Solving for Pattern

Reading the 1999 U.S. National Research Council (NRC) report, “How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice,” I couldn’t help but recall that (widely attributed) Twainism: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

The first of the NRC’s three key findings:

Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

Research on early learning suggests that the process of making sense of the world begins at a very young age. Children begin in preschool years to develop sophisticated understandings (whether accurate or not) of the phenomena around them (Wellman, 1990). Those initial understandings can have a powerful effect on the integration of new concepts and information. Sometimes those understandings are accurate, providing a foundation for building new knowledge. But sometimes they are inaccurate (Carey and Gelman, 1991). In science, students often have misconceptions of physical properties that cannot be easily observed. In humanities, their preconceptions often include stereotypes or simplifications, as when history is understood as a struggle between good guys and bad guys (Gardner, 1991). A critical feature of effective teaching is that it elicits from students their preexisting understanding of the subject matter to be taught and provides opportunities to build on — or challenge — the initial understanding.

Without using the terminology, this description of “learning to unlearn” points to a practice sometimes called instructional scaffolding — that is, teaching with appreciation and support for each student’s zone of proximal development, or area of potential growth. Except that, in this case, it’s the zone of proximal unlearning that offers a sweet spot for perceived development.

Diagram from the Wikimedia Commons on the left, and my revised version on the right. Thoughts? [Diagram updated]

In the book Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate-Change World, Ray Ison describes systems practice as a kind of performance.

From my review in the journal Ecopsychology (just out, vol. 5 issue 2):

[Ison’s] guiding question for this performance is this: what is it that we do when we do what we do? This double-layered look — not only at what we do but also at our looking at what we do — can help illuminate an immersive web of existence: our emotions, language, social rules and norms, and so on. We are, he emphasizes, always in one emotion or another. Calm is an emotion, along with more pronounced ones, like fear or joy. Language, rules, and social norms are types of social technologies in which our daily practices are embedded, often invisibly.

This embeddedness becomes a trap when accustomed ways of being or thinking, reified in social technologies, leave us unaware of alternative possibilities or powerless to adopt them. To reify is to perpetuate distinctions that arise from projecting our meaning onto the world, thereby ‘‘making a thing’’ of our experiences, as when we talk about problems and solutions rather than perceptions of problematical situations and effective actions. Every noun, Ison writes, obscures a verb.

See also: Ison on science in the Anthropocene.

[Update: Ray comments on my review here.]

“The essential characteristic of systems theory,” described theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, is that “there is a sense in which we can learn about S by studying S’.”

This pithy statement comes from Rosen’s “Old Trends and New Trends in General Systems Research,” the Ludwig von Bertalanffy Memorial Lecture at the 1979 meeting of the Society for General Systems Research. Rosen was born on today’s date in 1934.

Here’s the full excerpt:

[T]here is a sense in which we can learn something about a particular system S, such as a developing organism, by studying some other system S’, perhaps completely different from S in purely reductionistic or physical sense, but nonetheless manifesting the same behavior.

To me this last proposition articulates the essential characteristic of systems theory, which distinguishes it from everything that has gone before. Hitherto, the reductionistic-empirical approach to systems mandated that any given system of interest be analyzed into ultimate particulate units; understanding any behavior of the system meant resolving that behavior into the properties of these particulate units and the forces acting on them. On the other hand, von Bertalanffy stressed that in the organic realm, many important classes of behaviors are shared by systems of the utmost physical diversity.

This fact has, in turn, two utterly revolutionary implications: first, that if such behaviors are to be analyzed, the appropriate analytic units cannot be the particles of the physicist, and hence, that the reductionist analytic paradigm is not the only one of the large family of analytic paradigms, each of which captures a distinct aspect of physical reality. The second implication, which arises from the first, is this: if two systems S and S’ which are physically different (i.e. are constructed of different kinds of particles) nevertheless behave similarly, then there is a sense in which we can learn about S by studying S’. That is, physically disparate systems can nevertheless be models, or analogs, of each other.

These days, familiar examples of learning about S through S’ include:

• Resilience science, in which studies, initially in ecological systems, of multiple stable states and critical transitions have informed understandings of persistence, adaptation, and transformation in systems of a more social character.
• Scaling laws that describe similar rates of growth among animals (metabolism per-unit of body mass) or cities (per-capita rates of crime, innovation, and so on), as described by Geoffrey West and colleagues, e.g., “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities.”

Stewart Brand and Jay Ogilvy, two of five co-founders of scenario planning consultancy Global Business Network, describe very different views on objectivity and subjectivity.

Brand, from Clock of the Long Now: Time And Responsibility: The Ideas Behind The World’s Slowest Computer (1999):

I think it is time to draw a harsh distinction, similar to that drawn between science and “scientism” (the style of science without its substance). There is a domain of future studies, rigorous and objective, and another that is essentially “futurism” — a belief in structure, often highly subjective. There are futurists, like [Peter] Drucker, and there are those who pretend to be futurists: futurismists, exuding futurismo. …

The core fallacy of futurismo is: Desire always misreads fate.

Ogilvy replies in Creating Better Futures: Scenario Planning as a Tool for a Better Tomorrow (2002):

A colleague, Stewart Brand, is fond of quoting Bernal’s line, “Desire always misreads fate.” I persistently disagree. Desire, or a vivid sense of hope, can create what comes to be called fate. To think otherwise is to resign oneself to a predetermined future. Play up fate and you play down planning. Planning presupposes freedom and refutes the very idea of destiny. …

There is, consequently, a constant danger of bad faith in the work of most futurists. Eager to escape the charge of subjective bias, of claiming that what we want to happen will in fact happen, we do everything we can to make sure that our scenarios of what will happen have been scourged of every relic of what we ourselves might want to happen. I call this bad faith, but not because I think we are unsuccessful in scourging our hopes. I call it bad faith to the extent that we are successful. To the extent that we mimic scientists in claiming value-free objectivity in our view of the future, we deny the very thing that makes us good human beings and good futurists. …

The claim to objectivity turns out to be compromised in any case, if reports form the other human sciences are to be believed.

See also: Adam Kahane’s whole system transformation.

Conventional wisdom is that we are living in an era of unprecedented socio-technological change. Recently, however, I’ve been intrigued to discover a couple of dissenting voices.

One is Noam Chomsky, in this talk at the 2012 Future of Learning conference (~6:35):

We should bear in mind that the technological changes that are taking place now — while they’re significant — probably come nowhere near having as much impact as technological advances of say a century ago, plus or minus.

So the shift — let’s just take communication — the shift from a typewriter to a computer, or a telephone to email is significant but it doesn’t begin to compare with the shift from a sailing vessel to a telegraph. The time that that cut down in communication between, say, England to the United States was extraordinary compared with the changes taking place now.

And the same is true of other types of technology — like the introduction of, let’s say, plumbing. Widespread plumbing in the cities had a huge effect on health, much more than the discovery of antibiotics.

So the changes are real and significant, but we should recognize that others have taken place which in many ways are more dramatic.

Ironically enough, Chomsky wasn’t physically at the conference but made these remarks via remote video hookup. Ray Kurzweil called Chomsky’s statements “apocryphal,” meaning dubious, and Ken Robinson gave the nod to Kurzweil. All the videos are here.

I caught these talks earlier this year but hadn’t considered commenting on them until I noticed a similar statement in Herbert Simon’s autobiography, Models of My Life. In one passage, Simon critiqued the 1970 book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, whose thesis was that rapid changes can cause physical or psychological trauma:

[W]e learned that someone had called Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock to President Nixon’s attention. He, or someone on his staff, wanted an evaluation by social scientists of Toffler’s thesis. I wrote a memorandum pointing out that social change had surely been more rapid in my grandmother’s time (from an agrarian to an urban society, with the advent of rapid transportation and communication) than my own, and that she and her contemporaries showed no great signs of psychological trauma — no more than any other generation. I could not understand, therefore, why our generation should be subject to any special “shock.”

See also: Will climate shuffle the pace layers?

Conversations about smart growth and urban density remind me of Teddy Cruz’s comment that density could be re-imagined, from people/things per acre to social exchanges/transactions/relationships per acre. What if density were analyzed through social network analysis? How then would we understand and compare neighborhoods?

Just a thought in preface to my scan through key findings from the new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Smart Growth program report, “Our Built and Natural Environments,” the second edition of a 2001 publication and a richly cited review of the latest research:

• A bus carrying 20 passengers consumes about one-­third of the energy that would be needed if each passenger drove a private vehicle.
• A study of 26 TOD (transit-oriented development) projects in California found that people living within a half-­mile of a rail station were about four times as likely to commute by rail as those living between one-­half and 3 miles away.
• An evaluation of 17 TOD projects of different sizes in four areas of the country found about 47 percent fewer vehicle trips than predicted using the industry-standard Institute of Transportation Engineers manual.
• A study of 45 of the largest metropolitan regions over 13 years found that the least compact regions had 60 percent more high ozone days than the most compact regions. Of the variables, density was most strongly associated: each standard deviation increase in density was associated with an average of about 16 fewer high ozone days per year.
• A Toronto study found that a low‐density neighborhood was between two and 2.5 times more energy intensive per capita, based on greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation, infrastructure construction, and building operations, than a high‐density one.
• A study of an ethnically diverse sample of 5,529 adults from six U.S. cities found that when population density and the amount of land devoted to retail uses increases from the fifth percentile to the 95th percentile, the probability of walking more than 150 minutes per week, compared to getting no exercise, increased from 66 percent to 95 percent.
• An analysis of the association between car crashes and urban form in San Antonio, Texas, found that locating retail and commercial uses on arterial streets away from
 residential areas made streets more
 dangerous: each additional mile of arterial street was 
associated with an increase of 15 percent in the number
 of car crashes and a 20 percent increase in the number 
of fatal crashes.
• Satellite measurements of nitrogen dioxide levels in 83 cities found a decrease in urban contiguity of one standard deviation to be associated with a 31 percent increase in nitrogen dioxide levels.

Image: Percentage of new home construction that is infill, 2000‐2009. Source: EPA. 2012. Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions.

“Everyone designs,” famously wrote Herbert Simon, recipient of the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, who devised the terms “bounded rationality” and “satisficing,” and was born on this date in 1916.

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

From Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (Third Edition, 1996, p.111-167, without ellipses):

The natural sciences are concerned with how things are. Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be.

Many of us have been unhappy about the fragmentation of our society into two cultures. Some of us even think there are not just two cultures but a large number of cultures. If we regret that fragmentation, then we must look for a common core of knowledge that can be shared by the members of all cultures. A common understanding of our relation to the inner and outer environments that define the space in which we live and choose can provide at least part of that significant core.

If I have made my case, then we can conclude that, in large part, the proper study of mankind is the science of design, not only as the professional component of a technical education but as a core discipline for every liberally educated person.

A paradoxical, but perhaps realistic, view of design goals is that their function is to motivate activity which in turn will generate new goals.

One can imagine a future in which our main interest in both science and design will lie in what they teach us about the world and not what they allow us to do in the world. Design like science is a tool for understanding as well as acting.

From a reading of evolutionary history — whether biological or social — one might conjecture that there has been a long-run trend toward variety and complexity. If there is such a trend toward variety, then evolution is not to be understood as a series of tournaments for the occupation of a fixed set of environmental niches, each tournament won by the organism that is fittest for that niche. Instead evolution brings about a proliferation of niches.

Our essential task — a big enough one to be sure — is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches.

Our grandchildren cannot ask more of us than that we offer to them the same chance for adventure, for the pursuit of new and interesting designs, that we have had.

“My deep hope,” writes biologist Stuart Kauffman “[is that] we can find our way Beyond Modernity, but do so as an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary process that disrupts our cultural and civilizational roots.”

Key themes in Kauffman’s recent synthetic work include radical emergence, an end to the dominance of the physics worldview, and the re-enchantment that lies beyond Modernity. I’m referring to sources such as his 2012 paper with coauthors Giuseppe Longo and Maël Montévil (“No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere”), his NPR blog posts, this Lifeboat post (from which I took the above quote), and an October 2011 video from the New England Complex Systems Institute, embedded below.

Kauffman’s notes for this talk are posted at NECSI, and mine below supplement, rather than repeat.

I think, in a way we can’t articulate, we are lost in Modernity. And I think there’s an unrest [in] that we sense this but don’t know what to do. …

To use an American expression, the fact that the biosphere is enabling its own directions of becoming “blows me away.” And I have to say I find it enchanting. Somehow it’s utterly empowering. …

We think we live, since Newton, since Aristotle, in the nexus of causes, and we do. Equally important, the biosphere-and-we live in the nexus of enablements and ever-new niches. And we create the niches that enable. …

The world does, in fact, by this radical emergence, as Heraclitus said, bubble forth. …

If there is an adjacent possible, how is it changing over time? It looks like it’s getting bigger. That is to say, it’s easier to invent something now than it was 50 thousand years ago. How come?

We need a theory of niche creation as a function of the number of things that are around making their worlds with one another. My bet is that the adjacent possible is growing, and a dream of mine — and it is a dream — is that the biosphere is growing its adjacent possible, as a secular trend, as fast as it can.

It ties into engineering because, whether you like it or not, you are enabling ever-new adjacent possibles: whether they are airplanes flying into buildings, or people meeting needs or using your artifacts for things you never would have thought.

We must begin to think what wise enablement is, and how we will do it, and how we will adapt to correct our mistakes.

Shibley Telhami, author of The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East, describes the key to the Middle East as the perception among participants that one can achieve one’s desired outcomes.

From an interview with Diane Rehm (~44:00):

Before and after the Arab uprisings, it is remarkable that a majority of the Arabs still in principle support a two-state solution, just like you have in Israel. And I poll in Israel, on this one, among Jews and among Arabs.

But here’s the problem — and this is the problem that I think Secretary Kerry is going to have to contend with — which is that a majority of both don’t believe a two-state solutions will ever happen. So they’ve lost faith. That’s the difference between now and the 1990s.

In the 1990s a huge majority of both sides thought it was going to happen. Now a huge majority thinks it’s not going to happen. And when you think it’s not going to happen, it doesn’t matter whether you return to negotiations. You’d be an idiot to make a concession if you think it’s going to lead to conflict. Why give up something when you know you’re going to face…

And we see this assessment of conflict even influences their ability to emphasize or not emphasize. When they think they’re going to be in conflict, they’re less ready to empathize, because they want to be hardened enough to fight the conflict. Incitement becomes a tool to mobilize people to fight the conflict that they see inevitable.

So we can’t … We’re fighting symptoms, we’re fighting symptoms. What we need to do is deal with the core issue, which is transform the perceptions — and that can’t be done through going back to the negotiating table.