The Art of Lazy Science

I'm still in the process of continuing to read Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How they Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PHD and James H. Fowles, PHD, but one thing I've noticed in a tendency of the authors to resort to what I consider lazy science. The book itself is quite phenomenal in its process but its quoting and reference work is atrocious, leaving a lot to be desired. An example is on page 188, where the authors reference Robert Putnam by stating: "These findings contradict some of the core recommendations made by political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues who study the effect of "social capital" on the health of our democracy. It then references Putnam's Bowling Alone, but no specific chapter or passage is included. Nor is there any indication as to what colleagues these authors are talking about, especially when they mention a book that was written by one author. They then continue: "Putnam argues that highly clustered network ties improve information flow and increase reciprocity at a societal level because everyone is looking out for everyone else." If they're going to challenge specific arguments made by Putnam and unnamed "colleagues," perhaps the authors should at least give enough reference information for the reader to be able to come to a likewise conclusion.

Another blatant error comes in the next chapter when they start talking about tit for tat game theory, specifically that put forth by author Robert Axelrod. They talk about his cooperative strategy on Page 219, but when they reference him, they reference his work that has never been created, some strange volume called The Evolution Corporation, which they state he wrote in 1984. I am impressed because that means he put that out at the same time he wrote The Evolution of Cooperation, which coincidentally was written in 1984. In other words, someone should have at least edited this book to get the right titles of books they're references, especially when they're using some of the biggies of political science literature. And no, there is no The Evolution Corporation from Axelrod; I checked, just to make sure I wasn't missing a great volume of his and making a really stupid argument against bad science. When your own theory uses Axelrod as much as mine does, it's pretty hard to miss alternative novels written by him during the exact same year (with almost the exact same title and almost about the exact same subject).

Bad science! No cookie!

Stumble It!

If obesity is contagious, why isn't good health as well?

I'm reading an interesting book right now called "Connected" by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. I'm reading it as background for my Friendship Over Time theory, specifically to explain the process of how cultural adaptation can occur over time as a process of societal change. But what is really interesting for this post is an argument that is made in Chapter 4, which is that obesity is contagious. They cite a bunch of studies and show that over time obesity can spread in groups, and eventually push itself onto outlier connected groups, up to three degrees of separation.

What never made any sense to me in their study was how come this doesn't happen with positive circumstances, like good health? How come good health doesn't spread to three degrees of separation of people?

My guess is that what they are showing is that bad things tend to spread much easier than good thing, much like communication theory shows that it is easier to push a negative message than it is a positive message. In my thesis study, when I was showing that Boris Yeltsin's message of 1991 Soviet Union's past was negative rather than the putsches' message of it being a positive past was easier to push to the public, I think there's something there. Physics shows that chaos theory tends to push disorder rather than order, meaning the universe has a tendency to spread itself out rather than contain itself in order, so why should ideas and concepts be any different?

What this means is that in order to get your friends to all want to lose weight, you have to put serious energy into the central depository of information, meaning that the state of rest for information should be one of "do nothing" and that potential energy is always there to do negative actions, pushing towards disorder, such as gaining weight and leading to less healthy outcomes. In order to turn the message, you need to put energy into the mix to achieve a higher level of valiance of energy states (so that potential energy will yield kinetic energy that leads to positive results).

So mathematically, if you want to achieve better results from your social groups, you have to put in positive energy that is stored as potential energy that can yield kinetic results that spread out to a higher level of order. In other words, energy goes uphill, requiring effort to achieve positive results, while it is very possible that if your goal is negative attributes, your potential energy required is already stored at a state of rest and is just waiting to be released.

Stumble It!

The Problem With Wanting to Change the World

One of the immediate problems of wanting to change the world is that you are immediately in competition with a whole lot of people. These people want to change the world, too, but they think their ideas are better than your idea, so instead of thinking, "hey, two really good ideas," they think, "uh, oh, competition. Must destroy the other idea before it challenges mine." That's just from the people who want to change the world. Then you have to compete with the conservatives. I don't mean the Republicans, but conservatives, people who don't want things to change. This is an interesting class of creature that watches a building fall down and then says that we should build another building just like it because change is bad. They see the goodness in doing things as we've always done it, and quite often their argument (sometimes true) is that, "well, I had to do it, so then should you." Or my other favorite conservative argument: "If there was a better way to do things, someone smarter than you would have already thought of it."

Imagine that you have figured out how to make the world a much better place. You recogize the problems, and you realize, after lots of thought, brainstorming and communication with others, just how to fix things. Well, that's where the problem comes in. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to do anything. Everyone is convinced that things will eventually work themselves out because that's how things are supposed to be. It's like the old George Carlin bit about how the world was unable to develop plastic on its own, so it created humans to do it for the planet. Now that it has plastic, it doesn't need us anymore. The detractors are much like the Earth argument here, thinking everything will eventually work itself out because the planet normally figures out what it wants and gets it anyway.

So, how do you convince the naysayers to listen to new ideas? Or more important, how do you get anyone to listen to anything that isn't already considered singing to the choir?

The radicals seem to think the answer is to protest, to throw things around, to resort to anarchist tactics that cause the mainstream to sit up and take notice. But the only notice they really tend to take is that more police with riot gear are needed to bash in a few more heads. I remember during the run up to the war in Iraq, Woody Harrelson climbed the Bay Bridge (think it was the Bay Bridge) in San Francisco and stopped traffic. People were upset. Not about the war. But at Woody for causing a traffic jam during a commute hour. In other words, no one really cared.

So what else can one do? Write articles for academic publication? Who reads that stuff? Other academics. Generally, no one cares about that sort of tripe. Oh, academics will talk about it amongst themselves, and they'll argue some theory over this and that variable, but in the end, unless the person writing is a well known academic with tons and tons of publications and a fan base already, no one cares.

What else can you do? Get a job with the State Department? Not really going to help, unfortunately. In order to work for the State Department, you have to step into a paradigm that already has an accepted mindset. If you do not partake in that mindset, you're not wanted. You don't make the cut. They ask you to leave. If you go into the State Department with the sole purpose of changing it, may as well just start packing before you arrive. You COULD stay in the State Department for 30 years and THEN suddenly spring on everyone your great ideas that you've been holding close to your chest all of those decades. Think about that one for a second. If that was really the case, you'd probably no longer believe what you did 30 years ago; you become a part of your environment. The one who survives with ideology intact in that type of environment was someone who never fit into it to begin with.

So what can you actually do? I'll be honest. I don't know. I don't think anyone wants anything new. I don't think anyone cares. I think the only people who care are the other people who have a "better" idea, and once you try to get them together with other idea-minded people, they become bitter enemies because each one must emerge as the victor in "new" ideas.

So, I'll just leave it at that.

Stumble It!

US Tit for Tat Policy With North Korea Does Not Work

Christiane Amanpour, CNN's Chief International Correspondent believes new policy incentives are necessary to keep North Korea in check. In other words, she feels we should set up benchmarks that North Korea can meet and then those will keep North Korea from continuing on its confrontational trajectory. Now, I generally like Amanpour and find her reporting to be decent, but I have to state that I totally disagree with her analysis and with the constant chatter that is coming out from those who consider themselves to be "experts" on North Korea.

Here's a part of her article:

North Korea now says it is slowing down its disabling of Yongbyon and that it will engage in "action for action."

Some analysts now say that despite North Korea's "provocative" rocket launch, the U.S. and its allies should launch new policy incentives and expectations with clear benchmarks for North Korea's nuclear disarmament.

Why should I have an opinion on this? Well, I used to be a counterintelligence agent in South Korea some decades ago, and I dealt with this sort of thing first-hand some time ago. The situation was no different back then. We were making the same mistakes back then, and we're going to continue to make the same mistakes in the future.

First off, we have to stop trying to "reward" North Korea for not doing certain things. They don't care. North Korea is a nation that has always gotten the rewards it achieves by doing something that pisses everyone off, and then they wait for the rest of the world to reward them. And it usually works. It's like the Bizarro interpretation of game theory's tit for tat where you continue to reward a partner for continuing to play the game, even if that partner falls out of the game a few times. In this tit for tat, we're all tat and haven't received a single bit of tit (okay, that didn't sound good, but the point still stands). We keep rewarding the player for not engaging the game, as if we're convinced that if we continue to keep upping the ante and offer more rewards, that player will somehow jump back into the game again.

It doesn't work that way. They have no incentive to jump back into the game when they know they're going to be rewarded anyway.

Twenty years ago, North Korea was facing a famine because they happened to isolate themselves from the rest of the world, and they suddenly realized that most of their arable farmland is on the side of cliffs, meaning they have nowhere to grow the rice they need. So they needed food from outside. When China and the Soviet Union were their allies, this wasn't so bad. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. So they were left begging from China. Now, China is having enough trouble feeding its own. North Korea is now relying on South Korea and Japan. Japan gave up on North Korea, pretty much just giving North Korea the middle finger and saying it wasn't worth it. North Korea responded this last week by shooting a Taepodong-2 missile through Japanese airspace, claiming it was a satellite that was going to transmit North Korean nationalistic music back to the motherland, claiming it succeeded, even though the missile never even came close enough to inserting a satellite into the atmosphere.

Today, North Korea has as much ability to feed itself as it did 20 years ago, and what nations have discovered is that a lot of times the food aid sent to North Korea was sold to fund the military complex that is literally the entire economy of North Korea.

So what is the solution? Stop the tit for tat game and let North Korea come to the table on its own. North Korea is already isolated so that military action is national suicide for North Korea, so if they take that direction, it was because they were planning for it long ago, not because they felt they needed to. By not engaging them in discussion, you let them do whatever it is they want to do. Engage China in real diplomacy, and let China know that North Korea is THEIR neighbor, so if they want their neighbor to run around with nuclear weapons, that's pretty much going to be on them.

All diplomatic efforts need to cease with North Korea immediately. If they come to the table and want to engage in diplomacy, that's another thing. Let them. But if they're going to play the hard to get girl at the dance, then let that girl sit in the corner and watch everyone else dance for awhile.

For too long now, our foreign policy has attempted to threaten, cajole, bribe and shame North Korea to do what we desire. Stop doing that immediately and within a few years North Korea will have to approach the table all by itself. The whole quasi-nuclear test and the missile launch were all responses to all of our previous attempts at cornering North Korea into compliance.

Stumble It!

My Letter to President Obama

I got frustrated over the events happening in Iran, North Korea, Russia and practically everywhere else the US has any dealings, so I wrote this letter to President Obama:

March 15, 2009

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20500

President Obama:

During the presidential election, my colleague and I tried to contact your people about a peace process we developed, involving a new iterative, additive strategic model. While we didn’t really expect any direct response, I find myself realizing that with the actions taking place in the world right now, I would be remiss if I did not attempt to try contacting you again. It pains me that we are making some of the exact same mistakes we have always made in foreign policy, mainly because we’re so tied into a 19th century model of diplomacy that we’re incapable of trying anything different.

The process I am referring to is called the Friendship Over Time (FOT) Model, and it involves several political science, communication and game theoretic functions that are mixed together to form a new direction in dealing with international actors. We presented it at the 2008 National Communications Association Peace and Conflict Division and received a lot of positive feedback from fellow scholars. While we could take the usual path of pursuing simple publications and continue with academic success, I’ve started to become concerned that perhaps expediency is more important than curricula vita generating successes.

The process itself, while involving advanced mathematical manipulation through a computer iterative processing, is simplistic in its usage, meaning that the hard work is done in developing the theory, not in carrying it out. It is almost as simple as using a tit for tat processing strategy when dealing with international players, so that developmentally we create a friendship process with interactive neighbors rather than engage them as a part of our current foreign policy of rewards and punitive responses. The beauty of the theory is that it can operate in the same sphere as our current foreign policy objectives, although the bigger picture requires the incentive always be focused upon for long term, generational change rather than immediate rewards.

I figure this is my last chance to try to make a positive difference here. The people who receive the most attention are quite often the ones who are only willing to do what has already been done before, for fear of rocking the boat or taking a chance that might diminish future career success. I’m a simple writer, and I’ll probably return to that area of specialization because I realize that no one really wants to make a change. I figured I had to make one last attempt at making some type of connection, especially when a president ran on a platform of wanting to interject change into the country and the world. This would most definitely do that, and on such a grand, wonderful scale as well.

If someone actually does read this letter, I just would like it known that I at least tried to make a difference before giving up.

Sincerely,

Duane Gundrum
US Citizen
Seoul, Republic of Korea

Stumble It!

Why I Lost Faith in Political Science

I've been meaning to write this for some time, but I never really had the time, so I thought I would finally get around to doing it.

A few years ago, I changed my field completely from political science to communication. Whenever people asked me why, I would often say that it was because political science was interested in large movements of statistical data, whereas communication was more about the specific acts of communication between individuals. Well, that's somewhat true, although there are variations in both sciences that offer alternatives, but for the most part, that's generally how it is. But that's really not the reason why I abandoned political science for communication.

It was political science itself that caused me to realize I'd never be able to answer the questions I had within that discipline. You see, political science has taken a direction since the 1960s that puts it more into a self-reflective paradigm where its members are scared to death to appear to not be doing science that they are going around creating science for the sake of creating science rather than creating science for the sake of answering questions. Most disciplines borrow from other disciplines, and we all accept that. Political science borrowed punctuated equilibrium from biology. Communication borrowed identity theory from sociology and psychology. Each made these concepts their own, so much that they might not be recognized by the original discipline. I was fine with that. However, at some point political science became so engrossed in wanting to appear scientific that it stopped being very relevant.

I was taking a course on Congress from a professor at Western Michigan University when I realized that political science was finished for me. BS (the professor) was all about making science out of political science, and he loved his data files. It was all about manipulating those data files and then publishing his results. This was also the first time I came across the dirty tactic where professors latch onto the work of their students and then sign onto the project so that they can up their publication numbers; that's one of those incest-like behaviors of academia that I've never really found myself to be very comfortable. It's one thing to have a student approach a professor and want to write a paper with that professor, but when a professor acts like a vulture and scavenges off of grad students for material, that just seems so wrong. But that's for another essay, I guess.

Anyway, what I started to discover at this time is that political science has been overrun by the desire to publish material that comes from massive survey data. National Election Studies, student evaluations, and all that sort of tripe is used to make major inferences in the discipline. Every major election is followed by tons and tons of published reports about what scientists have found based on the question and answer sessions at polling booths by science-thinking professionals. And then a bunch of people across the planet keep making connections based on whatever statistical process they think to question in their research. If the numbers don't give them the results they expected, they change the variables, or they manipulate the way they question the variables. At least until they get the results they desire. In other words, we're not a bunch of scientists curious about finding something out, but we have a theory and we use the data to prove it. And then we publish it. And then we continue to publish about it, regardless of whether or not it's really true. We all have heard the joke about statistics (99% of all statistics is made up), but we keep accepting it as canon that it's good information. And we keep publishing it over and over again, and it makes major careers out of people who then call themselves scientists, because they can claim to use mathematics as part of their academia research.

In the 1950s, after World War II, the Ford Foundation sort of changed political science as we know it. In order to receive those elusive grants that were coming from the foundation, you had to show that you were doing "science". The hard sciences, like physics and biology, had an easy time because they were doing actual science. The softer sciences, like sociology and political science, had a much more difficult time doing the same thing. They had to make their social experiments look more scientific, and one of the ways they did it was to start using a lot of statistical information because that looks and sounds very scientific. But statistical data is very misleading. Let me explain why.

There are two types of statistical data. One is hard data, and the other is survey data. The first is actual science. Things happened, they were recorded, and you can use that data to explain natural phenomena. An example is one I did early in my career. I gathered data for a ten year period to display how many violent revolts took place in the world, and I categorized them by the amount of violence that occurred (deaths, financial GDP losses, etc.). I then compared that to the types of governments, the amount of legislation that took place in those areas, the education levels of areas in those countries and the countries at large. I tracked a few other variables I had to gather. I then plugged them into a statistical formula to eventually surmise a few things, such as "as more legislation occurs in a yearly period in countries with low to mid levels of education, they tended to suffer more violent outbursts". There were a bunch of other findings, but that's the basic style of what I was trying to do.

The other type is survey data, and that's where you question a lot of people and try to make some type of statistical connection in the data, like "how does education reflect whether or not someone feels good about a particular political figure". To me, this kind of data is somewhat useless because I've never been a fan of the opinions of people because I don't believe people really know what they believe. It's like the mass communication theory that states that people are influenced by media because they think their friends are influenced by the media, but they don't think they are personally influenced. The theory shows that they are obviously mistaken about themselves and right about how they feel about their friends. The fact that they might be mistaken about their friends never seems to creep up into the literature, and that sort of interpretation is why survey data is such a problem for me. People interpret it as they desire.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, and it reminded me of this. She's worried about her data efforts because others have suggested that using another command in the statistical program might achieve different results. That's where we're so focused on the "how" rather than the "what" or "why". Scientists aren't doing the statistical work anymore by hand, which means that the software has become so complicated that they may be making mistakes just because they don't have every proper button pushed when running the data. I had someone try to tell me that once in a statistical data set I was running, and I asked what are the implications of that "other" command he was discussing. He said he didn't know, but that he learned about it from another professor. I'm not kidding about this. I asked if the calculus was still correct, and he had no idea there was even calculus involved. For my friend, I would just like to say: Continue doing what you've been doing, unless someone can prove to you otherwise that your data manipulation is an error FOR A SPECIFIC REASON.

This has gotten me to the point where I don't do data manipulations now unless I understand the science behind what I'm doing. I've been to conferences where I realize that's not the case with others because I'll ask such a simple question based on the mathematics involved, and they stare at me as if I just asked the location of the abominable snowman.

For the record, I don't do survey research anymore. I abhor it and have no faith in it. To be honest, I don't care what people think (the ones you survey). I care what people do, what people say and how they carry out what they intended. For projection projects, I now use what I call an iterative approach, involving computer modeling. This is a complicated way to say I use a computer to continue to throw the same independent variable at the dependent variable and then reverse it for effect. I see things over massive periods of time, involving tens of thousands to millions of iterations, to see how things effect based on continuous influence. An example is the Friendship Over Time (FOT) Theory. Rather than focus on one attempt at communication, I focus on change over time as two entities share something in common over generations, until the results start to approach each other (people become a lot more alike as they share common behaviors), and then use that as an additive process to other behaviors to explain why friendships grow over time between nations, or devolve.

I'd probably like to use this process to challenge a lot of political theory, but to be honest, I don't feel welcome in political science anymore, so I have to find my own place in the sphere of science, even if I don't know where that is yet.

Stumble It!

Peace in the 21st century using the Friendship Over Time Theory

The article about Obama's olive branch to Iran and how they brushed it off:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.073ba2ee2f1f00668848a4655420fedc.411&show_article=1

This whole Iran thing is yet another reason why I believe the west needs to pursue a different strategy of achieving peace with the rest of the world. The old strategies really aren't working, yet we keep trying them over and over in hopes that the next time will be better than the last time. Friendship or sanctions can only go so far as a diplomatic strategy towards people who see the United States and the west through a kaleidoscope of images that have a lot of historical baggage attached (like supporting the Shah, overthrowing democratic governments to support dictators who will support the US against the USSR, and other such moves that have damaged the US's reputation with those nations or people). The thing is, and this is what people just don't seem to grasp, is that while the United States HAS matured a lot since those days of the 1950s and 1960s, yes, there is still some work to be done, and no, Iraq didn't help the image any.

But with a new president, part of the problem we have to face is that Obama holding his hand out is still going to be seen as the same arm that connected to Bush, Clinton, Bush Senior, Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon. I personally believe we may have turned a huge corner here, but the rest of the world isn't going to see that until a lot of steps are made to change international perception.

The United States needs to pursue a generational approach to peace-making in the world instead of trying to achieve things overnight. That's been our problem for so long now. We keep trying to get immediate results with other nations when dealing with nations that have been harboring attitudes that have existed over centuries. We've pretty much obtained all of the friendships we're going to get with immediate result seeking strategies. Now, we have to start focusing on long-term peaceful efforts with nations that have no reason to want to be friendly with us. To keep referring to countries as enemies of peace or an axis of evil, is never going to lead to long, sustaining peace with those people. Unfortunately, we don't get immediate results with them, so we automatically declare them as lost causes.

Look at Cuba as an example. There is absolutely no reason the United States should not pursue automatic friendly relations with this country. A tit for tat policy would do everything to produce friendship between the United States and Cuba. They'd be suspicious and act counter to friendship in the beginning, but sustained efforts at actually producing friendship would eventually thaw the hatred that exists between the leaders of these nations. The people don't hate each other. Americans have no hatred for Cubans. And I doubt Cubans hate Americans. However, because one man, Castro, went against the US decades ago, we refuse to have diplomatic relations with this country. And then a whole bunch of political people have made any future attempt at friendship politically impossible. A simple tit for tat strategy would produce immediate friendship that would grow over time. We start by opening up doors to their ambassadors, stating we recognize Cuba and will allow them to trade with our nation on standard international trade agreements. It would start slow, and it would stall several times. But eventually, with sustained policies to make it a positive experience, it would start to escalate towards friendlier relations. All that would have to be eliminated is the hostility talk and the sanctions we keep putting on people we perceive as enemies because we don't know how to deal with people in any way other than black and white terms.

Stumble It!

Why the average person has given up on trying to make a difference

Years ago, when the AIDS scare was just beginning, and people had no idea what this disease really was, I was studying genetics in college. At the same time, I was double majoring in archaeology, because I was fascinated with both subjects. Realizing the implications of this disease, I formulated a theory of how to trace back the virus to Patient Zero, the first case of someone with the disease, and then eradicate the disease by following its original mutations. I turned in the theory to my professor at the time, not knowing she was actually one of the main people instrumental in forming one of the first AIDS Conferences for the city. A few days later, she asked me if I would speak to a number of doctors who were interested in my particular theory. So, I went to this little informal gathering before the conference, and I was asked a bunch of medical questions, involving T-cell counts, and other such medical inquiries that were relevant to the AIDS crisis at that time. I answered all of the questions to the best of my ability, and they all seemed impressed with the direction I was taking with this conversation. Then, one of them asked me where I received my medical degree. I was dumbfounded, because I figured my professor would have at least informed them of my actual status, that I was really only an undergraduate, studying genetics and cell biology. When I informed them of this, they immediately wanted no more to do with me, thanked me, and that was the end of that. The AIDS crisis bloomed and exploded after that. Twenty years later, I read in a journal that someone was actually thinking of attempting to eradicate the HIV/AIDS virus by a method very similar to the one I presented; the only caveat was that so much time had passed, the investigator did not think it would be possible to trace the disease to Patient Zero.

Why am I bringing this up thirty years later? Well, because it keeps happening to me, and it is really depressing me. During the Reagan Administration, I had a plan for fixing the problems with our intelligence gathering assets, which I projected would cause serious problems for dealing with harder to pinpoint subjects, like the growing phenomenon of terrorism, which was limited at that time to splinter groups in Western Europe and student radicals in former authoritarian nations. I received a glossy photograph of Reagan as a response, thanking me for supporting his administration. That was pretty much it.

Years later, I had an idea to fix the economy of Michigan, using an advanced method of game theory that I was manipulating using a pretty simplistic interpretation of computer modeling. I received a message back from the state’s national senator, thanking me for supporting her stance on fossil fuels. I’ll be honest; to this day, I still don’t know what her stance is on fossil fuels, so I’m not sure how I was supporting her.

Unfortunately, this has been a pattern in how representatives of our government tend to respond to the common constituent. It’s like invoking Rousseau, when he argued that democracy only works during the election, but rarely after the ballots have already been counted. The politicians only seem to need you when they need votes; after that, the constituent is a roadblock and irrelevant.

Recently, I completed a theory for sustainable world peace, which a colleague and I have titled “Friendship Over Time”, or the FOT Theory. It involves several disciplines, some advanced game theoretic mathematics, and a result that can easily be obtained without having to be an analytical genius to handle the implementation. In other words, carrying out the peaceful project is easy; I did the math so the implementation could be easy.

My colleague and I, both communication scholars from the same institution, sent this theory to the Obama people during the 2008 campaign, explaining this is change that could make a serious difference. No response. None. Not even a glossy photo or a thank you for supporting his fossil fuel policy.

We presented the theory at a national communication conference, and people showed sincere interest. It was different from anything they’d seen before, and it actually causes people to think. Unfortunately, we don’t think that much anymore. We keep trying to do things the old way, hoping that unlike the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a better result), we might be successful if we keep doing the same international moves we’ve always done. Yet, we don’t get better results. We end up with more enemies and more people who we have to categorize as people who hate us for whatever reasons we can think of to fill in the blanks. Rather than moving towards peaceful co-existence, we move towards sustainable lack of hostilities that can change at a moment’s notice.

This is why the average person gets really frustrated with politics and trying to make a difference. I have been trying to make a difference for most of my adult life, and I’ve discovered that I might have been better off just trying to make a profit off of gullible people and exploiting those who didn’t know better. Because that’s what so many other people do, and they’re seen as successful, and even worse, they become powerful enough that those are the people to whom the rest of the country listens. It’s almost as if the one who screams the loudest, but has the least to say, is the one who gets the most attention. And we reward that.

Personally, I’m about to give up. I don’t see that anyone really cares for solutions to the bigger problems in the world. Instead, I see a lot of people who are more interested in pretending to focus on those problems without actually doing anything about solving them. We’ve become very good at rewarding reactive politics and shunning preventative actions.
With that being the case, is it all that surprising that people have given up on trying to make a difference?

Stumble It!

The Election of Obama, the Healing of America, and the Future of Cooperation and Friendship with the Rest of the World

The election was a very long one, and a lot of people are exhausted, finally getting through this process that has managed to prove how divided a nation the United States really is. We knew we were divided some time ago, when each subsequent election showed that half of America wanted one party while the other half wanted the other. In a winner take all system like we have here, that meant a lot of people being completely misrepresented by a party not their choosing. This allowed the Republicans to run the White House, and so many others to continue to control the halls of government of this once great, shining country.

But when it came to the election, people became so divided that they stopped seeing clearly. Instead of seeing people who disagreed with them as the other side of the family that loves you but holds you in check, people saw anyone who disagreed with them as enemies, as people who not only had to be defeated, but had to be disgraced, dishonored and, if possible, destroyed. This has been politics in this country for some time now, and right now, things can get better, or we'll be turning over a cesspool of political disfunctionality to those who come behind us. It's our choice, even though we sometimes make it without thinking about exactly what we are doing when we finally do it.

The United States has suffered greatly because of the misguided intentions of a few who believed they had the best intentions at heart. And they probably did. But their thinking was archaic and outdated. Their thinking was confrontation leads to solution, but that's 19th century thinking that led to 20th century destruction. The future needs to be something different, and unfortunately, people have been swimming in the same muck for so long now that they are no longer capable of thinking about alternatives other than what someone may have tried before. Unfortunately, hitting the same nail into a board only goes so far before you're just breaking wood. The future needs something different than what we are capable of achieving with our think tanks of old ways and diplomats of ancient ideas. The world has been crying out for a future direction, and all we keep hearing is old ways that rarely worked in the past as if they will somehow work some day in the future.

What the world needs is directed cooperation, not mandated imperialism or negotiated compromise. In interpersonal communication literature, one of the final achievements of success in successful communication with another person is not the predicted compromise, but an understanding with the other person that together both of you can achieve a combined learning process that leads you both to a successful outcome that is not a compromise for either but achievement for both. People still don't think that way. Even counselors rarely think this way, telling people that one person must compromise so that two people can reach a commonality (although it is usually directed at both partners, so that both compromise).

The future can be one of successful cooperation, but only if the most powerful nation on the planet realizes such a future can be achieved. Right now, we live in an era where our diplomats play catch up games with international affairs. If someone treats us unfairly, we treat them unfairly in return. If someone does something nice for us, we produce easier trade routes into our borders. That may seem, on the surface, to be the answer to achieving successful economic stimulation, but it is really only temporary, and in most cases does not produce friendships that are long-lasting but develops trade relationships that last only as long as it is economically viable for both sides. In a game theoretic framework, this means that we continue to prosper as long as our "friends" prosper, but once one of us drops out of the game, the only path usually ends up being one that utilizes either the proverbial carrot or the stick. Our paradigm does not know any other functionality.

I suggest the future needs to look at this game theoretic and introduce the idea of cooperation and generational footprinting. What this means is that our targeted friends should not just be those who do right by us, but that when we do right by those who are in our economic and political spheres of influence, we must also do right by those who are overlapping our partners' economic and political spheres of influence as well. This isn't the old "my friends of my friends are my friends" but more a directed desire to work towards friendly relationships with those who border us, and recognize changes in our relationships to where we share certain, fundamental characteristics, such as the desire to wear plaid pants (dumb example, I know). The more functions we share with this neighbor where we wear plaid pants, the more likely we are to also begin sharing other characteristics, like wearing the same kind of hat. This expands out into the cultural realm as well, so that over time we become more like our neighbors, and our neighbors become more like us.

Then we focus on their neighbors, and we look for when those neighbors (who may have very few dealings with us as well), and if we see them wearing plaid pants, we reward them by opening up functionality spheres with them so that we share more venues where we can both show off our plaid pants, so that we, too, might begin to share other attributes and then become more and more like our friends.

This is a simplistic example of the model I'm proposing, but at the same time it also leads to the ability to create long-lasting friendships with potential friends and enemies. This isn't a new process by any stretch of the imagination, but a recognition of certain mathematical principles that do exist in raw social interactions. I use a matrix application to run the interation mathematics that drives the process, but what is important is that nations that are actively involved in attempting to build stronger friendships must be as willing to recognize the change in others as well as accept changes within themselves because self-reflective entity nations have a tendency to attempt to self-correct themselves when they see change as an error rather than a natural progression of cooperative behavior.

This is kind of an offshoot of the FOT (Friendship Over Time) Theory that I created with K. Bruce, and it is going to be presented at the NCA National Conference. We sent a shortened version of the process to the Obama campaign during the last month of the election, as I felt it was important to at least make an attempt at trying to find a better alternative to the rotten ways the US attempts to conduct international relations. My guess is that our letter was either ignored, passed on to some flunky who ignored it, or treated as fan mail. Unfortunately, there are really few avenues for an academic theorist to try to make one's ideas known, especially ideas of such magnitude that would require enlightened leaders to take notice. So I just thought I would say that I at least gave it a try before realizing that in most cases, no leader ever really vies for changing the way things are, even if one's campaign is run on the idea of change.

There is a better way. Making it known is a deeper struggle than finding the solution.

Stumble It!