test one

New York Times
November 21, 2006
George Johnson

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

Public health , business, jobs, and profit

All of my theoretical models lead to the same conclusion - the field of "public health" cannot really do their job well until the needs and interests and realities of multi-human meta-organisms are included as well.

In English, that means that we ARE what we are PART OF, which is increasingly clear in public health studies of the impact of social connectivity on physical and mental health.

But it also means that the internal life of corporations, cultures, and nations, as well as the entity called "the public", are all very real systems that behave as if they were separate biological goal-seeking, energy-consuming, adaptive, reactive, self-protective organisms.

It also means that it just doesn't make any sense to evaluate the impact of different interventions in the health of people without, at the same time, evaluating the impact on jobs, employment, and the health of corporations and business and the business community.

The physical health of people in a community or nation is very directly influenced by the "health" of the community or national economy. If the economy or businesses crash, it will show up "under the skin" very rapidly.

The failure of many in public health to have a wholistic approach that includes BOTH people AND corporations reduces the credibility of public health. If there is one lesson "systems thinking" teaches, it is that the word "OR" is vastly over-used. We shouldn't be thinking that EITHER we can serve people OR the public - we need to lead the way in serving BOTH. And, similarly, we need to get corporations realizing that they can't survive if the workforce they draw on, and customer base they need in this country collapse. We need each other. We are each other, in some very real ways, and our respective "health" depends on each other in a feedback loop, either for better or worse.

Similarly, it makes no sense to me that "Republicans" should be fighting for the interests of "business" and "Democrats" for the interests of the "people" - because there is only one, multi-leveled complex life-form on this planet, which includes "cells", "people", "corporations", "cultures", and "nations."

We are all in the same lifeboat. At this point if the people all die off, so do the corporations. If the corporations all died off, so would almost all the people. Get over it.

If we're upset that corporate or national planners don't include "human factors" in their planning, we shoudn't also assume it's because they refuse to -- it is, in my experience, more that they are clueless as to how to do that.

If public health wants to change that equation and interaction, great, pick up that heavy burden and figure out how to include humans in the equations and not make them indescribably difficult to solve. If corporations can get better bottom-line performance by doing better planning including more of reality in the plans, they'll do it, but someone has to show them how that would work and make a convincing case that it does work.

That gets down to that messy problem of "profit." As the Ross School of Business here in Michigan says "Non-profit is a tax strategy, not a business strategy."

Or, as one sister from Trinity Health Care's catholic leadership put it, "No margin, no mission."

Health is intimately tied to growth and life which are intimately tied to "wealth."
That component sub-systems decay and die is a given; what's up for grabs is whether there's a balancing source of regeneration and growth, which requires that actions result, ultimately, in absorbing more energy than is spent in getting there.

In other words, in the larger accounting scheme of life, public health interventions have to "pay off" or they will simply "die off." This is a schitzohrenia that both clinical health and public health seem to have - the idea that making money is intrinsically bad or a dirty concept.

Yes, obsession with short-range, stupid strategies to make money at the expense of life, health, and stability are indeed stupid. On the other hand, there is no such thing as a long-range strategy of losing money each year.

The most important distinction is that wealth, and health, are not zero sum, and are based heavily on interactions across levels of the MAWBA beastie.

Health can, in fact, be created out of thin air.
Wealth can, in fact, be created out of thin air.
BOTH of these, health and wealth, cross-support each other.
Being "rich" and "dead" is not a winning strategy.
Some balance is required.

Public health has an opportunity to teach the principles of SUSTAINABLE GROWTH, which means sustainable rates of return on investment. Business owners hate that venture capital firms and stockholders expect them to operate to maximize profit this quarter, at over 27% a year annual rate, but to keep operating in the long run.
Those are incompatible goals. With the exception of discovering gold or the equivalent, healthy businesses probably grow at 10% or less, maybe as low as 2% per year. If public health would show CEO's how to keep stockholders from jumping ship if the companies invested more internally in people and showed such "small" profits, the CEO's would love public health. Everyone knows this is an absurd demand that's killing off healthy, stable business as "not up to par."

These problems cause each other. People are stressed out because the businesses they work for are stressed out. Businesses are stressed out because they don't know how to tap the healthy creative power of people at a sustainable rate. They are different views of the very same, multi-level, MAWBA problem.

If 30% of the humans died or were seriously put out of commission for 2 months by something like avian flu, at least 30% of the corporations would crash and burn as well, because they are riding very close to the line on being as short-staffed as they can be right now. The crash would cascade, as suppliers of key components failed. The interests of public health and "big business" align when it comes to stopping global pandemics.

This fact is maybe less visible because of the invisiblity of the details of the roles of people on "the bottom" in keeping corporations operating. My guess is, after the last round of layoffs, that more than half the large corporations in the US are vulnerable to crashing and burning if 30% of their Information Technology staff were to abruptly be incapacitated on the same day. All meta-life involves a constant battle between natural collapse and regenerative efforts, which may "look like" nothing is going on and all is "well." Remove those people who are holding everything together, and it will suddenly become apparent that maybe they were doing something after all.

Other areas of "infrastructure" are similar. We have huge reliance on armies of people doing low-visibility or invisible jobs, without which the wheels of commerce would cease turning in a cross-cascade, house-of-cards type collapse.

It is a mistake to think that pulling out the "safety net" has "worked." It hasn't been tested on a full-scale pandemic yet. The effect of having almost 50 million people in the US without health coverage will have the same effect as having a basement filled with gasoline-soaked rags would have on a small house fire. These are things you really do NOT want to give a running start on you.

Multilevel Architectures - boon or bane?

Marsden Bloise once described life as having a "curiously laminated quality."

Life on earth does have levels, and they have important mathematical consequences.

In fact, the multi-level model is one we find reasonably familiar and can live with. We structure our corporations and government to have layers and levels, with people one "one level" reporting to people on "a higher level."

Not only are there levels, there are gaps between the layers. It is almost like a quantum mechanical model, where there are legal levels and forbidden zones.

In the world of large-scale enterprise computing, there are officially levels (see the OSI model), where there is a hardware level, a messaging level, an application level, etc. The goal of each level is to function so well that it essentially becomes a perfectly flat, stable platform or metric on which the higher levels can be built. A perfect level "goes away" and "falls out" of the equations.

So, in the best world, when nothing is going wrong, an application such as Microsoft Word can say "save this file!" and, behold, it happens. The application doesn't need to concern itself about the details of what brand disk-drive is in the computer, or how may empty slots of what size are there, or how to chain them together and break up the document into chunks that size for storage and retrieval later.

Or, in business, workers and "the boss" or the next level of management up have a functioning gap between them. The boss doesn't really want to know the details of how something happens, and only wants a simplified, almost cartoon-level sketch, and mostly cares, yes or no, did that happen. The employees see all the details and prefer the boss not "micromanage". The employees have little idea what the boss does all day - so long as reasonable work tasks come down the pike in reasonable order, it's good. The boss has little idea of the complexity of many tasks, or the pains that have to be taken to accomplish them.

On the upside, this makes "management" even possible, because otherwise the world would rapidly become way too complex for anyone to ever comprehend, and the largest business would probably be something like 200 people.

And, if perfectly managed, lower level computer "infrastructure", like plumbing or electrical wiring, should be completely invisible. The thousand upgrades a day, putting in new hardware, swapping out old networks, installing new security patches, upgrading the database or operating system, should all be done "seamlessly" and at most result in a slight slowing down of normal response time.

One downside of this is that it is very easy for the upper levels to mistake the perception with reality. The classic problem in preventive maintenance is that, if perfectly done, all problems are seen coming in advance, headed off, and so "nothing ever breaks" -- and consequently upper management, at the next budget crunch, decides they can lay off the maintenance department because, who needs them, nothing ever breaks! So, they do, and only later discover what it was that the department did.

A second downside is that upper management is shielded from details by multiple layers of oversimplified sketches to the extent that they mistakenly believe that the tasks people at the front, or on the bottom, are actually easy to do, or even trivial. Consequently, it follows that the people doing them are really only one step above morons, and also that failure to do the tasks must be due to not only incompetence, but bad attitudes, because anyone can see the work is trivial.

Thus we have what I call "wicked-II" (wicked two) problems - where the tasks may be enormously difficult, but from above or outside they appear to be simple or trivial.

The immediate consequence of those misperceptions then are that management may decide, in its infinite wisdom, to undertake some new task, or "put in" a new computer system that, from their very limited depth model, should be "easy." First, they seriously lowball the associated work and costs. Then, they interpret reports of trouble from below as being obviously due to incompetence, laziness, or, worse enemy action that demands instant retaliation and disciplining or firing the idiots who resist. Management says "I don't want to hear about problems! Don't tell me you can't do that!" That directive appears to be successful, as complaints drop to zero, until the whole project finally crashes on the rocks the employees were trying to warn management about when they got fired. Management blames the employees for failing to do what they were told to do. And everyone loses.

This model of operation appears to be the norm, and enormously easy to slip into, even if management is trying hard not to. It is what "safety cultures" and "high reliability organizations" have to try to overcome in order to work.

So, we also expect to find, throughout history, a vague awareness of this type of problem and hard-won advice on some benchmarks to avoid falling into that same pitfall in the future - advice typically ignored as old wives tales, so the future generations end up rediscovering the world of hard knocks.

In some ways, this is like the brain-body dichotomy, where our conscious selves are able to think deep thoughts, like what movie to go to, and be generally unaware of all the hard work going on in the body below synthsizing enzymes, digesting food, managing pathogen invasions, etc. It is all too easy, not seeing those details, to take "the body" for granted and neglect or abuse it. And, as with management, complaints can be suppressed and we can continue on deep into fatigue and exhaustion because of higher goals, until some physiological system that was trying to warn us finally collapses. (Recall the old rule of thumb - the time to furl your mainsail is the first time it occurs to you that maybe you should furl your mainsail. Those who forget it as the wind picks up rediscover it after their mast snaps or the boat overturns.)

Similarly, "upper" levels of society are reminded in all religious literature to "remember the poor" and take care of the powerless "below" them. This advice is often neglected for short run gain and long-run disaster.

Similarly, "upper" structures, such as corporations, can easily forget that their existence depends on the lower level existence of a healthy workforce and community, and a stable ecology and climate. Again, industry can take actions for short term gain that undermine the workforce health or environmental stability, with long term catastrophic results. It's very easy to do, and very easy to suppress complaints.

Similarly, "upper" levels of the military, or civilian government, can suppress dissent and ride roughshod over the key needs and observations of their own staff, often without realizing they are doing it. The result is being surrounded by "yes men", being cut off from reality into a fantasy shell, and making terrible mistakes that end up being catastrophic.

The problems listed above are all the "same" problem mathematically. Interlevel communication and the tradeoff between "invisibility / detail hiding" and constant needs that have to be met remains an open problem.