The Renaissance Mob

Kodaly's circle games

To write a folksong is as much beyond the bounds of possibility as to write a proverb. Just as proverbs condense centuries of popular wisdom and observation, so, in traditional songs, the emotions of centuries are immortalized in a form polished to perfection.
~Zoltan Kodaly

Today the Hungarian town of Kecskemét is decorated with signs that read “Welcome to Kodály Town!” It was in this town, 128 years ago today, that Hungarian ethnomusicologist Zoltán Kodály was born. Kodály is special to the people of Hungary not only for being one of their most famous composers, but also for his work as champion of their heritage. Along with his friend and colleague Béla Bartók, he recorded and studied numerous Hungarian folk songs and stories to preserve them for future generations.

But Kodály was more than a musician. With a PhD in philosophy and linguistics, he was a strong believer in music as a language – a concept shared by many other musical pedagogues including Suzuki and Orff. But to Kodály music as linguistics was not just a metaphorical cliché. He saw music as a literal language, claiming “we should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.”

Today, we’d like to make the case that Zoltán Kodály, a Renaissance Man in his own right, was also complexity scientist. Any music educators reading this post will at least be aware of “The Kodály Method,” which was actually developed after Kodály’s death by his students. Kodály himself was opposed to labeling his way of teaching music as a method, preferring the word concept. He felt it would be no less presumptuous for an individual to say they had written a folk song than a proverb. As a pioneer in the study of folk tales and song, Kodály believed great ideas – and great art – come about gradually through a process of emergence.

Another connection to complexity science is Kodály’s belief concerning the way we learn:

Singing connected with movements and action is a much more ancient, and, at the same time, more complex phenomenon than is a simple song.
~Zoltán Kodály

This idea that learning should be a whole body activity is only just beginning to get traction in the education community thanks to people like Sir Ken Robinson (see his TED talks – 2006 & 2010).

So happy birthday Kodály! And thank you for the gift – not just of music, but of the linguistics of complexity.

The following interview is in Hungarian, but if you go to YouTube, some translations are given in the comments section.

Steven Berlin Johnson

Chance favors the connected mind.
~Steven B. Johnson

Innovation seems to be the hot topic of late. Our “Featured Tweeter” for November 2010 is author and Discover Magazine columnist Steven B. Johnson (@stevenbjohnson on Twitter). Last month we looked at the ideas of complexity scientist Dave Snowden, including his three criteria for innovation: starvation of resources, pressure and perspective shift. Steve Johnson’s latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, asks a different question about innovation: what environments are the most conducive (think conductive) for producing good ideas. See Johnson’s innovative video introducing his book:

In September, Johnson made an appearance at a TED talk in Oxford. He had just taken a picture of the oldest coffee-house in England, and displayed it to make the point that the Enlightenment was born in such places.

Johnson’s blog (http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/) features recent posts about:

Deep Structure – About interdisciplinary writing.

The Shanghai Surprise: Urban Planning is Sexy – About the limitations of self-organizing systems.

More on The Shallows – A supplement to his review of Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

. Johnson makes the case that innovation comes more from “the ability to share information asynchronously” than slow, deep contemplation.

Johnson also provides links to his Discovery Magazine essays, which are on the topics of thinking, emergence, planning and complexity. One of these essays (Air Purifiers for Data Smog) gives a looks at how we deal with information overload in an age of multitasking.

Tea Part Rally, September 12, 2009
Estimated turnout of 1.2 million

The ant is a collectively intelligent and individually stupid animal; man is the opposite.
~Karl von Frisch

Do a Google search for “The Tea Party,” and you get the following top results:

Join the Tea Party (www.jointheteaparty.com) – owned by Todd Cefaratti of Glengary Inc. in Gilbert, Arizona

Tea Party Patriots, “Official Home of the Tea Party Movement” (www.teapartypatriots.ning.com) – owned by attorney Mark Meckler of Grass Valley, CA

Tea Party (www.teaparty.org) – owned by Dale Robertson of Drums, PA (infamous for his “n-word” sign)

The Tea Party Express (www.teapartyexpress.org) – owned by Our Country Deserves Better PAC in Sacramento, CA

Tea Party Day (www.teapartyday.com) – owned by the American Family Association in Savannah, TN

Tea Party Nation (www.teapartynation.com) – owned by Judson Phillips of Franklin, TN

…just to name a few (but we’ll leave www.teaparty.com out of it, since they’re a Toronto rock group).

Let’s pause here to say The Renaissance Mob is not a political blog in the sense that we don’t get down in the mud villifying and demonizing political parties and/or politicians. So before going further, perhaps it would be good to clarify the purpose of this post.

At first, it seemed àpropos to publish this post before the November elections which took place earlier this month. However, while it might have been a “hotter topic” then, this post is not meant to instigate or provoke. Rather it is meant to ask: Can a mass of humans self-organize and carry out positive change? The “Tea Party” seemed an ideal contemporary case study, since the claim, among their admirers and advocates (insert any of the big name “Talk Radio” hosts here), is that the group:
1. Has no one visible leader (collective intelligence)
2. Is a “grassroots movement” (diverse sampling of population)
3. Was spontaneously organized (emergent organization)

Indeed, both allies and enemies of the Tea Party Movement seem to be in… at least semi-agreement on these claims:

If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. ~Karl Rove
So the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify, specifically, what would you do?” ~Barack Obama
Many [Tea Party activists] are proud of their decentralization, which makes them feel like their voices are being heard. ~The Daily Beast
There is no single Tea Party. The name is an umbrella that encompasses many different groups. ~Matthew Continetti

…It’s actually pretty hard to find quotes about The Tea Party that aren’t charged with strong rhetoric. But if you distilled the views of everyone from Michael Moore to Glenn Beck down to the most basic elements, they all are saying the same thing about the movement: that it has no leader, that it comes from individuals, and that it is self-organizing. (True, Nancy Pelosi called them “Astroturf” a while back, but that may have been more wishful thinking since she is now talking about the things she has in common with The Tea Party.) It should be said that, while most seem to agree on these three points, not all think them a good thing. The post-election news shows a brewing battle between “establishment Republicans” and “The Tea Partiers.” In particular is the issue of leadership and control. Career politicians aren’t usually big fans of movements they can’t predict or control. But we’ll leave battle for someone else to sort out…

The interest here is how the Tea Party thinks. On the Washington Post website, Robert J. Goodwin attributes some of the success of The Tea Party to what he calls “distributed leadership:”

The Tea Party movement embodies that of a “starfish” organization. It is difficult to attack with no clearly defined leadership, and even if one cell-or candidate-is defeated, the movement lives on.

Readers of this blog may hear an echo of a recent post in which we looked at Al Qaeda’s growing use of “swarm attacks.” No, this is not meant to equate The Tea Party to terrorists. But – if it is possible to remove yourself from political views – it is interesting to see how the strategies (not the motives and goals) are similar.

Let’s assume for a moment The Tea Party is a bone-fide example of swarm/collective intelligence that works – separating yourself from your feelings for or against the movement. What compelled it to form in the first place? How can it be strengthened/weakened?

For the first question, we can go back to last month’s “Tweeter of the Month” Dave Snowden, who teaches three conditions for innovation: starvation of resources, pressure, and perspective shift. According to Wikipedia, the first Tea Party protests (imitating the Boston Tea Party) were over the 100-some new taxes being proposed in New York State. The perception was that there was a starvation of resources via taxation, the pressure of isolation of the individual from government and a perspective shift away from the two-party (or any party, for that matter) system.

As far as how the movement might strengthen or weaken, that might be accomplished by resisting or giving in to groupthink. Tea Party rallies have been described by some as a circus, with all kinds of freaks. Advocates of the movement tend to be dismissive of the “freak show” element, not realizing that it is that very diversity that gives the movement viability. Enemies of the Tea Party really may not need not do anything, because if the movement tends toward centralized leadership, it will weaken under the weight of groupthink. Groupthink is defined as “a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas.” In other words, thinking is homogenized to the point of losing individuality and diversity.

This means, for The Tea Party to stay viable, it must stay decentralized and increase its diversity. A movement, then, is limited to the degree of faith it puts in its members. It is also limited by its willingness (or lack thereof) to listen to very different opinions.

See also:
The Tea Party’s Weird Science

The Angel Damiel perches on the Victory Column, where he listens to the thoughts of the city.

Germany has crumbled into as many small states as there are individuals. And these states are mobile. Everyone carries his own state with him, and demands a toll when another wants to enter…. The German soul of today can only be conquered and governed by one who arrives at each small state with a password.
~Driver, Wings of Desire (1987)

Closing his eyes, the angel Damiel calmly lifts his face to the sky as though captivated by some enticing aroma. Instead, voices rise up from the streets of Berlin to his perch on the right shoulder of the statue of Victoria. These voices, we quickly learn, are the thoughts of Berlin’s citizens: worried, singing, depressed, making plans, laughing. Later, we find Damiel in the library – a place filled with trenchcoat-clad angels leaning over scholars and students. And then, at the scene of a motorcycle accident, Damiel listens to the thoughts of a dying man – at first panicked and fearful, then (as though sensing the angel’s presence) reflective and at peace.

The first half of the movie Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) is devoted to this idea of listening. In a 2009 interview, filmmaker Wim Wenders told of the movie’s popularity among the women of Tokyo. “A social phenomena,” he claimed. “The only explanation they could find was that women loved the film so much because [in it] men listened.”

This week in the United States we held our mid-term elections. We herded into polling locations and registered an opinion. Yesterday, Republicans and President Obama interpreted that opinion with very different conclusions. While the election may have been effective at shuffling politicians, was it good at providing a sense of the people? No.

Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all others that have been tried.” Of course, we don’t have a democracy in the U.S., we have a republic where we elect people to represent us. People who spend millions of dollars and countless hours propagating their view of things, leaving the average citizen feeling like Tokyo’s women: Who is listening to me?

In an article posted this week, Scott Southward, of the Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems, wrote about studies of ant colonies at Arizona State University. They found “that the ‘brain’ of the colony is distributed throughout the group of workers, and that there is no one ant doing the thinking or making the decisions for all of them.” It’s called collective or swarm intelligence. A remarkable video (found here) shows how several ants working together can retrieve an object and move it to a specific place. Now compare that video with this one of a common team-building game called “the helium stick.” The object is for all members of the team to lower the bar to the floor without lifting it off any one individual’s finger. Simple, right? Watch…

In spite of all the talking and coaching you can hear the humans doing, the ants seems to do a better job at working quietly, efficiently and intelligently together. Why?

The problem is how we come to a consensus. How does a collection of diverse people come to a decision on how to go ahead with a project or plan? Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow addressed this when he came up with his “impossibility theorem,” which states:

When voters have three or more discrete alternatives (options), no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of people into a community-wide ranking while also meeting a certain set of criteria.

In “The Perfect Swarm,” Len Fisher lists these criteria as: completeness, unanimity, non-dictatorship, transivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives and universality. In short, there is no such thing as a “fair” election when there are three alternatives. (And, as mentioned in our last post, there are always three or more options.) But there is more to be learned from Arrow’s theorem. Alex Tabarrock recently “popularized” this theorem on the Marginal Revolution blog. Beyond showing the flaws of the voting system, Arrow also demonstrated the limits of what we can conclude about a group from election results: “More generally, what Arrow showed is that group choice (aggregation) is not like individual choice.” So while the Republicans say “referendum on the President,” and the President says otherwise, it’s just not that simple.

What complexity scientists are finding is that to understand a human system, we need to go back to the narrative. Much like the angels in Wings of Desire, we must listen to the fragments of narrative each person contributes. Recently we’ve seen projects like StoryCorps (where people go in a booth and tell a story from their life) are emerging as a “new” way of understanding society as a whole. ….Of course, it’s not new. People have been sitting around campfires and family reunions for ages telling stories. Perhaps the only difference is we are only now understanding how important it is.

While the past is as opaque as the future, the present offers the translucent beauties of both past and future just beneath the surface.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.
~T.S. Eliot

Today’s scientists and scholars are just beginning to learn what Socrates and King Solomon could have easily told them:

The only real wisdom is knowing you know nothing.

…and yet we begin each day sure of our expertise, or at the very least confident in our ability to address the day’s challenges.
There is nothing new under the sun.

…although we live with a hope that we can contribute something new and original to society, or at the very least our immediate community.

Neither of these men were complexity scientists. They didn’t study recurrence plots or fractal geometry. For their insights they relied on observation, intuition and reason. And yet, they arrived at the same conclusion today’s greatest thinkers and self-help gurus are just now coming to terms with: that the world is just too darn complex to predict or control.

Depending on how much sleep you get, there are about 1,000 waking minutes each day. If five decisions/minute are made, that would mean 5,000 decisions/day. (The number of decisions made per day depends on age, activity level and other factors, so let’s just use this figure as a low estimate.) If we apply the Pareto Principle – sometimes called the 80/20 Rule or Power Law – it tells us that 80% of those decisions are not significant, while the remaining 20% are. If this is true, we still would make about 1,000 potentially life-altering decisions per day!

Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, each of those was an either/or decision where one choice led to personal destruction and the other led to success (however you may define that word). That would mean you’d have 1,000 chances to change your life each day.

….But life is not simple, and a straight 50/50 choice – an ultimatum – is a logical fallacy because there is always a third option. Do you take the phone call or let it go to to voicemail? Status quo is always the safer route. It might tell you let it go to voicemail. Depending on what is on the other side of that call, the alternative opens up a whole can of worms. Picking up the phone might mean dealing with a whole new series of decisions.

If there are 1,000+ pitfalls/prizes each day, how are we so good at avoiding a thousand chances of destruction/success? The answer might be that the brain is very skilled at developing routines. Much like we are able to filter out “background noise” in order to have a conversation with a friend in a crowded room, our brains are able to perform decisions “in the background” as a routine. In a LiveScience article Dave Mosher says “daily decisions make a mush of your mind.” He shows that, while we are attracted to choice, the mass of daily decisions bog down our brain’s “processing power.”

There are a number of methods and tools we use to process those 5,000+ decisions each day:

Emotion – Sometimes the intellect is put on hold when we are in a heightened emotional state.
Logic – We attempt to reach a decision by way of reason based on the evidence we have at our disposal.
Habit - Ritual helps us make decisions with little to no conscious effort.
Conditioning – Many of our decisions are made due to early childhood conditioning – even without our knowing it.

Of course, why we make a decision never fits into just one category. It’s a mix. But the thing we must understand is that, no matter how much brain power we expend we will never be able to know all the consequences of each decision. In our own personal day-to-day life we tend to spend a lot of time focused on the things we can predict and control. And even more energy is wasted on trying to control things we can’t.

Our “Chaos Journal” experiment attempts to turn focus to the things beyond our control and leave the routine things to the “auto-pilot” portion of the brain. Why? We’ll find some answers in our “Aesthetics of Chaos” series because, while we may not be able to predict or control, we can intuit and adapt. Like artistic improvisers, the starting point is not as important as the process. It’s a “making lemonade out of lemons” approach to living.

Rather than seeing our way forward we learn to improvise with whatever hand is dealt. Rather than planning for the future with assumptions of resources we may not have we learn to be in a constant state of active reflection on the little – and big – suprises of life.

In a society focused on the future, this way of improvised living sees the past as intimately involved in the present. Solomon may have been right that we cannot create anything new “under the sun,” but like all the fractals of nature teach us, we can innovate. Today make your own “Varations on a Theme by _______.”

Title: The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life Author: Len Fisher Publisher: Basic Books

The buzz in LA over the past week was whether Google has been testing self-driven cars on public streets in California. In fact, they have – although they also claim a human was always in the car in case something went wrong. With all the technology at our disposal these days, you may wonder, why we aren’t already riding on robot-driven roads? Turns out the answer is complex – literally.

Whether it’s driverless cars in traffic or data packets on a busy computer network, much of the progress of today’s technologies are indebted to locust, ants, bees and all of nature’s creatures that swarm. In his book, The Perfect Swarm, Dr. Len Fisher explains how many fields of study, from psychology to engineering, have been learning from nature things like:

How individuals avoid a collision within a swarm

How the swarm navigates around obstacles/threats

How the swarm gets to their destination with efficiency

Dr. Fisher starts with a look at nature’s swarms, and gradually moves to human society and complexity science. Throughout the book, he provides amusing anecdotes from scientific experiments, examples of computer modeling, and lessons humans can learn about leadership, change management, problem solving, decision making and networking. Dr. Fisher also provides up-to-date examples of these principles at work, from web businesses like Digg.com to political flash mobs self-organizing via Twitter in Iran. Seventy-two pages of informative notes also provide detailed information and references that did not fit in the body of the text.

Two thoughts might occur to the reader in the course of reading this book:
1.) “This stuff is common sense” – It’s true that many of the ideas related to swarm intelligence and decision making are based on simple principles. (In fact, it seems, the more complex the problem, the simpler the solution.) However, Dr. Fisher points out that finding that simple solution is… complicated. Take this Frank Plumpton Ramsey quote:

The rate of saving multiplied by the marginal utility of money should always be equal to the amount by which the total net rate of enjoyment of utility falls short of the maximum possible rate of enjoyment.

This is a great example how getting to a simple solution (how much money we should save) is complicated.

2.) “Is this just about crowd control?” – One might easily think, when reading about “bee logic” that all you can get out of these insights are general rules for managing crowds (at sports events, for instance). But the second half of the book takes a detailed look at some hidden applications for swarm intelligence.

The following are just a few of the many practical insights offered in The Perfect Swarm

Leadership – Bee swarms teach us that leaders need not be visible or prominent to be effective. Dr. Fisher states, “We can lead a group simply by having a goal, so long as the others in the group do not have different goals.”

Teamwork – Swarm intelligence differs from “groupthink” in that individuals think and act independently. Dr. Fisher points out how groupthink leads to problems such as the two space shuttle disasters.

Human Resource – Complexity theory says that, while experts are good for specialized problems, a “swarm” of generalists are better for solving complex problems. Phil Tetlock breaks down “experts” into two types – foxes and hedgehogs – and shows how foxes offer “built-in diversity.”

Consensus – Once solutions are reached by individual members of “the swarm” there still exists the problem of reaching an objective consensus. Decisions with only two alternatives (i.e. Yes/No, guilty/innocent) are much easier to deal with.

Heuristics – Sometimes good decisions can be made by a “swarm” – even in the absence of information. Gerd Gigerenzer offers strategies for such decisions based on statistics.

Change Management – In today’s complex world, there is a growing need to be able to adapt quickly to changes. The book takes a look at businesses such as Ebay that have acted like “hawks,” taking advantages of fleeting opportunities.

Networking – Even with billions of websites, it’s still a small world. Dr. Fisher shows the importance of “two-way” links, the Power Law (80/20 rule) and 6 degrees of separation.

Because the field of complexity science connects all conceivable areas of study, this book is a “must read” for leaders, followers, innovators and technicians. Whatever role one plays in “the swarm” it is important to understand lessons we can learn from nature.

Listen to Science Friday’s interview of Dr. Len Fisher:

Please join us for our next book review of David H. Freedman’s book Wrong: Why experts* keep failing us–and how to know when not to trust them *Scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, … consultants, health officials and more

1. Adaptive
2. Sensitive
3. Deterministic
4. Intractable
5. Emergent
6. Recursive

(This list is a summary of Life With a Rock Star.)