Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 10:23:25 -0800
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From:
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Garold L. Johnson
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dynalt@dynalt.com
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Subject:
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Is "bootstrapping" part of the problem?
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[Responding to Paul Fernhout's letter this morning....]
To reiterate my main points, which perhaps are getting lost in the
debate over future economics:
- Technological (as opposed to social or political) progress, while
desirable for many reasons, is not required to solve basic human
problems.
- The exponential growth of technology is both a threat and a blessing,
and at this point is a given, and like fire we need to do what we can
with it for good ends (however we define those, where we may not agree).
- To an extent the exponential growth of technology may help meet human
needs of the disenfranchised through reduced costs it may seem
desirable, but it is not required to do so. This means people driving
technological innovation, including the Bootstrap Institute, should be
clearer about what it is they are trying to accomplish. Is it simply to
escalate the infotech arms race, is it to make charity more effective,
is it in some belief in "progress", or is it for other reasons?
-Paul Fernhout
It seems this should probably start a different thread, but --
[addressing Paul's first issue......]
1. Technological (as opposed to social or political) progress, while
desirable for many reasons, is not required to solve basic human
problems.
The question that I have in this regard is whether the social or
political changes are really doable without better ability to collaborate,
share knowledge, investigate systems and options, etc.
One of the areas that I study is the question of how to reason about just the
sorts of problems that are fueling this debate.
- In complex systems, the obvious is not always correct. In fact, in most
complex systems, many properties that seem obvious are simply not
correct.
- The penalty for answers based on incorrect models of the way the world
works is failure to solve the problem. It is possible to hypothesize
solutions that are simply unworkable if the model is incorrect.
- e.g. it is possible to establish certain chess checkmate positions
that cannot be achieved in the sense that there is no possible
sequence of legal moves that result in the position.
- I read a book (I think it was "Wasted Wealth" by ??? Smith -- I'll
check it) in which the author makes some very good arguments that the
amount of work that needs to be done is improperly allocated among the
people doing the work. His thesis was that about 50% of the work being
done was taking twice as many people as possible just to provide
individuals a slice of the economic pie. His basic observations were
sound, but his implicit assumption was that (some unspecified sort of)
central planning would allocate work more equitably and efficiently
resulting in phenomenal increases in efficiency and productivity. The
only problem is that the rearrangement that he recommends has no way
to be accomplished in anything he recommends nor in any way that I can
see working. People are not arbitrarily reassignable to tasks as the
statistical approach would indicate.
- In social and political debate there is a very strong tendency to
assume that anything and everything that is in pursuit of a "good cause"
is in fact possible simply because the cause is "good". Supply your own
definitions. The problem is that this is not true. What determines the
workability of a solution is dependent on the nature of reality and the
correspondence of the solution with reality. The merit of the cause is no
guarantee that a proposed solution can be implemented. The tendency,
however, is to brand anyone who suggests that a proposed solution is
unworkable is opposed to seeing the problem solved and is therefore
(clearly!) in favor of continuing the problem and therefore evil. While
this mechanism tends to be more evident on the left, it has no monopoly.
Until we can get a handle on the fact that reality is not malleable just
because it is inconvenient. There was a story, likely mythological, about
a legislature trying to pass a law setting the value of pi to be exactly
3 because the current value was too terribly inconvenient. It is
difficult to credit that even legislators could be this dumb, but other
proposed legislation ignores truth in less obvious ways.
If this is a correct assessment, political and social problems are not totally
independent of the ability to understand complex systems, particularly social
systems. There was an attempt to replace a series of "water temples" that were
the traditional mechanism for allocating irrigation water with a "scientific"
system. The eventual discovery (I don't know whether it was before or after the
temples were displaced) was that the temple system came closer to an optimum
solution than any software mechanism they were able to devise.
Therefore, I contend that the problems that are social or political rather than
technical may well require that we understand more about the nature of the
social or political systems that have to be modified than we ever have before,
and that is a KM problem of magnitude. The solutions to the social an
political problems are not going to happen just because it would be convenient.
We don't have models for even the most obvious issues. Consider the way
polarization on a problem work, for example.
- A problem is stated as being a major issue.
- One or several solutions are proposed.
- Nobody bothers to define what the desired outcomes really are or
whether there is any set of outcomes upon which agreement can be reached.
- Forces polarize on the nature of the solutions, some adamantly
opposed, other adamantly in support. The other viewpoint is characterized as
benighted, misguided, and (eventually) evil.
- At this point, any attempt to investigate either the validity of
proposed solutions or of actually workable solutions is attacked by both
factions.
- At this point, there is no chance of arriving at any workable proposal
because only those in one faction or the other are ever heard.
If we can't find a way around this problem, the chance of solving other social
and political problems seems to me to be vanishingly small.
We don't understand how groups organize or what contributes to their
success or failure. There are all sorts of explanations for business failure
rates, for example, but the only things that can be said with any definiteness
are:
- Every enterprise that fails does so because there are one or more things
that were essential to their survival that were not accomplished
correctly or to an adequate level. This is a tautology, and yet it gets
lost in the myriad of "single point" explanations.
- We still haven"t identified a workable set of success factors for
organizational success.
- As a result, every new organization begins in ignorance of whatever
success principle there might be, and ends up having to discover the
success factors by trial and error, and the search for success factors is
not even explicit in the group.
- We are having similar problems with this forum. We have little agreement
on what we are trying to do, why we are trying to do it, or even how to
frame these questions in a way that stands a chance of arriving at
answers rather than endless, largely pointless debate.
In short, I contend that certain technological advances are essential to the
solution of some social and political problems, and that among those advances
are tools that allow people to collaborate effectively and to investigate the
working of complex systems. Without this we cannot form successful groups that
can
- Formulate problems in ways that permit of solution
- Allow self-organization of individual efforts
- Evaluate proposed solutions for actual workability, resulting in
workable programs for achieving the solution.
- See that solutions are implemented effectively, and are modified when
(and only as) necessary when reality contradicts preconceived notions.
We can't accomplish this in the relatively simple case of defining and
implementing a set of software tools. Let's not even consider the next larger
problem of how to organize efforts to develop successful software systems (any
candidate definitions for what it means for a software development project to
be successful?). Just how does anyone suggest that we go about tackling world
scale problems of vastly greater complexity when we can't begin to handle such
a small scale endeavor?
[Paul's second issue.....]
2. The exponential growth of technology is both a threat and a blessing,
and at this point is a given, and like fire we need to do what we can
with it for good ends (however we define those, where we may not agree).
Here I agree. There are some forces that we aren't going to be successful at
opposing no matter how we view them. The best that I can see is to try to
find ways to attack problems of interest to us while the rest of the world
does what it will.
Realize that as bad as things may appear, we have more people having more
energy that doesn't have to be devoted directly to survival, and more tools
for them to work with than at any time in history. A cynic would say that
this results in too many people with too much time on their hands.
While the remaining problems may indeed need solution, it is necessary to
maintain some degree of historical perspective. In short, a far greater
percentage of humanity has a higher standard of living that ant any time in
history, and that seems to be improving. Even that supposition can't be
evaluated with currently existing KM capability. Certainly just stating that
there is a problem and then that any who disagreed with the currently
proposed solution, workable or not, known to be workable or not, are somehow
part of the problem is not going to get them solved.
[Paul's third issue.....]
>3) To an extent the exponential growth of technology may help meet human
needs of the disenfranchised through reduced costs it may seem
desirable, but it is not required to do so. This means people driving
technological innovation, including the Bootstrap Institute, should be
clearer about what it is they are trying to accomplish. Is it simply to
escalate the infotech arms race, is it to make charity more effective,
is it in some belief in "progress", or is it for other reasons?
If you don't believe that the tools will support the efforts that you
consider socially worthy, don't support them.
The intent of building a tool of the generality of the KM solution is such
that I don't see how the use of the result can be constrained by anything
but its lack of capacity. I don't see better tools for collaboration and
helping groups manage their efforts is in any way detrimental to the
accomplishment of social agendas.
How do you build a system of the generality being proposed that can be used
only for "good" uses or that cannot be used for "good" uses?
I can see no way to force such constraints on a system like this except to
build it on models of authoritarian management, or to develop a solution
that is so limited that it cannot manage efforts of the scale of social or
political solutions. Since I can"t see how we can possible create a system
that has the problems that are supposed for it, I can"t see how this debate
is useful
If we really want to see that the evolution of such a system is appropriate
to the sorts of problems that we want to tackle, we need to look at
requirements on the system that are levied by the nature of the efforts
required to address problems of the complexity that we face, not the
specific problems, their proposed solution, or the moral benefit to be
derived from their solution.
As a simple example, a tool that would allow proponents to create proposals
that are at least self-consistent and make some attempt at completeness.
Take a look at any piece of legislation as a document, and it is clear that
we need better ways to evolve and organize knowledge and information. This
is completely aside from whether you agree with the legislation or can even
understand what it proposes.
If we could add some ability to model at least some of the possible effects
of implementing these proposals, we could advance dramatically the ability
of people to achieve the ends they agree upon and organize to achieve.
Then we might have tools that would allow a debate such at this to be
more than an exercise in using bandwidth.
Thanks.
Sincerely,
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson
dynalt@dynalt.com