardized testing (high stakes testing) has left its mark on the culture of high school. And we have seen new junior faculty who need good evaluations in order to get tenured quickly pick up on how to play the game (this also goes for lecturers who have to get their contracts renewed). Indeed some of them actually went to high school as the transition to the game was underway and so know very well what to do.

So just how knowledgeable is the citizenry that has been emerging out of our education system over the last two decades? There are numerous studies now that indicate that most are not very well educated when it comes to critical thinking. Indeed they are not even educated about facts. I asked some freshmen how the three branches of government (US) interacted systemically as we tried to model a governance system. Over half could not remember what all three branches were let alone how they interacted. They would say things like, “the president, the cabinet, and the senate.” I don't know but that doesn't sound promising to me. When I corrected them and showed them the model they all then suddenly remembered that they covered something like that in civics courses, but it was so dull they didn't pay attention. At least they were honest about their experience. But seriously, this same thing has been shown for college graduates and people who have worked for years after college.

So strike out one for democracy. Over forty percent of the American population don't “believe” in evolution, as if it was an option to believe in. Though the number is growing smaller, at one point more than half of American citizens didn't “believe” in human-caused global warming. But now that it is too late to seriously do anything meaningful about it, the freaky weather patterns that are taking over have got more of them believing. The point is that none of these people were in a position to critically evaluate the evidence and the science.

Strike out two — informed electorate. To have an informed electorate you need an information system that actually works. Here I would put much more blame on the modern main-stream media. It is supposed to be their job to detect the changes in our societies, analyze the causes, and report unbiased to the public. How does Fox News measure up to that? But Fox News is an abhorrent example. They are driven by ideology to begin with. The other networks, even including National Public Radio and TV are culpable for a slightly different reason. Their approach to reporting has been shaped by the markets. For-profit networks have to publish what sells to gain eyeballs and thus advertising dollars. PBS and NPR never have sufficient resources and so often rely on commercial news feeds for their content as well.

Let me give you an example of misinformation that has gripped the media of late and has had an influence on public media as well. For the past year or more the ideas of energy independence for the US and vast resources of oil and gas, albeit in tight shale plays, have been filling the papers and airways. The story is downright false. Even as I write this some of the early plays are winding down because the availability of oil or gas was tremendously over hyped in the media by the carbon companies because they needed to attract investment capital to stay in business. Those plays, which we were told by the media, would last a hundred years, are already in serious decline and will fall far short of the promises. The media's role in this was to simply parrot what the so-called expert talking heads were feeding them. Those folks, in turn, were in the pockets of the major carbon players. But did anyone in the media stop to critically analyze what they were saying? Of course not. They played the game. Sell advertising spots. Sell viewer/listener support. Tell the audience what they WANT to hear. Even while these stories (which are still circulating even as the plays are starting to decline) were being foisted on the public, there were several researchers who had already determined, scientifically, that the tight gas and oil was just a hyped story. They had the data and the models to prove it. But did any of the media want to listen. Hell no. That isn't the way to sell papers or advertising spots.

So the public's information channels are simply dysfunctional. More misinformation than information is being spread. And in the area of political information it is even worse. The media people have absolutely no concept of critical thinking when it comes to presenting various ideological views. In the so-called interest of fairness to all sides they present Tea Party nut jobs as somehow equivalent to liberal politicians. Well, I guess, in some sense they are equivalent. But more often the liberals show a bit more respect for facts (and science) than do the right wingers.

Which leads to strike out three: thoughtfulness. We are a hedonistic species. Given the option of reading a knowledge book or a juicy novel, guess which one most people will choose. Given a choice between going to a lecture on the evolution of plants or going to a NASCAR race, again, which one will most people choose? Entertainment rules. And it really isn't hard to understand why. Start with a pathetic education, a lack of motivation, and a spoiled lifestyle (too many energy slaves) and it isn't really any wonder that people are basically just entertainment/novelty junkies.

We do not teach people how to think. In a sense we really shouldn't need to teach them. The human brain is a natural learning machine. But what we do is teach them how to not think, how to accept what the talking heads and prominent leaders say is true. Since they can't evaluate claims for truth of subjects, competing claims cause a deepening division. Conservatives listen only to conservatives and liberals listen only to liberals. It is much easier than being thoughtful about the claims.

The world has become incredibly complex. And in a sense you can't blame people for wanting to take the easy way out.

All of the institutions that are supposedly there to support citizen development are failing badly. And because they all interact with one another they form a reinforcing loop that is driving us deeper and deeper into ignorance, disinformation, and simple hedonistic responses, the antitheses of what it takes to be successful in democratic governance.

What we have ended up with is a governance system that is broken (in my opinion beyond repair). We get the likes of James Inhofe, senator from Oklahoma as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The guy consistently claims the global warming is the greatest left-wing hoax ever perpetrated on the American public. In order to make that claim work, of course, he has had to accuse the entire legitimate climate science community of lying about climate impacts and change. Explain to me how this could ever happen if our democracy is working.

As another example of the sorry state of affairs in government take a look at this article about Congressman Paul Broun, a member of the House Science Committee dismissing evolution. This is not an aberration, unfortunately. Most of the members of the House and many in the Senate do not understand or believe that evolution is the explanation for all biodiversity and our origins as a species of animal. Please explain to me how this man and others like him (and many her's such as Michele Bachmann, a Republican representative who rails against homosexuality as being against god's plan) can make thoughtful and knowledge-based decisions.

The Absence of Sufficient Sapience

You cannot point to any one aspect or institution and say, “There, that is the prime cause of everything else going wrong.” Everything ‘causes’ everything else. It is a great recurrent web of interactions and positive feedback loops that exist because the actors in all of these institutions are human beings — Homo callidus (formerly sapiens). We are so clever we can figure out, subconsciously of course, how to avoid facts that don't support our a priori held beliefs and find pseudo-facts that support them. And therein is the problem. If there is a cause it isn't the cultural and structural elements of the system, it is the actors and decision makers, and benefactors of the system and their lack of sufficient sapience to deal with this complex world that we have created. The few examples we have of more highly sapient beings are not selfish, hedonistic, narcissistic beings. They are more often cooperative, moral, selfless, and thoughtful. They care about others and they think about the future of everyone. They would desire to help make things better if possible. But they also recognize when the systems aren't working. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people on this planet are inherently low in sapience and that is why they dominate the system.

But there again it isn't even our fault! We didn't decide to be low sapients. Blame evolution. Blame natural selection that led us to agriculture where a different set of selection pressures may have started us losing much of the sapience we had evolved up to that point. It does little good to bemoan our situation. It is what it is. I just would like to understand it better, I guess, to satisfy my curiosity.

I don't write this stuff to point out what the problems are and thereby find solutions anymore. I have long ago realized that the system simply is what it is and it will continue in a dynamic that was set in motion by the evolution of Homo callidus and will lead to, I think, the evolution of Homo eusapiens in the distant future. You and I and our whole human-culture system are just milestones along the path. We can't be saved, preserved forever. We should not be saved in the sense of preserving the population and going on with business as usual. The essence of humanness, the sapient, abstract symbol processing, tool making, creatures that evolved on this planet does not depend on the current species existing forever. But that essence needs to be saved (if we can). Some of our kind need to succeed in persisting beyond what will surely be a massive population bottleneck event so that the seed of a new, emergent species will be available when the time is right.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Meanwhile try to enjoy the comedy-tragedy that is Washington DC, and for that matter, every other national capital in the world. Washington is probably just the most dramatic because it was the most powerful capital in history. All good things must come to an end eventually.