Results tagged “complexity” from Eccentric Eclectica

Glenda Eoyang from the Human Systems Dynamics Institute presented at the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum yesterday. She gave a polished presentation on complexity and human systems.

She started by distinguishing two perceptions of time: linear and pragmatic. Linear time is what we usually envision time to be - a straight line from the past into the future. There are a lot of problems with this view and we spent some time talking about them as a group. I thought we got bogged down in this area a bit. Then she introduced pragmatic time that incorporates a multitude of different paths from the past into a multitude of future paths. Getting away from the single line of progress seemed to be the ultimate upshot and was a useful message to promote.

Adaptive action is the core of her work and she summarized a simple three step process to help analyze situations. First, what patterns do you observe? She offered three possible meta-patterns to classify observations: organized, self-organizing, and unorganized. Organized patterns appear familiar, predictable, reducible, replicable, stable, etc. Self-organizing patterns are constantly changing, irreducible, not replicable, emergent, interactive, familiar whole, surprising parts. Unorganized patterns are like a hot gas: constantly surprising, totally ambiguous, unpredictable, and unstable. Reminds me of classifying cellular automata a la Stephen Wolfram whom she no doubt has borrowed some ideas from although she didn’t mention him.

Second, so what does the situation demand? How should we intervene? Again she used the same typology for three types of intervention. If more control and predictability is needed then an organized intervention such as policy, procedures, team building, visioning, clear goals, branding, or six sigma will be appropriate. A more active response prompts self-organizing interventions: increase or decrease control, stand and watch, or jump in and play. Unorganized interventions such as telling stories, collecting histories, gathering data, anxiety containment, relationship building, or enjoying innovation may promote more random exploration.

Third, now what will you do to shift the conditions for self-organizing? You can change the:

1. Containers that hold the system together until patterns form. Greater organization could come from fewer, stronger, or smaller containers; less organization from more, weaker, and larger.
2. Differences establish the pattern and build tensions to motivate change. Again organization can be fostered by having fewer, clearer, and smaller differences. The reverse would lead to more, fuzzier, and larger differences.
3. Exchanges connect agents together within the container and across differences. Tighter or looser exchanges move along the organized/unorganized continuum.

I liked the whole presentation. A lot of good food for thought. The container, differences, and exchanges typology sounded particularly interesting.

I had some questions:

• How do you mediate between group and individual perspectives on pragmatic time? The number of histories that need attention grows quickly as the number of group members grows? This led me to thinking about Dunbar’s number and expanding the boundaries of our awareness beyond biological limits. Same for working memory, 7 +/- 2.
• I was also reminded of the problems Anthony Giddens raises in The Consequences of Modernity regarding trust and self-reflexivity. Complexity analysis is good but hard to do in conditions of bounded rationality.

Never have so few been so sure of their own rightness. That is my reaction to this morning’s meeting of the MN Futurists. I’m sorry to say this, because I like the principle of the group, but the reality today was a bunch of old white men exercising their sense of dudgeon.

The topic of the day was immigration, a sensitive issue to be sure. Some of the initial presentations raised good issues about the immigration policy of America but the discussion was quite different. For a group of amateur futurists there was a remarkable level of certainty about the nature of the problem and the possible solutions.

My jaw almost fell out of my head when one of the audience members told everyone that we had to look at the problem from a systems perspective and then, in the very next breath, linked the problem of affordable housing to the poor family culture of non-white people. He argued that housing requires a job, which requires an education, which requires a family structure that values education and therefore we should require all adult immigrants to participate in ESL immersion classes as soon as they arrive in our country.

A real systems perspective emphasizes all the parts of the system when looking for a solution or a point of intervention.

In the systems perspective, once one has identified the system as a separate part of the universe, one is not allowed to progressively decompose the system into isolated parts. Instead, one is obligated to describe the system as a whole. If one uses separation into parts, as part of the description of the system properties, this is only part of a complete description of the behavior of the whole, which must include a description of the relationships between these parts and any additional information needed to describe the behavior of the entire system.

Further, in a systems perspective one should be careful about considering the system in the context of the environment and not as an isolated entity. Thus one should include the interactions and relationships between the system and the environment.

The presenter to the group, Elizabeth Glidden, responded that as an expectant parent she would need to spend a minimum of $200 per week on childcare. The only way for a family to do this and afford housing is for both parents to work.

Our interlocutor from the audience replied that a significant number of people choose homeschooling. (2% to be precise. Does this person really understand the meaning of significant?) Some families “find homeschooling to be a cheaper alternative than the public schools.” Cheaper? In what possible way is homeschooling cheaper than public school or daycare.

When people say something is cheaper they usually mean that it costs less or saves money. So you have a family with two incomes. They spend 30% of their monthly income on housing. Then they have a child and they decide to homeschool. Is this really “cheaper?” At best homeschooling is only cheaper if you consider the labor of the stay-at-home parent to be completely uncompensated. A homeschooling family may indeed be spending less money per month because they don’t pay out money for childcare. But the tradeoff for that is a significantly lower savings rate.

The group dynamic in these situations is really interesting to observe. Most of the people who speak up in this group have been coming for a long time and each of them has a particular ideé fixe into which discussions inevitably bend. People don’t listen to each other because they’ve heard all the arguments before.

The anti-immigration arguments boiled down to three points:

• Immigration is bad because diversity causes cultural division and balkanization. See here for a refutation.
• Immigration is bad because it leads to increased consumption of natural resources. A Hmong person driving an SUV in St. Paul has a much bigger carbon footprint than a Hmong person still living in Laos.
• Immigration is bad because current federal policy is rooted in deception. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 led to a dramatic increase in immigration, especially non-white immigration, so therefore the people who wrote the law must have intended to change the cultural composition of America. I call this the conspiracy theory. Refutations to take place on your own.

The only interesting argument in this bunch is the second. It’s clear that people in the United States consume much more natural resources and produce more pollution than people in the rest of the world. But to say that immigration is the cause or solution for this problem is a big jump.

All Americans have been living a cadillac lifestyle for many years, even before the legal changes of 1965. For any individual immigrant the marginal increase in resource consumption and pollution is trivial compared to the overconsumption we’ve all been living with. Shutting off immigration to this country isn’t going to solve the environmental problem. It might be part of the solution but it is hardly the end of the discussion.

I called this entry “Sense of Authority” because I was so astounded by the certainty with which all of these people spoke about the future. I’m not even sure if I can call this futurism because it bears so little connection to the complex systems view of futurism that I hold. I think it’s more accurate to say that the tropes of futurism and engineering (systems perspectives, statistics) became cloaks for political positions.

Given the age of most of the participants in this group my experience may be representative of what future studies used to be. If the profession were founded today things might be very different.

There were more silly things said today but they will have to wait for another post.

The Future for Intelligent Simulation Models is an article from the Edge newslettre published by the MITRE organazation, a think tank that works on technology and the military.

The author, Gary Klein, outlines the history of agent based analysis and the object oriented based approaches that began to be adopted in the 1980s. The most recent developments are to add adaptive intelligence to the agents to allow them to change their strategies over time.

Adaptive Agent Simulation Modeling--Recently, MITRE has begun making these agents even smarter by providing them with methods that allow them to perceive the results of their actions and then to modify their behaviors to improve their performance in achieving their goal-state. They are now capable of learning to go beyond their initial programming. A widely accepted term for these agents hasn't yet been coined. The term "intelligent agent" has sometimes been used, but it has also been used interchangeably with "autonomous agent". For the purposes of this article, we will call these new classes "adaptive agents" to distinguish them from the others. This powerful new paradigm allows us to examine systematically how behaviors of adaptive individuals affect the evolution of the individuals and consequently of a society. If we simulate two societies with competing goals we can examine how they co-evolve. If we place adaptive agents on a simulated battlefield, then we have a simulated wargame where the parties are capable of adapting to their environment and to each other. This is how we developed the simulated cyberwargame described at the beginning of this article. Collaborative groups of these agents may form an organization, or (as in Minsky's The Society of Mind, 1988) a single mind of a decision maker.

The nod to Marvin Minsky coincides with my developing notions of connecting agents to human beings as an augmentation of our capabilities, not necessarily a replacement.