You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2009.
The acclaimed analyst on the interaction of geopolitics and terrorism Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed describes the current state of geopolitical manipulation in terms of Emeritus Professor Peter Dale Scott’s concept of deep politics.
In short deep politics is the breakdown of the state in terms of its legal foundations and subsequent corruption by private actors. Rendition is a prime example but the corruption and moral ambivalence goes even deeper in the name of interstate competition. We have heard all this before but this time its all coming from respected academics and analysts. See Ahmed’s blog The Cutting Edge
Gerald Celente is a trends forecaster who has predicted an awful lot that has come true over the years. He calls the current slide the ‘greatest depression’. By now those who share his predictions have gone from thousands to perhaps millions.
James Kunstler says this will ‘not be your grandmother’s depression’ because the Western World no longer has the socio-economic resilience to handle a protracted period of negative economic growth – it is now a house of cards system with a long way to fall before it finds a solid base. Track back through some of my earlier posts or search with the terms ‘resilience’ or ‘fragility’ to see my take on the state we are all in. And here is a mild taste of what the UK could be in for in the same vein.
Get to know your community, its strengths, its resources, and get building your family’s and your community’s resilience now. For you Brits – see the www.transitiontowns.org
The UK National grid connection is about to take its first injection of liquified natural gas (LNG). The pipeline runs near me and I watched it being driven across Wales and England with near military efficiency in 2007, it passed and was covered over within months that summer. If only we could build wind farms and plug them in as rapidly.
In the area of social sciences in which I am specialised we tend to view some global macrosphere events such as the credit crunch and general economics as a wild area in which the unpredictable can sneak up and wipe out long-term gains overnight. We call this the 1:106 problem: How do we predict the one in a million, but highly significant and potentially catastrophic, event in a wild world?
My area of specialism is on people’s state of situation awareness or SA in dynamic real-world situations of scale variability. One of my current areas of research (2001-) has been to develop ways of teaching people strategies for maintaining better SA or for enhancing the way in which a group develops shared SA – and my conclusions so far (congruent with Taleb, 2006) are that SA depends on principles of attention switching across modes (contexts), intuitive-rational interplay, and mental simulation, all within a process of suspending drilling-down or action until the most appropriate moment. That most appropriate ‘moment’, in psychological-social terms, seems to be perceptible from relationships between patterns of data rather than from the particular patterns themselves – joining the dots; systems thinking – holistic thinking? This can be most appropriately called ‘ecological thinking’ where it is the links and relationships that are key rather than the specifics, whether those be abstracted means or abstracted concepts of attractor-nodes; both of which are not properties of reality but properties of the mind making sense of the world.
In any given situation some of us are more aware of current events and likely future events than are others. Experts tend to have better SA, but only certain kinds of experts have the best SA; these appear to be the experts who have both the knowledge and the know-how in a wild world rather than in an assumed world of central tendencies and discrete ‘things’ (C.f. Taleb, 2006 who predicted the banking crisis). These experts can respond automatically and with a high degree of accuracy in building advantage against a complex environment in some required context, and can also come out of the automatic when attention must be effortfully redirected to some certain focus or context for such advantage.
Such experts’ experts can also experience strong processes of psychological flow and unflappable relaxation as they maintain ‘metacognition’ while switching between conscious and unconscious processing. I feel that what psychologists mystically call meta cognition is really a way of alluding to a lack of distinction between consciousness in the person and consciousness in the world when a person is able to read the reality of the external world; learning to ride the world as a benign master between limits of equilibrium but to maximise benefit wherever possible to the self within the limits of the self – in the knowledge that eventually the advantage will be lost but for the present a game is won.
The experts’ experts are good at sitting in the waiting room of uncertainty and holding their water until the right confluence of factors emerge for a desired win. The context can be the global situation, or sub-contexts, or even ‘out-of-the-box’ new perspectives – a thinking style that relates more closely to structures seen in network theory, Mandelbrotian maths, and their consequent narratives rather than with Gaussian measurement methods. Real experts are up at the edge of the competition-cooperation paradox looking over the horizon to glimpses of true reality. They have what we tend to call wisdom, they are closer to mystics than professors, they know that their main task is not to manage the known and mundane but to be vigilant in order to identify the unknown unknowns that are waiting around the corner with a sting in the tail.
You never truly get there
Those unknown unknowns can be predicted to emerge when certain processes occur in linkages between patterns. I am currently working on artificial intelligence (AI; connectionist modelling) processes that highlight such changes and bring them to the attention of a system operator either in real-time simulators, real system control, or in data mining techniques such as social network analysis. But it is only a way of maximising cumulative advantage, squeezing the tiniest extra bit of cognitive performance out of the computational machine. Somewhat odd since I am not a competitive person myself; I hate playing to win. But we will never get to 100 percent, not in the lifetime of this universe with its physical laws, even set as beautiful and elegant as they are.
Experts try though. They are dynamic, they continue to scan the data, system, airspace, society, for emerging risks, whereas novices lock-on to the most salient current risk and do not move their cognition effectively across events in order to see emerging patterns from different perspectives. The best experts are always scanning, interpreting, tracking events from past to present and back again, consciously and unconsciously, and they do not have firmly fixed ideas about the future. The best experts are round not square. They are looking for salient relationships between events, not the events themselves, for areas of risk to be attended to. In my models the maths are nothing spectacular but what is novel is configuration to measure dynamically changing contexts and relationships between contexts – a combination of connectionist modelling and iterative multi-dimensional scaling is the basis of the method.
Free your mind
Fixed ideas and the search for certainty are very much the domain of classical thought not the realm of wholistic nature and certainly not at the supra-atomic scale. The reifying of Kantian categories, that are more likely emergent properties, into theories of human nature is one area in which classical thought has been misapplied from physical sciences to more complex behaviours of nature such as those found in social science.
Our heritage, and partly innate use, of classical thinking in order to reduce uncertainty means that we are increasingly living in what Taleb calls Mediocristan, in which the world appears more predictable and certain than it is due to the projection of classically derived theory and logical positivism onto the real world. In reality Taleb argues that we live in Extremistan where unknown unknowns abound free of measurement. We are only looking at what is measured-classified!
Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan makes the argument in the context of theory development in social sciences (particularly areas like economics) that we should avoid drilling down in focus when our classical thinking bias has directed us to look at the current most-likely event. This is because in a real, complex non-linear world the current most likely event is just that – both current and measured. Without knowing what is unmeasured (because we have no context from which to measure other than unknown!) we cannot predict the impact of future low probability events in a dynamic complex wild system.
We need to maintain nuance, and a sense of uncertainty, about the conjunction of present events and our anticipation of future events. This is the true expert who flies by the seat of his/er pants while keeping their sharp mind flashing across concurrent multiple contexts. Taleb’s book is well worth a read, I agree wholly with its thesis regarding how best to stay aware and ahead, it offers the reader some tips (applicable to individuals and shared cognitive settings) on how to achieve this state of action-decision-action mental equilibrium.
So what has this to do with sustainability?
Well, almost everything. It appears that our education system, our institutions of action and thought, our governance, our overall systems of civilisation, are based mostly on processes of classical thinking. This has resulted in the notion that if (apparent) problems are isolated and then solved sequentially then the Ascent of Man will continue unabated. This has resulted in the notion that Leviathan is infallible, the only alternative to the untested, and hence the only option despite its crumbling foundations. Institutional processes adhere very strongly to this kind of information processing.
If the economy is understood and fixed in isolation, then economic growth will continue, despite the sciences based around ecological understanding and physics telling us that the problems of economics cannot occur in isolation. Economists are in charge at present and their theories about the interplay of the individual, society, and environment are therefore in the foreground – we are all being invited at present to drill-down into the problems of the economy to the neglect of many many other contexts. The true experts and the wise among us will be standing back and joining the dots – looking at the big picture and seeing that the problem is far more complex.
However, unlike Taleb I am of the mind that experts, social science experts who look at multiple contexts and interactions holistically, can help by identifying and targeting multiple nodes in the system that are critical to the overall problem. For me the problem is one of specialisms driven by reified classical ideas versus broad ecologically driven complex process thinking. I predict that it is within the habitat of institutions that you will find the former and in the wild leftfield ecology where you will find the latter.
If there is such a class of people known as the Illuminati elite then this is what they will be doing right now: scanning the Big Picture, looking at its nuances and emerging properties for opportunities – and rigging the game, constructing the ludos from first principles of incremental and cumulative advantage. Such advantage is anathema to grass-roots empowerment and human diversity – get this one point – we all end up following the classically predicated standards set by the leaders, we can all end up playing the game created by the leaders’ rules.
Likewise but on the inverse, ecologists and sustainability thinkers-actors (philopraxists) are trying to draw society’s attention to the interaction of problems and how those interactions can be broken or remedied as appropriate. In the latter case there are no rules, no standards, no qualifications or best methods, no specialisms, just interconnections and qualitative interpretations. However, few want to step outside the comfort of conformity into this alternative world of ecological-economic-social uncertainty.
Ecological thinking then is the ability to switch contexts in pursuit of patterns that are interconnected across contexts. Walking through wild nature our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have done just that, people from non-developed or primitive societies tend to do just that.
It’s our Western educated population that has been entranced by the certainties of classical (Taleb calls it Platonic) thinking after the tradition of Platonism vs. aPlatonism and the emergence of what appears to be a Mediocristan-of-certainty but which is really an Extremistan of stacked-up political-economic power but riddled with potential catastrophes (e.g. the banking crisis that Taleb predicted) and opportunities that are only seen by the few – i.e., the freemen elites versus the counter-culture subversives – who are empowered to step outside that thinking mode.
Furthermore, in my view classical thinking has led to the idea that there is a best way in any specialisation – standardisation – and hence the growth in socio-economic hierarchy based around economic and social centralisation. We are a monoculture – our eggs are in the basket called society and culture (Derrick Jensen’s Culture of Make Believe) and it is becoming ever less diverse. This economic centralisation is a highly fragile and the eggs are becoming ever more tasteless. The Culture of Make Believe is almost synonymous with Taleb’s idea of Mediocristan.
We can define the other way of thinking, the non-classical mode of thought, non-theorising imaginative use of attention and creative problem solving, direct perception, as eco-thinking. It is an imperative for the coming Ecological Age. It is supported by the experiences of the eco-therapy movement: take people out of the context of Western institutionalised social structures and put them on farms and amid nature and their mental-physical state improves; and they see the world more holistically and from the bottom-up. They are back in their natural environment where they can exhibit their natural tendency for eco-thinking, perceiving the natural world and their self as an interconnected whole rather than as a set of categories or variables.
Somehow we all need to shift to this mode of thinking if humans and planet are to be reconciled.
