Archive for the ‘Complexity theory’ Category

Move on!

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

800px-new_road_brighton_-_shared_spaceA few weeks ago Dave Snowden wrote a post on his blog about the Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, Monderman was a visionary. He was the first to recognize that the way we try to control traffic is counter productive. The signs – like he put it – are not there to prevent accidents, they are there to prevent legal ambiguity after an accident. In Monderman’s view a road should be made in such a way that signs are not necessary. The basic paradox is that the more you lines, traffic lights, traffic signs you add the less safety you get. One of the reasons is a false sense of safity: the drivers trust the signs and take less attention to the real traffic. He introduced the concept of shared space. In stead of heavy control, separating differcnt sorts of traffic (pedestrians, cyclists, cars) the road should be shared. This creates a safe behaviour. The picture shows an example of this in Brighton (picture from Wikipedia). Monderman recieved the innovation prize for this concept in 2006.
Tom Vanderbilt with his ‘Traffic – why we drive the way we drive’ shows strong evidence that a two-way road without a line in the middle is safer than a road with a clear line: the drivers adept their behaviour, are afraid to get to the wrong side of the road and take more attention to traffic. This is in my opinion a basic metaphor: the harder you try to control whatever you want to control, the less you succeed. The superior solution is a loose sort of control. Not a ‘laissez faire’ but a careful steering of emergent actions to a desired pattern.

Monderman designed roads and crossroads with a minimum of signs, all of them showed significant less accidents. Allthough his legecy is now growing, in Holland it is officially declared that his ideas are applicable ONLY within slow traffic zones. The allmighty Dutch ANWB just started a big campaign to bring the government to add MORE striping on the so called ‘ 80 Kilometer an hour’-road.  This is an effort to claim back control. It resonates very well with the classical control mechanisms, always in favour of more signs. They use research to back up this policy and claim to be able to save hundreds of lives with addes striping.  This is based on a case where new striping was added. The research made a classical mistake however, because not only the striping was changed, but on top of that the police started rigorous speed control with a dedicated team. It is more than likely that so called ’striping effect’ was nil in comparison to the other measures.

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Steady as we go

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

spaceball

424945091_c39322733fJust got back from a ski-holiday in France. As you are skiing in those steady rocks, you don’t really feel that you are actually within an area of – geological spoken – young mountains: round and about 60 million years young. In our timescale there is nothing as solid as a rock. However, for archeologists rock is all but steady. It is hard for us to really understand the timescale of geologists. I remember a ‘geographers talk’ in the Grand Canyon. He disclosed that the Grand Canyon emerged in an extremely short time period: only 17 milioen years. It is quite certain that it wil erode away in a short timescale as well: it is eroding at a pace of 16 centimetres every 1000 years, so it will have been half the depth it has now within 5 million years. In the earth timetable this is peanuts. A geologic whim.

You could argue that within the time frameof human civilisation it is as close as you can get to stability. One million years ago there might have been manlike creatures, but not the home sapiens (or homo ludens as Huizinga calls us or home narrens as Snowden does).

Yet it is a good example of how we underestimate change. It appears as if our mind is inclined to see stability in a world that is all but stable. We have the inclination to forecast the future as a straightforward function of the present. Not so long ago all science fiction literature was all about ‘the cold war in 3000 and something’. The future was – as it always is – an exaggeration of the current state. In the beginning of the 2oth century the big fear in London was that in the further future horses manure would become a major problem. Again, a forecast based upon (at that time) current reality taken to the extreme in the future (think about the mess in a city of 16 million people, half of them riding a horse!).

The funny thing is that we appear to have an extremely short memory. Once we have passed through a phase change, we forget all about the previous states we were in. Take for instance the internet and the on line possibilities. I remember quite vivid the year of 2000 when the internet bubble collapsed. There was a clear concensus in society that internet would not deliver the bright future that it had seemed to do only a short time before. The new business models were not solid enough, there was not enough added value in the internet. Funny how only a few years later Google apparently is thé example of new business models. And presented by the same media that not so long ago were absolutely certain about the internet economy as a failed concept. Funny how, hardly without noticing, our lives changed dramatically in a practical sense. I am writing this with my laptop where it should be according to its name, sitting on the bank (after watching Ajax winning from Utrecht). Checking some English words on my i-phone with the famous Van Dale (a Dutch dictionnary) installed as an applet. Before choosing to watch a movie on the TV I check the rating at www.imdb.com (above 7 you will never be disappointend). If I choose to work, I log in to my office network, finding all reports, agenda, emails that I need to look at.

The interesting thing is not that I can do all this. The interesting thing is that I hardly notice how different this is from only 4 years ago, let alone from the practice when I started to work (in 1989, at Ferro there was one stand alone computer. The idea of a network existed already, but not for small companies like Ferreo). We wrote reports by hand, these were typed out on the single computer we had). I am not living in a constant ‘wow’. It is just that I forgot about how things were a few years ago. Only if I deliberately imagine the before-internet habits I do feel: ‘wow. That is different’. You could blame our memory for this. That would be false. It is not exaclty that our memory is fault, for we do remember the past. It is just that we have accepted the new order as ‘normal’. This blog is not about bad memory, it is about superiour adaptation.

It is exactly this adaptation that creates the second important illusion: the illusion of stability.

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Five illusions!

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

Illusions are  interesting phenomena, because they reveal where our thinking gets wrong. An illusion reveals that we make sense of the world in a way that is consistent internal, but not necessarily consistent with the actual reality. There are classes of illusions, like the photo next (from this very interesting website dedicated to optical illusions) is revealing that our brain uses ‘tricks’ to calculate the nearness and size of objects. These tricks can be used to mislead the brain.

Optical illusions reveal ‘faults’ the way we make sense of visual stimuli. It is more difficult to reveal mistakes in the way we make sense of other data. Like the illusion that mankind is the crown of the creation. Or that language is the basis of our thinking. Or that we steer our own thinking. Five illusions that delude us quite often:

1 the illusion of individuality

2 the illusion of stability

3 the illusion of truth as a binary phenomenon (true or false, right or wrong)

4 the illusion of insight and understanding

5 the illusion of knowledge transfer as a rational phenomenon.

In my following blogs I would like to write about those illusions, culminating in the sixth: the illusion of control. I don’t think these  represent a complete and systematic framework of ‘thinking illusions’. But I hope that thinking and writing about them will give me some insight in how we (I, my clients and maybe you) withhold progress in our thinking, and how we systematically deceive ourselves in order to keep alive the illusion of control.

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Guilty innocents

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

I have been watching Peace is Peace is every step by Thick Nhan Hanh on YouTube. The video takes about an hour, it is not very good quality, but I was stunned and moved and kept watching the full 52 minutes. (If you click the link above you will get to it. I recommend all to watch this).

Why was I moved so much? There is quite a lot to tell about. The whole idea: a bunch of Vietnam veterans, oldies now, but rough. You see these rough guys doing exercises with Thich Nhan Hahn like a bunch of softies. One explains that he was in Nam at the age of 17 and had been responsible (his words) of killing more than 50 before the age of 18. This part is tearing me apart, having a son of 18. All this was moving.

But maybe more than that I was moved and intrigued by Thich Nhan’s speech. Both the words and the tone of his voice. Let me start with the latter. We hear speaking a man that suffered the Vietnam war as a victim. As a Zen monk he had chosen to fight for peace and not to choose the side of one of the two parties in war. As a consequence he has never been able to live in Vietnam, even after the war, because he was felt as a traitor. And you hear no remorse, no hate, no frustration in his voice. This in itself is an act of peace. A deliberate chosen one, because it is clear that his life was dedicated to fight for peace. His choice is to live peace as an act of life, every moment. This moved me even more, after reading the daily on the middle east conflict. You know this conflict has been going on for a long time, and that an awful lot of suffering is going on. If you see how devastated the Vietnam Veterans are and how they struggle now, decades after having been there to find peace in themselves, you know that there wil have to be done a lot of healing in the future.

This about the tone of voice, now the words. These where fascinating, both in an theoretical and practical sense. I can’t quote literary (again: watch the video!). But in essence he speaks to those feeling guilty about the killing they have done. He says: why do you take all the guilt for this? You where not there on your own. You were send by a president. The president was chosen by the people. You were the hands, but are the hands guilty alone? The interesting about this argument is that it is correct. America is an abstract phenomenon, consisting of several hundreds of million people, interrelated in a complex way. From all of their individual thinking, feeling and acting, based on a history of thinking, feeling and acting, within a wider context of the world, emerged this war. This is an insight, worthy pondering on. War as an emergent property. The way a highly structured and intelligent colony emerges from the individual, stupid ants. The way (the illusion of a) consciousness emerges from a relatively a little bit of grey matter with quite a large amount of interconnected cells . A big mass of little interactions, sum up to a new degree of abstraction, creating its own laws. Maybe each of the ‘little’ interactions is understandable: fear for being taken over by communists, regret about losing a highly profitable country, seeing movies about heroic soldiers and wanting to join that romantic lot, the need to earn your money, the stories about your father having rescued Europe from the Germans, the need to act as a president. Apart from that there are without doubt all of the real bad intentions of a few. And all together, this blends into something terrible, with its own laws and it can’t be stopped. (Well, it stopped eventually, but at what costs? And how much sorrow, grieve, remorse, hatred and pain is still there? I mean, even the mines haven’t been all moved away, the war still has its victims more than 30 years after it was ended).

This was exactly my point in my blog about ‘The benevolents’. It is creepy to see how atrocities can emerge from a bunch of people that are all on there own (or at least most of them) not of bad intention. (by the way, I stopped reading it. I still think it is a brilliant book but it is too much tot digest).

The argument is extra interesting since it has been misused after the 2nd world war. War criminals tried to hide behind it. They used it to mask there misdeeds and get away with it. For this reason there has been a long ban on the argument. Saying ‘i didn’t know’ ‘I was acting in commission’ are suspect.

Apparently the same argument can be valid and invalid in different contexts, depending on the intention it is used. The context of Thich Nhan Hanh is consolation, with the intention to take away or at least diminish the negative energy created by the feelings of guild of boys who where sent to Vietnam and put in a situation where normal man start to kill. As a means of defence. As a means of wrath, and probably in the end – as the mind gets dumb – out of fun or boredom or whatever stupid reason. Even if they went there voluntary, they could not be blamed for this alone. But Thich Nhan Hanh goes further. He says: do not take a grunge against those who send you. The leaders could have been victims of ignorance. Maybe if they knew how bad war is, they would have refrained. This is debatable, because I think they did know or at least could have known, but probably put it out of their minds. But I get his intention. If it is true that war is an emergent property of the complex system called ’society’, then it is useless to spend your energy trying to find the guilty ones. As a victims of war (as he calls the veterans) you should better spend your energy for more positive things, trying to get war, guild and hate out of your system, maybe do something positive. As his advice to one soldier who suffered from his responsability of the death of 5 children (in an ambush meant for soldiers). His advice: 40.000 children die each day right now. You can save 5 children today. Why spend you life time in regret about the children who died 30 years ago?

So if the argument ‘you were not responsible alone, you were part of a system’ is used to console, it is all right. If it is used to escape, it is not so right. Because it might be so that all of the players within the systems are so to speak ‘victims’, this does not take away all personal responsiblity. Thich Nhan doesn’t claim it does. He didn’t say ‘why do you feel guilty’, he said ‘why do you take all the guilt on your shoulders’. Here we are at an extremely interesting field, highly ambiguous. There are no right or wrong answers here. If this whole idea of war as an emergent property is right we are all responsible for all that happens. Because we all function in the system called ’society’.

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The origin of ideas

Monday, January 12th, 2009

In february 2009 it will have been 200 years ago Charles Darwin was born. In NRC – a Dutch Daily – a science section was dedicated to this man. Although his theory is widely accepted scientifically it is still hard to grasp his ideas. Especially the idea of unintended change is extremely hard to get. Over and over you see in argumentation that the idea of evolution as striving to a goal, is popping up. We as a human race tend to think backward. We have the illusion that all of the events that lead to the state we are in, are deliberate steps leading towards this state. That is because we think in stories, and in the story lines we are constantly looking for meaning, a plan. I think this is because a meaning and a plan we can understand, and what we can understand we can control in one way or another. This is why the idea of ‘intelligent design’ is so much more easy to understand then the idea of natural selection without any purpose.

For me it took reading ‘the blind watchmaker’ from Richard Dawkins to really grasp this idea of unintended progress, without any plan or preconceived idea. Every next step in evolution as an emerging trend, the consequence of many interactions over a long time. It is apparent that we do have a problem to intuitively understand how complexity can grow out of ’simple laws’. But it is obvious that complexity does always emerge from simple interactions, such as weather systems with extremely high complexity arising from simple interactions between gas molecules.

Dawkins tried to apply the idea of natural selection to our thinking, introducing the concept of ‘memes‘ as the ‘genes of ideas and thinking’. I wonder if we really would need this ‘memes’ concept as a mechanism of how selection could work in ideas.  I feel that it is possible to conceive other ’simple’ mechanisms than these mysterious  ‘memes’ to account for a natural selection within the thought world. Some interactions are extremely simple: I remember reading Montaillou from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, describing in detail the way the religious ideas spread in this village. What really struck me was the simple explanation: you got ‘infected’ by the new religion by just hearing it from someone you new. It was quite simple to track down the current of the idea by understanding ‘who knew who’ and ‘who met who’. The conviction outcome was like a function of ‘meeting’.

Gladwell dived deeper into this in ‘the tipping point‘, using three simple basic laws as explanation of how ideas spread: the law of the few, the stickyness factor and the power of context. The only law really ‘explaining’  is the law of the few. This law describes in detail different ‘modes’ of infection of ideas by accounting for different kind of persons who spread the ideas. The other two are not really ’simple laws’ . As interesting as they are they are more a description of the the problem than an explanation to the spread of ideas.

Take for instance the ’stickyness factor’. Some ideas seem to have more sticking power than others. This law asks for an explanation. Why is the one idea more sticky than the othert? Why was the sticking power of the religious ideas spread in Montaillou so sticky?

I think the ‘Origin of ideas’, with an explanation of a process that steers the idea evolution would be an important next step in science.

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Reductionists have more fun

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Every now and then I feel the roots of my study in Dutch literature. While studying today on the difference between reductionistic and holistic view on reality (in order to get a better understanding of complex systems), good old Julien Offray De La Mettrie came to my mind. If his name doesn’t sound very Dutch, that’s because he wasn’t Dutch. He was as French as his name. However, claiming an extreme materialistic and reductionist view, he had to flee from France. In 1745 you could still visit Holland if you had any deviant opinion that religious leaders considered dangerous, and more important: you could have your books printed. That’s why he lived in Leiden and that’s one of the reasons his book L’Homme machine entered my curriculum of Dutch literature. I never read the book. It was mentioned as an example of how the very productive reductionistic views of Newton and Descartes pervaded the thoughts at the time. In the book La Mettrie explained human beings as machines.

The whole idea of his book is a wonderful example of how a reductionist view can be right (human have some machine like properties, for instance the ability to lift weights) and utterly wrong at the same time. And he was dead serious about it. Of course his ideas where heavily influenced by the struggle for an atheist view on the world. And his comparison is not so much more idiot then the current opinion that our human mind is a ’sort of computer’ (a view both insulting to the human mind and to computers).

Not that I have an argument against reductionists per se. Newton was one of the superminds. He is considered by the Royal Society as the greatest scientists in history and therefore was rated over Einstein (because other than Einstein he was not only a huge theorist but a brilliant . His views where revolutionary. And I guess at the time the reductionist views where needed badly, given the predominant religious view on reality and science. On top of that, the view absolutely works brilliantly in the field of Newtons study. But I guess the reductionist view have their limits.  And De La Mettrie surely went beyond. .

But as you can clearly see in his face, reductionists can have fun. He is supposed to have died because he indulged too much in the good things of life. I don’t want to keep this wonderful sentence from his Wikipedia Bio:

It is claimed that La Mettrie wanted to show either his power of glutony or his strong constitution by devouring a large quantity of pâte aux truffes. As a result, he developed a fever, became delirious, and died.

I would have liked to drink a pint with him before that happened.

(picture taken from the Wikipedia website)

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Navigating trough traffic jams by neural network

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

The Dutch radiobroadcasting VPRO has a wonderful science program called ‘noorderlicht‘ (site only available in Dutch, photograph taken from the site). Today one of the guests was Chris van Hinsbergen (sorry for those lacking knowledge of the Dutch language, this interesting curriculum from Chris is available in Dutch only). A young scientist who is working on a smart system to guide us through traffic jams. The current Dutch road has signs with time forecasts (23 minutes driving towards The Hague). These are notorious for wrong time prediction. Chris explained why: the methods used for estimating driving time are extremely simple. Every 500 meter the speed of cars driving by is measured. The system assumes stability in speed and expects this speed not to change. Chris is using a more complex way to estimate the driving time. A neural network will be looking for patterns in all of the speed data, that takes into account the time the speed is measured. No assumptions on traffic jam causes, just a learning system. No assumptions on stability. The neural network will ‘learn’ about patterns that forecast a change in velocity. I see a really interesting comparison to market research and marketing. I mean: how often do we assume stability? How many of our models are based on stability?

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It is the little things that make you fall, stupid

Monday, December 1st, 2008

When giants fall, their history is to be researched by journalists. This gives us the opportunity to look what happens in boardrooms. After the collapse of Ahold a few years ago, all of the boardroom meetings has been covered. The journalists are often helped by the fact that the collaps of a giant causes a lot of collateral damage: fired and therefor unhappy top managers, or others that seek salvation by confess (in order to reduce the chances to be accused of mismanagement themselves). Now Fortis is being examined.

This morning I read in the FD (Financieel Dagblad december 1st) an interesting insight in the Fortis files. Two really interesting points. One is that the board had no idea what the consequences would be in the market from their idea to raise 8 billion extra. In their opinion this was a ‘technical financial’ valid action. Even after the protest of three very important investors, they still valued their idea as rational behaviour. In the market their action was percieved however as the last desperate action of a bank out of control. A very interesting gap in view on the world and selective blindness to signals from outside (from their own perspective these were weak signals, all the rest of the world would consider them as Screaming Out Loud signals).

The second interesting point, related to the first, was the role of little things. The bank had a strong tradition within the french speaking elite of Belgium. The rich all had a very strong position in the bank. All together 15% of stock was in hands of this subgroup. They were however neglected. Their role in the board had been vanished, exchanged for a more international view. Lippens, being one if their lot, should have been aware of the importance of this group, but did not communicate with them. When they were confronted with the new emission they had not been consulted on, they started a ‘revolution’ and tried (in an indirect way as Belgiums normally like to act) to get rid of the complete board.

Clinton used to write on his desk ‘It ’s the economy stupid!’. The fallen big firms and institutions could all engrave on their grave ‘It is the little things that make you fall, stupid!’

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And the next disaster will be …..

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

Last week I introduced the concept of the predictable disaster. A traffic jam forecast generated a lot of arousal. In the Netherlands the ANWB is taking care of the traffic news, updating about traffic jams. The ANWB forecast the ‘predictable disaster’ of a big traffic problems on Monday 24th. However last monday the traffic was not so heavy after all. Lots of laughter, criticism. Tuesday however, the roads were a mess: over 350 miles of slow traffic, or no movement at all. Big discussion. The ANWB claimed that the disaster was prevented: people were disencouraged to travel. Others claim that the ANWB forecast had had no effect at all and that ‘traffic forecast’ should not be given any more.

This is a wonderful example of a subtype of predictable disasters. The ‘disaster’ is inevitable because we now that heavy traffic is bound to happen and that the mean length of traffic jam is rapidly increasing and therefore the ‘high values’ (big jams verses no traffic at all) increase even more. The factors are known: day of the week, weather, time of the day, situation of the roads. On top of that: random factors such as traffic accidents. But the interdependence of them is not yet fully understood: the lack of any traffic problems during big road works two summers ago at the A10 around Amsterdam is still not fully understood.

How does this relate to other ‘predictable disasters?’ Financial crisis? Food situations in the third world? Greenhouse effect? Over population? Shortage of oil supply? And what about the numerous disasters that were likely to happen but never actually did (yet), such as ‘nuclear world war’?

Maybe all of these share the ’statistical side’: there is a chance they might happen, but we do not know or understand the maths of the chances. There is an interdependence of the different factors at stake that sum up to new, unknown factors. If you look at the documentaries on National Geography about aeroplane crashes, you always see this very unlikely combination of seemingly independent causes that you would never suspect to cluster together. On hindsight, after years of research, the combination of factors is quite logic.

So I take back my concept of ‘predictable disaster’. The only predictablility is that disasters will come but we don’t know what and when. Maybe that’s why they are called disaster for.

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