Parliament in the Dark

I have been a fan of Peak Prosperity ever since Chris spoke at Parliament about the connection between the 3 E’s (Energy, Economy, Environment).   Members of Parliament seemed unable to act however. They did not have the tools to test the information they were given or even to ask good questions. The esteemed British journal of finance and economy, The Economist, an organization that thrives on gathering and printing important information, was also in denial – or in the dark.

Are the issues too complex? Are they mixed too closely with other, less important issues?   Maybe we are afraid of the crowd, or maybe we have a fear of being left out.   Even if the crowd seems to be going the wrong direction it is difficult to break away. This fear is subtle but powerful and it inhibits the asking of important questions.

What can we do when nobody listens? Follow the lead of children and play games.  The play of puppies and kittens is instinctual and has survival value, not only for themselves but for their group.  We humans can create games around almost any goal.  Why not a goal of finding, filtering, and moving useful information and ideas?  Communities that thrive will find ways to do this.

Much of nature is competition and we must learn how to use it constructively.  It can be a simple game like sandlot game of baseball with a combination of transparency plus the semi-privacy of team meetings.  A game is a temporary social structure for the achievement of some goal whether or not that goal is artificial, like putting a ball through a hoop, or a more concrete goal like finding which homes would benefit from better insulation.

Trying to change one’s own community can be frustrating and time consuming.  Making the next neighborhood (NH) as the target learner can be more productive.   A competitive game to find ideas for another community requires no salesmanship, no apologies.  Start with a Discussion Question (DQ), divide a dozen people from your own neighborhood into several teams with a few to act as judges.  They can play just for fun.  That means they can come from any part of the political spectrum.   Re-mix frequently to minimize bias.  Repeat to refine the question until there is some result that can be acted upon by people in the next NH.

NH1 can ask any Discussion Question (DQ) about the next neighborhood (NH2).   The DQ could be  “where is NH2 wasting energy?”   The bonus of the game can be useful information for people in NH2.  They do not have to accept results but are more likely to trust results if they can see the process – and it may save them money.  Players can come entirely from NH1 to start the process but then it can be a mix of players from NH1&2.   Since only about a dozen player-judges are required for one DQ, other people and other groups can address other Discussion Questions.

A community or NH of 10 breadwinners can also use tools of Information Gathering to support 2 of its members.  Those 2 can then work on any job they want.  This is real power and can change the job market for the better.  This type of organization may become more important as more jobs are lost to automation.  It requires social structure changes at the local level, not just government policy changes at the top.

Moving the process forward . . .

Information Games can even be extended to a third neighborhood (NH3) by NH1 crafting a Discussion Question for NH2 such as  “How would you get this process started in NH3?”   If NH1 (or sponsor) can provide enough prize incentive and ask the DQ, then NH2 can provide the players and judges.  The goal of the game is to provide information that might be useful for NH3 (4, 5, etc).  This is real power too.

We are all on a steep mountain and need to point out footholds and give feedback to other climbers. This is true no matter what our own situation might be.  We must engage others in the search and testing of new models that work.  Whoever puts up the prize money can ask the DQ (as usual), but judges should be chosen from the pool of participants.  To accelerate the method there can be many games, each with only a dozen people but focused on finding sustainable ideas for one NH.

Victor Frankl pointed out that finding meaning in life is an important key to survival.  We must search for meaning, not simply be nice people waiting for social justice.  Games and competition can add to the purpose we find each day. Athletes know this.

“Bringing out the pitchforks” may be a metaphor, but in reality all national governments have a monopoly on the use of coercive power (Max Weber).  National governments can use force, if needed, to keep the currency intact and counterfeiters at bay.  This also means the Fed will play with the economy simply because they can.

It’s not about the science anymore.  It’s about turning the social hierarchy to find pathways of sustainability.  If society is a biological model, then the Internet is the nervous system that already extends to most of the earth. The next step should be to look at the cellular level, the community level, and create communities that work.

 

Social Structures for Social Change with Applications for Climate Issues

It’s an awkward time in history to be a leader.  Many are unsure where power lies, unsure of information.  Ironically, the wearing away of the social fabric is made worse by Information Technology.  An obvious question is “How do we re-connect?”  Media that use an ad-model for revenue may be insufficient without the creation of information receiving structures to find and filter useful information.

Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon studied how individuals within institutions make decisions.  His book, Sciences of the Artificial, described the science of things made by humans, or artifacts.   He noted that we humans are not very good at predicting the future.  Who knows exactly where or what we will be doing one hour from now?  As Simon points out however, we are very good at receiving and processing feedback from people and the environment.  A good story can start an action but it takes good feedback to keep it on track.

Feedback can be any signal or any useful information.  Feedback can be temporary.  It connects people to get things done.  Systems with good feedback need relatively small signals.  Money spent can be feedback too.  In many cases placement of the money is more critical than the amount. Feedback does not have to follow the paths of power but may come from outside observers.

Democracy as a Problem-Solving Structure

Is democracy a structure for problem solving or is it simply another way to divide the spoils?  The difference may lie in the integrity and usefulness of feedback information.  Tobacco companies were essentially pushed out of the US by the legal system and by a flood of cases brought by smokers and health departments.  The tobacco companies simply moved overseas.  Smoking was a nasty habit that people wanted to quit, but fossil fuel does wonderful things for us all.  A gallon of petrol can do an amazing amount of work.  It integrates into our lives in ways from which it will be difficult to separate.  Fossil fuel companies too will go overseas unless we find more creative ways to help developing countries leapfrog the carbon phase of their development.

Getting off of the fossil fuel habit on a world wide scale will take new and creative cross-border structures to effect change.   Organizations like the UN may or may not help.  Courts seem to have power.  Arguments are made in public as if the speaker were in a court of law presenting proof beyond reproach.  In the court of public opinion however, decisions are made on probabilities.  Crossing the street is a decision based on probability. Courts are slow and must also wait for legal questions to be brought to them.  This limits the court’s ability to look forward.

Failure of Capitalism? 

Is the current climate dilemma a failure of capitalism?  If we had applied capitalism and a business model to climate change when we first knew about the problem there would be fewer calls for large scale government programs today.

Capitalism, along with the business model, can do many amazing things: it can organize and create a division of labor.  It can achieve efficiency pushed on by fair competition. It can achieve time-constrained goals with local control, all by itself.    We want to keep these functions.  Yet, as seen with the tobacco industry and the more recent opioid epidemic, the final product might not be in the best interests of the community. These might be business successes but moral failures.

Failure of Media Structures

The media give feedback and information to citizens and leaders alike.  They are the nervous system of this grand experiment.  We knew cigarettes caused lung disease.  Research by the tobacco companies showed that 90% of smokers wanted to quit.   Yet it took 30 years to achieve what should have taken 3 years.  The media were either not asking the right questions or asking the right people.  They were not showing pathways that more successful quitters had taken.  This was a structural failure related to the media’s business model of selling ads directed at getting the most eyes for their advertising clients.  It precluded discussions about anything difficult and ignored the problem.  A sin of omission.

The structure of ad-media is not new.  Misuse by giant tech companies today make us more aware of its drawbacks, yet that structure is unlikely to change.  We can still get a lot of useful information from the media but it may require outside structures to find and put that information to use as part of real problem solving.

Even the structure of language can be important.  An “online-community” is not the same structure as a local “geographic-community”, though both are communities.  Each has its own purpose.  This important difference can be key when looking for solutions to problems.  It may be the local geo-community where questions to be addressed are hammered into better questions through face-to-face meetings.

The Missing Part of Social Media – The Receiver

Social media enhances extreme views.   It also tends to divide people because there is no information processing structure at the receiving end.   Anyone can join the discussion but few real problem-solving conversations take place.  A temporary structural change here might increase the value of information by creating a “group comments” section written (and filtered) by a group of readers instead of simply individual comments.  Competition for best group comments, as judged by another group of readers, would encourage even more serious thought about some discussion question.  Creating this missing part may be something that social media companies cannot do by themselves without initiative taken by end users.

Competition

Every day millions of people old and young participate in sports, trying to get a ball through a hoop or over a line.  It is the structure and process of the competition that make it engaging. Sports are both abstract and simple, almost artificial in the same sense that Herb Simon wrote about.  Yet people throw their heart into it, often for little external reward.  If there is a level playing field and a well-structured game, competition can bring organization, efficiency, division of labor, and time limited goals.   Climate leaders don’t yet know how to engage that tremendous energy.

As with sports, competition for finding and filtering useful information can be done  with small groups very efficiently.  A group can start with three people, two of them playing against each other and the third acting as judge in a short game.  Invite an additional person each day to be player or judge and continue until a dozen or so people are participating, then spin off another group.  This division of labor can give useful feedback to decision makers on large and complex issues.

Players and judges can be mixed and re-mixed to neutralize bias.  The goal of the game is not to find friends but to find useful ideas and information.  The local group decides what, if any prizes can be given for winning ideas.  This requires some person-to-person contact, not simply online games through social media.

Competition helps to create a gradient or tension in a general direction that can help to find and move useful information without forcing a pre-determined outcome.  Without a gradient, people feel no need to search for answers.  Positive gradients can be formed by natural tensions of human interactions but other things as well.  This includes the use of money or other prize incentive.  Human emotions such as love and loyalty are certainly very powerful motivators in creating a gradient but less predictable.

More on Feedback

The Income Gap debate sounds like an argument over money.  The more important issue is the omission of news that may be inconvenient to owners of the media.  Lack of key information in such a system leads to slow response times when events and the environment require attention, leaving citizens and decision makers in the dark.

Waiting for citizens to take the lead on climate issues is like asking passengers on the Titanic to vote on the risks of hitting an iceberg.  The crew of the Titanic knew they were taking a risk.   Their judgment may have been clouded by group-think or poor feedback.  They rolled the dice and lost.  Without good feedback, evaluation and action on long term risks is a real weakness of democracy itself.  But if a good story does not move the dial, good feedback can still slowly turn a ship.

Feedback loops do not need central coordination.  Local level groups can create their own competition on any topic, choose the Discussion Question, do the judging, and supply their own prizes.  The resulting information may be useful to other people, even if it is a byproduct of the competition.  Results can be built upon by other groups.  Disagreements can be re-tested by anyone with a similar process.

The ability of local level groups to find and move useful information is a real source of power.   Example:  Ten houses in a neighborhood may benefit from better insulation.  Gathering this useful information can be the goal of a competitive game, even with players that don’t live in that neighborhood.  Data can be gathered by using  an infrared scanner commonly used by contractors.  If the group of home owners work together to first insulate the home that needs it the most, then the savings on the first home’s heating bill can be used to buy insulation for the next home.   These are extra savings that may not be realized if they work separately.  None of the homeowners need to use the results but a competitive game between players, some of whom may not care much about energy savings, can still discover useful information.  The players may gain a prize, the homeowners might gain useful information – and save money too.

Loss of jobs to automation will be an increasingly important issue requiring better communication at the local level.  This type of competitive game structure can work here too.  If a community of 10 people can support 2 of their members, that gives them a freedom to invest work hours in anything they believe is important.  This is a real power that is not available without better communication at the local level.  This communication requires a process to find and filter information that is trusted.

DQ in a Box – How to Start a Competition

One way to start the process is to have players or the organizer put any question into a box, then draw one for the competition’s Discussion Question.  For climate issues it could be a question focused on energy usage and finding where we are wasting it.  It could even aim toward Whole Community Sustainability using feedback from outside the community.  To get the process started any kind of Discussion Question will work, even a question unrelated to climate issues.

How do people know what information is Useful Information and what they might do with it?   They may be able to figure it out themselves but can do it much faster with other people and the right structure.  For people who have little time, competition with a level playing field will help sort it out in an efficient manner.

Complacency or Competition?  

On the surface the average person seems complacent about climate change.  We avoid talking about climate issues in the same way that we avoid someone who asks for money.  For most people there are no marching orders, no Dunkirk. Yet people are still listening and thinking.

Life has great momentum at the local level.  We all keep doing what we know how to do.  But people like competition too and we should use that part of our nature.  There are structures all around that can help process information if we know how to use them.  The best ones are simple, like a sandlot game of baseball, that can create a safe space where people are more likely to think out-of-the-box, ask any question, and have semi-privacy within team meetings.

We should be kind to one another, but altruism alone will not get us there.  Neither will a multitude of new laws and policies that stop at our border.  Building a bridge often requires temporary “pre-structures” to help create the final product.  With the size and scope of the climate crisis, it will be helpful to create pre-structures for finding and moving useful information.

John Suter                        jsuter@sbcglobal.net                                  josuterdotcom