Solving for Pattern

Here are my slides from the 2012 International Society for the Systems Sciences conference.

I organized this talk as a set of 12 propositions. The core idea is that the stability landscape metaphor, as developed by the folks in the Resilience Alliance, can be used as a heuristic for engaging in social change work.

The talk is called “Design for Social Change.”

Taxing Energy Use, a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), compares tax rates per unit of energy and per tonne of CO2 emissions from energy use across its 34 member countries.

Switzerland has the highest taxes per tonne of CO2 (on the right), at 100+ Euros (~$141). These figures for CO2 taxes include all specific taxes on energy, whether or not they are explicitly intended to tax carbon. This graph ©OECD.

From the NYT (“In Energy Taxes, Tools to Help Tackle Climate Change”):

Among the 34 industrialized nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, these taxes average about $68.4 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. The United States, by contrast, has a gas tax to pay for highway improvement, and that’s about it. Total federal taxes on energy amount to $6.30 per ton. …

One study found that a carbon tax of $15 per ton would reduce greenhouse emissions by 14 percent as people sought to save energy by driving less, insulating their homes and switching to renewable fuels, among other things.

What’s more, it would raise lots of money. Estimates reviewed in a report by the Tax Policy Center ranged from 0.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — for a tax of $20 per ton of carbon dioxide — to 1.6 percent of G.D.P. for a tax of $41 per ton. Consider this: 1.6 percent of G.D.P. is $240 billion a year. And $41 per ton amounts to an extra 35 cents a gallon of gas.

Video of a passionate 1976 debate between Margaret Mead, Herman Kahn, and William Irwin Thompson. Topics include nuclear energy, genetic engineering, and poverty alleviation.

Kahn’s book The next 200 years: A scenario for America and the world had just been published.

Mead on ozone depletion: “We don’t know what the thresholds are!”

Kahn on transportation: “By the end of the century you’re going to have pollution-free cars.”

Thompson on Kahn’s positive assessment of the green revolution and its demands on fresh water supplies: “You’re looking at too narrow a time scale.”

Neurobiologist Björn Brembs and biological psychologist Marcus Munafò in the paper “Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank”:

[U]sing journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. …

Alternatives to journal rank exist – we now have technology at our disposal which allows us to perform all of the functions journal rank is currently supposed to perform in an unbiased, dynamic way on a per-article basis, allowing the research community greater control over selection, filtering, and ranking of scientific information [57,112–115].

Since there is no technological reason to continue using journal rank, one implication of the data reviewed here is that we can instead use current technology and remove the need for a journal hierarchy completely. As we have argued, it is not only technically obsolete, but also counter-productive and a potential threat to the scientific endeavor.

We therefore would favor bringing scholarly communication back to the research institutions in an archival publication system in which both software, raw data and their text descriptions are archived and made accessible, after peer-review and with scientifically-tested metrics accruing reputation in a constantly improving reputation system [116].

This reputation system would be subjected to the same standards of scientific scrutiny as are commonly applied to all scientific matters and evolve to minimize gaming and maximize the alignment of researchers’ interests with those of science (which are currently misaligned [27]).

Only an elaborate ecosystem of a multitude of metrics can provide the flexibility to capitalize on the small fraction of the multi-faceted scientific output that is actually quantifiable. Funds currently spent on journal subscripts could easily suffice to finance the initial conversion of scholarly communication, even if only as long-term savings. Other solutions certainly exist [73,117], but the need for an alternative system is clearly pressing [118].

H/t Christo Fabricius

“The objective of education is learning, not teaching,” emphasized management science pioneer Russell Ackoff in a 2008 book with Sudbury Valley School cofounder Daniel Greenberg, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track.

Published a year before Ackoff passed, the book complies their pithy email exchanges on educational reform. From Ackoff’s opening section (emphasis in original):

Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those that are taught. …

After lecturing to undergraduates at a major university, I was accosted by a student who had attended the lecture. After some complimentary remarks, he asked, “How long ago did you teach your first class?”

I responded, “In September of 1941.”

“Wow!” The student said. “You mean to say you have been teaching for more than 60 years?”

“Yes.”‘

“When did you last teach a course in a subject that existed when you were a student?”

This difficult question required some thought. After a pause, I said, “September of 1951.”

“Wow! You mean to say that everything you have taught in more than 50 years was not taught to you; you had to learn on your own?”

“Right.”

“You must be a pretty good learner.”

I modestly agreed.

The student then said, “What a shame you’re not that good a teacher.”

The student had it right; what most faculty members are good at, if anything, is learning rather than teaching.

Recall that in the one-room schoolhouse, students taught students. The teacher served as a guide and a resource but not as one who force-fed content into students’ minds.

There are many different ways of learning; teaching is only one of them. We learn a great deal on our own, in independent study or play. We learn a great deal interacting with others informally — sharing what we are learning with others and vice versa.

We learn a great deal by doing, through trial and error. Long before there were schools as we know them, there was apprenticeship — learning how to do something by trying it under the guidance of one who knows how. For example, one can learn more architecture by having to design and build one’s own house than by taking any number of courses on the subject. When physicians are asked whether they learned more in classes or during their internship, without exception they answer, “Internship.”

In the educational process, students should be offered a wide variety of ways to learn, among which they could choose or with which they could experiment. They do not have to learn different things the same way. They should learn at a very early stage of “schooling” that learning how to learn is largely their responsibility — with the help they seek but that is not imposed on them.

The objective of education is learning, not teaching.

Many of these themes dovetail with those of John Seely Brown in, say, 2008’s “Minds on fire” or the more recent “Global one-room schoolhouse.”

For more on Ackoff, see also: “What’s a system?” a.k.a “If Russ Ackoff had given a TED talk.”

In November 2010, California voters defeated proposition 23, which would have suspended the state’s plans to establish a regulated carbon market. Grassroots organizations and people of color turned out in force against the ballot proposition, as I’ve recently been reading.

From “A Perfect Storm: Lessons from the Defeat of Proposition 23” (pdf), published by the Funders Network on Transforming the Global Economy (now EDGE Funders Alliance):

Prop 23 went down to a resounding defeat, with 61.6 percent voting no and only 38.4 percent voting yes. But there is more to the story: Voters of color comprised 37 percent of the electorate and whites 63 percent. However, 73 percent of voters of color and 57 percent of white voters voted against the measure. One million new voters of color came to the polls in November 2010 in California, and clearly the vast majority of them opposed Prop 23.

Those new voters helped to tip races for both Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer.

The short film Where We Live tells the story of the 2010 grassroots organizing.

On Inauguration Day, it’s worth reposting, Carl Malamud’s 2009 Gov 2.0 talk, “By the People” (pdf). Malamud is founder of public.resource.org and law.resource.org.

I would like to leave you with three propositions that should be true in a democratic society, challenges our government can and should address today:

First, if a document is to have the force of law, it must be available for all to read. Artificial restrictions on access are not appropriate for the law of the land. The federal judiciary, in particular, must make their data much more broadly available or they will find others owning their databases, claiming authority and authenticity that should emanate directly from the courts themselves. This is a foundational issue, one that goes to the very heart of our system of justice.

Second, if a meeting that is part of the law-making process is to be truly public, in this day and age, that means it must be on the Internet. Today, public means online. When Congress holds hearings, hearings that lead to laws that we must all obey, those hearings must take place in a forum that all may attend and observe. Today, they do not.

If you want to attend a hearing today, you’d best live inside of the Beltway and have the means to hire somebody to guard your place in line.When Congress does webcast, the efforts are half-hearted and of poor quality. Many committees webcast a few select hearings, but then systematically withdraw their archives from the net. Shielding hearings from the public eye reduces the legitimacy of the Congress. Broadcast-quality video from every hearing should be made available on the Internet so our legislative process becomes more visible to all Americans.

Third, the rule of law in our federalist system is a matter that applies to all three branches of the federal government, and also to all 50 states and the local jurisdictions. The principle that primary legal materials should be available to all is a principle that needs to be driven by the leadership of the executive branch and applied to all levels of government.

Our new administration has many noted constitutional scholars — Solicitor General Kagan, Attorney General Holder, President Obama — who must surely understand the importance of making America’s operating system open source. Through litigation, legislation, and executive memorandum, the Administration could and should lead a fundamental reform in how we make our laws available to our citizens, turning the private enclaves of today into the public parks of tomorrow.

The promise of the Internet wave is the promise of an opportunity for more efficient government, for more economic activity, and for a better democracy. Artificial and unjust limits on access to information based on money and power can be abolished from our society’s operating system, giving us at long last a government that truly is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

How does social change come about?

1960s radicals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin traded strategies and barbs in a series of mid-80s debates, including this one filmed in 1986 in Vancouver, British Columbia and hosted on UbuWeb.

Sure, there is plenty of yippie-versus-yuppie posturing, but entrenched institutions evolve but slowly, and much remains relevant today.

Abbie urged divestment from South Africa, while Jerry praised “Hands across America.” Jerry got hit with a pie (~64 minutes). The last ten minutes or so features interviews with the audience.

Jerry:

I think that everything I’m doing today is a natural evolution of the past. … In the 70s, millions of individuals made individual decisions to go into the system, in one way or another. … And the transformation of western society from an industrial society to an information society, a historical transformation, is taking place because of the baby boom generation.

What is the role of self-reliance in changing society? Self-reliance used to be, and historically has been, a right-wing cop-out idea. But I’m proposing that we take the idea of self-reliance and marry it to the concept of community.

I know that when Jesse Jackson goes to black high schools … his message is something like this: Stop blaming whitey. Stop blaming capitalism. … Change yourselves.

So a superficial right-wing message of changing yourself is, I believe, an explosive philosophy that people from the 60s should adopt and inculcate into a new method for changing society. … The real challenge for the activists of the 60s is to build a majority coalition for the 80s and the 90s.

Abbie:

I am the broken record. I am the has-been. … I still believe in the effectiveness of political activism and grassroots organizing. …

I call on people to make a balance between their individual needs for a comfortable life and as citizens in a community and partners in a world out there. … I don’t want to see a country that feels it has to control the rest of the world in order to build its standard of living. …

I don’t want to see people define success as money alone. … Where’s the evidence that the new generation of rich is going to be any different from the old generation of rich?