The Rhythms of Political Speech

I tell people that I’m a recovering academic, and one of the consequences of that is that my writing has a disturbing tendency to be dense and long, which is acceptable for academic theses but somewhat less so for blogs, social media, political speeches, or other media messages. When communicating with general audiences, shorter and clearer message are both more easily transmitted and comprehended.  Consequently successful politicians tend to adopt similar speaking styles because they are effective. There are a range of written works that inform this topic, but I’m trying to reign in my dense, academic thesis-esque instincts, so I’ll recommend one book, Our Master’s Voices: The language and body language of politics by Max Atkinson (1984). Atkinson articulates the rhythms of political language and inside tricks that makes some politicians different from or better than others.

The first of Atkinson’s rules that stuck in my mind concerns presenting arguments in terms of lists of three. This is am argumentation technique that is common throughout history from the sacred Christian Trinity to the more secular Hegelian dialectic and negative feedback relationship, but presenting information in lists of threes is a natural technique that corresponds to how people naturally think. A list of three is compelling because it makes the list seem sufficiently long that it could be easily elongated if necessary. A list of two, in contrast, seems insufficient like you may have done insufficient research or the point you’re making is insufficiently supported. So persistent are lists of three that people will often add a third item to a list of two to fill it out in the form of the word, “etcetera.” I didn’t pick this up until Atkinson pointed it out, but then I started noticing it occurring frequently.

A second effective argument pattern concerns contrastive pairs that take the form, “either this or that.” The technique implies a decision point, a choice, or a cognitive verge. Contrastive pairs can be superimposed on a policy issue to structure its confusing complexity. This superimposition can be done both for good and for ill.  When done for the former, it can help make complex issues more understandable. When for ill, contrastive pairs can oversimplify the natural complexity associated with a complex policy issue. More pernicious still, contrastive pairs can makes imply a false dichotomy that increases issue stridency by dividing populations into “them” and “us.”

The third point concerns the reasons why these argument framing techniques should be pursued: so that political communications can be more effective and more memorable. Effective communications should leave your audience whistling a tune. Talks should be memorable. So what do you want that tune to be? What should the listener take away? Note that this perspective puts the focus on the listener rather than what the speaker wants to say. It forces the speaker to consider what the listener can hear.  Experts in a field may have a deep understanding of an issue, but distilling and presenting that information in a way that is effective remains an art. This is especially true for conservatives as their worldview centers on what works over the long-term, which is inherently complex. Liberals, progressives, and Democrats in contrast, subscribe to a worldview that centers on the “advertising ethic” – that is, the truth is that which sells in the short-term, regardless of what works or “reality.”

In order to have a larger impact in the political arena, conservatives need to improve their communications strategies, and some suggestions have been made here. Additional potential suggestions include keeping arguments short and clear and being sufficiently informed and prepared to “drill down” and provide more detailed and supported explanations when required. It also helps if politicians are attractive. For example, before becoming Prime Minister, Margret Thatcher had her teeth fixed. Check out the before and after pictures as they’re quite surprising. I offer these communication tips because, in an attempt to be clear, understandable, and influential, I intend to focus on lists of threes that help the reader understand something memorable about a complex topic. We’ll have to see about becoming more attractive.   

MIT as Political Microcosm

For me, it all starts with MIT, which I treat as a condensed microcosm that reveals a larger set of wider-ranging issues. I went there to study policy and political science – what they call Course 17 – and as MIT is an engineering school, I thought that the department’s take on policy would be from an engineering perspective or at least accommodate an engineering perspective. After all, the mascot of MIT is “the Engineers,” so there are reasons to believe this is the case. However, that has not been my experience. My experience has been that MIT is surprisingly politically correct. Of course, it remains to be defined just what “political correctness” means, and there are several possible definitions. But the way it was implemented at MIT was quietly, pervasively, and powerfully. That is, if you held views that ran counter to accepted wisdom, then that was a problem.

Now you might ask, “What’s an example of accepted wisdom, and what’s wrong with it?” Well, I had a problem with the way democracy was treated as an unquestioned good, which is a view held by Noam Chomsky, which for me is a bright red light indicating “problem.” From an engineer’s perspective generally and an electrical engineer’s specifically, that view is highly problematic because we did not decide whether an answer to a hard electrical engineering problem was correct or not through voting. So how did we tell? Well, there was the matter of mathematical expertise, but even that was somewhat flawed, because how can you tell the transformation from the physical to the mathematical representation is correct? That answer is, “by experiment.” That is, the ultimate arbiter of correctness is a theory’s ability to predict the future as confirmed by experiment. Richard Feynman (MIT ’39) said at Cornell (1964) that there are three parts to science: (1) you guess it – i.e., theory; (2) you compute the consequences of the guess – i.e., experiment; and (3) if the guess doesn’t square with the consequences, then you’re wrong. It is that relationship between theory and experiment that provides the core of science.

Now there is a saying in academia that fields that are truly scientific don’t need to include the term “science” in their names. For example, computer science often amounts more to hacking than science, but computer science provides ample opportunities to determine if the code works starting with compiling and moving on to more sophisticated testing. Political science however is in my experience deeply problematic because too often policies are judged by their intentions and implicit flattery rather than logic, plausibility, or likely results. This is a problem because I expect that the policies that determine and guide our life should be crafted with the same care that engineers create Porsches or iPhones, but this simply is not the case. Moreover, even believing that this should be the case is controversial because it threatens those who have based their careers in making arguments that rest on a more… emotional and self-interested foundation, which has led to many of today’s political problems. Instead, a more cognitive and commons-oriented perspective is required, but because such change is fundamental it will threaten the status quo and prove controversial. Be that as it may, this is the challenge of the 21^st century politics. What we see now under President Obama, the European Union, and other institutions such as NATO, the IMF, the WTO, the UN, and the Federal Reserve are the dying embers of 20^th century social bargains coming under increasing pressure and eventual failure. The studies found here recognize this reality and choose to understand why this is the case in order to postulate policies that will lead to more stable and sustainable results.

AFG: The CRC Pad

So, for whatever reason, I decided to go to a warzone generally and Afghanistan specifically. The journey began in Georgia at what's affectionately called the CRC or CONUS Replacement Center -- note that "CONUS" is Department of Defense (DoD) terminology for "The Continental United States." The journey begins at a large cement pad with a roof to protect people from the sun and other elements. Note that while I was there, in July and August, there were no other elements. I had this fleeting idea that rain might also bring some much needed cooler air, but all it did was increase the humidity, if that was possible. 

We mustered there on our first day to check our paperwork because without proper paperwork, nobody was going anywhere. I had procured our paperwork only a few hours before heading down Georgia, which was a minor miracle. I wonder what would have happened had I not got the paperwork finalized, but luckily I didn't have to find out. I also wondered how many of the guys there didn't have their paperwork in order, but I didn't really care. I just wanted to ensure my situation was squared away, and it was. 

I was there with equal parts contractors and military, but the military had little love for the contractors and there was good reason for that -- we were a pretty slovenly bunch. I was there as an international relations scholar (call me a "recovering academic") who had done some analysis work for DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), but most were mechanics and workers who had other skills necessary to the US military war effort. Being "the DARPA guy" had the advantage of being interestingly different but the military guys figured that I was smart but overpaid and of dubious utility. Perhaps they were right. 

Tradition, Complexity, and Social Value

I confess that I find modern politics confusing. However, there are a few theories that I find helpful to explain political dynamics. I find that whenever a liberal – which is basically a Democrat, or a progressive, or a socialist – gets angry about a subject, I take that as an invitation to think more seriously, deeply, and logically about the topic. So when Joshua Cohen – the Martha Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford University, though when I knew him he was at MIT – took offense at my referring to his philosophy of law class as “radical,” Joshua’s anger presents an invitation for further inquiry in hopes of revealing political insights.

The inquiry begins with a simple review of the definition of the word “radical,” which means, “very new and different from what is traditional or ordinary.” My working definition becomes, “seeking or favoring fundamental change.” So the question then becomes, why might changing the political order be fundamentally problematic? Or conversely, what value is there in social arrangements that are ‘traditional’ or ‘ordinary’?  

The observation that provides insight into this question derives from complexity theory generally and software engineering specifically. When I was a computer science student, I spent a summer creating 10,000 lines of computer code – object-oriented C specifically. It was hard, and so it’s worth considering how I treated that code. Did I “seek or favor fundamental change,” or did I pursue a more conservative course of action? I pursued the second course because, even though I created all 10,000 lines of code, and I new that code better than anybody on the planet, I didn’t know was going to happen when I changed that code. I changed the code with a plan about what I thought was going to happen, but I was frequently surprised and needed to go back. There were times that I would implement two or three changes together, which would end up breaking what was already working, and then I would have undo my changes and then test each one carefully and individually. Consequently, I undertook changes to this system very carefully. This is actually a key engineering lesson: build on what’s known because radical changes tend not to work.

There is a lesson to be learned here for politics. That is, if you treat social systems as complex systems, and there are good reasons for doing so, then this argues against making fundamental changes. Why? Because those implementing the changes DO NOT KNOW what is going to happen. People generally are bad at predicting and confirming that promised changes actually occur. This is why science – predicting what will happen, creating an experiment, and then confirming the prediction – is so important and so hard. The fundamental insight then is this: social systems are even more complex than the software I built that summer, so these so-called experts have even less of an idea of what will happen with their policy changes than I did changing my software because they didn’t create the system, they have only studied it.

Logically then, it would make sense to study social system significantly before attempting to change them. I have studied complex social systems significantly in my monograph, Environmental Impacts of Globalization and Trade, but most policies are not subject to that level of rigor. In fact, I would say that most are not given the level of study that they deserve. And why is that? It’s because these so-called experts are not experts at social systems and their analysis, which would be logical, but they’re expert at self-promotion and seeming like experts. Moreover, the consideration of policy consequences is anathema. Finally, people who are capable of actual analysis would be demonized because they are capable of revealing the charlatanism of the pseudo-experts, who revel in the make-believe world of the media. These charlatans are expert at crafting and selling compelling stories, but the ultimate question is, “Do they work?” That is the value of proven technologies and tradition: they have been proven to work. These stories purveyed by the pseudo-experts? These innovations are designed to enrich the charlatans, not to work as advertised.  

This is a very old tension, which was explained in Plato’s Gorgias in his parable about the pilot. That is, Plato says there is a big difference between somebody who knows how to drive a ship and somebody who looks and talks like they know how to drive a ship. To conclude, let me review the MIT Seal, where Joshua Cohen was a professor and where I was a student. The seal features a both a scholar and an engineer with the phrase “mens et manus,” which is Latin for, “head and hand.” The way I interpret this is that there are lots of ideas from the head or “mens,” but very few that are proven workable over the long-term by experience, the hand, or “manus.” To conclude, there is a tension between our understanding and reality – we may want to believe in the possibility and benefits of radical change, but experience and reality show that most radical changes do not work and that tradition is undervalued and traditional solutions underappreciated. 

Complex Conservatism and its Consequences

I've been thinking more about complex conservatism -- what is means, if it's real, and why, if it is real, it's controversial. Previously, I wrote about the math behind it, which is fine, but doing so is limited because politically, there's a big difference between being correct and convincing. Being correct means getting the logic and data correct, while being convincing means getting the affect and rhetoric correct. These are not the same thing, as I learned in high school debate when I'd make these logical arguments that I knew were correct and would lose the debate. At the time I wondered, "How is that possible." In modern, media-dominated American politics, it's not just possible but probable. So rather than lay out the correct academic groundwork -- which Hayward Alker did for me in his complex social systems syllabus -- let me instead talk through the everyday consequences of why it matters and how complexity manifests itself.

First, complexity manifests itself in the form of counterintuitive results. That is, we do all these things for a reason -- like doing one's homework before watching pointless youtube videos -- or maybe no reason at all, and good things come about because of them. Conversely, we may do other things because we want to or they are fun -- like drugs or eating McDonalds -- and then are surprised when things don't work out well. Now this dynamic leads to all kinds of pointless arguments such as, "My friend did everything right and got cancer," or "My cousin dropped out of college and made a billion dollars," and maybe those stories are true, but that's not the way to bet.

Second, arguments divorced from political reality -- or more likely, from a carefully selected reality -- are the currency of today's politics, which explains why it is so impoverished. What is the antidote for this poverty? Jesus said that a tree is known by its fruits, which is so significant that this insight is developed twice in the New Testament:

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matthew 7:15–20 (KJV)

And

"For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh." Luke 6:43-45 (KJV)

This is a timeless truth, many of which abound in the Holy Bible, but they also exist in the secular world as well, three of which I will mention here. Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of John Locke (they were both born in 1632), wrote memorably sub specie aeternitatis, or "take the long-term view." Now there are some intellectuals who are dismissive of taking the Bible seriously, and to them I would direct them to Donald Knuth's Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, which is based on his lectures on his lectures on faith and science at MIT in 1999. Finally, I was talking with Jay Forrester about these topics and he told me to concentrate on the tension between the short and long-term, and many can appreciate the former but few the latter.

Third, the reality we all confront is sufficiently complex that it cannot be described in a few catch-phrases. In fact, when I see a car festooned with multiple bumper stickers, usually the advocate leftist causes because the driver believes reality is simple and can be captured by catchy phrases. I interpret the Bible as a collection of insights from parents who love their children and are trying their best to pass on cultural wisdom to prevent them from making catastrophic mistakes. The best way to do this is through stories that are retained by the human mind. Detractors call these stories "myths," but its their correspondence to timeless truths that determine their worth, and the fact that the Holy Bible has stood the test of time helps confirm their worth.

Finally, we have an opportunity to investigate these timeless truths with modern tools, as Knuth starts to do, though the average academic will find this idea ludicrous, so it's not clear who the audience would be for this work. However, the first-rank philosophers have been trying to answer these questions for century with unaided cognition and logic, so it makes sense to revisit these timeless topics with the more capable toolkit available today. This is the project and promise of complex conservatism.

Daniel Davis on AFG

There's an interesting guy, LTC Daniel Davis, who has been very critical of the way the war in Afghanistan has been fought. Now he's a smart, experienced, dedicated, and brave guy whose work has appeared in all kinds of interesting places including, Armed Forces Journal, New York Times, PBS, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Wired, Democracy Now, etc. Now when he was there, he observed all kinds of things that didn't make any sense to him, and I shared that same experience. Many people who have spent time in Afghanistan have come away less than satisfied with the war's progress.

What's interesting is how the system -- that is, the general officers and senior politicians defend themselves from these criticisms. For example, Joseph Collins, who is a colonel and holds a PhD from Colombia, criticized Davis for being insufficiently rigorous and coherent in his critiques. I get it -- Davis's prose is not always sparkling, his arguments are not always clear, and his methodology may be circumspect -- but that doesn't mean Davis is wrong. So the easy critique becomes, "His evidence is anecdotal." and "He doesn't have the big picture." Well maybe, but I don't think enough credibility is given by academic to on the ground reporting and observation.

Methodologically though, Davis does make some good points. Specifically, he argues that there have been no measures of performance identified that have been tracked against missions. That is, nobody has answered the question, "What are we doing there?" Now Anthony Cordesman has done excellent work defining measures and gathering empirical evidence about Afghanistan, but nobody yet has done the hard work of integrating these measures into a coherent policy analysis. I'm trying to do this, but it's hard to do in one's "free" time.

Afghan Elections

My second big analysis assignment in Afghanistan was to prepare an election report for the command, which I completed hours before I left in late February 2012. It wasn't a technical report, but I went through the available 2009 election documentation and pulled out some lessons learned which included the following. First, the command was not in the election business per se, but it was more in the business of providing security for elections. SOF didn't have enough people to provide security by themselves, so it was a matter of determining where their limited capabilities could best be used and how they could support other security forces including General Purpose Forces (GPF), the Afghan National Army (ANA), and Afghan National Police (ANP). In fact, due to the cultural sensitivities displayed by Afghans, it was determined that the best course of action was to be as invisible as possible on election day. Second, there is the matter of logistics, getting all the election officials and ballots transported to where they need to be is difficult in a country as large as Afghanistan. It was likely that there would be fewer ISAF planes and helicopters available in 2014 than in 2009, so that would need to be taken into consideration. Third, there was the matter of the larger context of the election. Would Karzai try to remain in office? What would the ISAF policy goals be in 2014? And what would the international aid situation be?

But a bigger question concerned what was hoped to be gained by the election. One of the phrases bandied about said that this was the international community's last, best chance to influence Afghanistan. My boss, COL Pat, placed a great deal of faith in the election, saying that it was going to bring about change for the better and get everybody in the country excited and moving in the right direction. Being a political economist, I was skeptical that mere elections could be that beneficial. This skepticism derived from the failure of Bush's Middle East democracy doctrine, which drew heavily on the work of Natan Sharansky generally and The Case for Democracy specifically, in which Sharansky argues that the primary goal of US foreign policy is to expand democracy. After having studied with Joshua Cohen, the co-author of On Democracy along with Joel Rogers, I was highly skeptical of democracy because most of his arguments seemed driven by affect, were historically unsupported, and did not take theoretical critiques seriously. Specifically, I'm thinking of Tocqueville's Democracy in America that I studied with Harvey Mansfield, which I found much more grounded, plausible, and convincing. Specifically, I felt more needed to be done with security, institutions, and development (as Mansfield and Tocqueville would argue) and less that elections would prove a singular palliative (as Cohen and Rogers would argue). I predicted that the 2014 elections would not go well.

Peter Bergen, however, has written an intriguing piece, "What if the Afghan Elections Actually Work?" that has me rethinking my position. Bergen tells the story how three internationally-trained doctors have emerged as the front-runners aided by their more domestically and militarily oriented Afghan "politicians" who some may call "warlords" (I'm not judging because Afghanistan is a rough place). Moreover, the Taliban are not as powerful as once thought, and the voter turnout is much larger than previously thought, all of which -- indeed! -- is cause for hope and optimism in a place that badly need it. Another consideration is that ISAF forces have decreased from more than 100,000 when I was there to less than 40,000 now, which may have a beneficial effect because international forces tended to do too much and would not let the Afghans learn through doing because that inevitably involved failing, which is something that SOF doesn't handle well. So for today let's celebrate the successful elections, but I'll be very interested to see what tomorrow brings.

Leaving Khayr Kot Castle

November 2011

I'm in a Blackhawk UH-60 helicopter sitting across from our interpreter, wearing body armor and a helmet, and we're taking off from Khayr Kot Castle in Paktika, Afghanistan, which is almost within sight of Pakistan. It's just a few months after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which I spent in Kabul. I was in DC on 9/11 ten years earlier and had to spend a few more days waiting for air traffic to return. It never did, so I took my rental car and drove it past New York City on the way home. I remember seeing fire trucks driving from more rural areas of New York towards the city, and I remember returning my rental car to the airport where no planes were taking off or moving for that matter. One short decade later, there I was, in Afghanistan where the whole saga began.

Leaving Khayr Kot Castle, November 2011

I was in Paktika to observe a Shura, a meeting between officials from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from Kabul, and the local leaders of Yahya Khel District who were being asked to support VSO/ALP (Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police) in their district. I was with the group from Kabul who had flown down for the Shura, which involved having the local leaders from Yahya Khel stand up and say they were ready to support VSO/ALP by identifying and vouching for local military age males who would be trained to be ALP, with the idea being that even though they wouldn't be able to fight as well, they could tell who belonged from who didn't belong, something with which international forces had a tougher time. VSO/ALP is an implementation of the Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission in Afghanistan, which is the specialty of US Army Special Forces (SF), otherwise known as "Green Berets." Within the Special Operations Forces (SOF) community, SF differs from Navy SEALS in that SF works closely with the locals while SEALS are more, "pure shooters." So if SF are the good cops, then SEALs are the bad cops. From the perspective of a political economist, SF are the more interesting group because they address the full range of security, governance, and development activities required by counterinsurgency (COIN) as opposed to purely putting rounds downrange.

My colleague MAJ Erik had put me on this mission to help me better understand VSO/ALP and to help tell the story of what the special operation command was trying to accomplish. After the Shura, the senior personnel shared some meat and bread to celebrate the event. I followed my boss, COL Pat, and found myself in the middle of thing, there on the right in the black fleece. This photograph forms the centerpiece of my time in Afghanistan, around which all the other experiences revolve.

Sharing meat and bread after the Yahya Khel District Shura

Afghanistan and Hotel Rouge

I was in Washington, DC for a computational social science conference, SBP2014, and stayed at the Hotel Rouge, which features numerous Venus statues (Veni?), cheetah and zebra robes, and a very cool restaurant, the “Bar Rouge.” I spent the week having friends and colleagues over for dinner at “The Rouge,” which is only two doors down from the Kazakhstan embassy, and generally having a great time on Embassy Row.

On Thursday night, I invited Frank Ritter of Penn State over, who I had only talked to a few times while he was on sabbatical, but we had never really had the chance to hang out and talk. On a wonderful spring evening, we settled into Bar Rouge, ordered some Stella Artois Cidre, which in my opinion is surprisingly good, and started chatting. Frank had given a great talk on the use of computerized moving targets for shooting instruction, so we talked about that for a while, and then he asked me about Afghanistan.

Two years ago I had gone to Kabul to work as a quantitative counterinsurgency (COIN) analyst for the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) based on some work I did for DARPA, which some people find sort interesting. Professionally, I’m a recovering academic because after having published my political economy thesis with a semi-reputable press, I couldn’t get a job as a professor. In the late 1990s, applying computational techniques to political problems was viewed skeptically, though now they have conferences on it. In 2011 though, SOCOM thought I could help blend politics and economics with security within a single analytic framework as required by COIN theory. After having earned two degrees in international relations, which primarily concerns the study of war, the idea of actually going to a warzone and applying what I had learned and hopefully making a difference to the war effort was exciting. People asked how I could go, but I wondered how I could not go. I have always been interested in the special operations community, so the opportunity to observe it up close was one to be taken seriously. I left for Afghanistan in August 2011 and returned in March 2012.

Fueled by Stella Cidre, I told Frank about my adventures in Afghanistan. I had become reluctant to talk about my time there not because of any trauma that occurred but because when I got back I had to perform immediately on a DARPA program and most people don’t really want to hear about what happened because it’s just so foreign and remote from their day-to-day interests and experiences. Frank though was very polite, listened, seemed genuinely interested, and he even asked questions from time to time. His encouragement and a few Cidres were all I need to tell stories for hours.  When I was done – or more accurately, when they closed the bar – Frank suggested that I write these stories down. I remember a cartoon from the ‘70s showing a self-involved and pretentious guy deep in thought with the caption, “After sailing across the Atlantic, Bill decides not to write about it,” and that’s the way I felt about my time Afghanistan. That is, everybody who comes back from war has a story, and after having read many of them, I’m not sure the world needed mine. But Frank’s enthusiasm was infectious, and he convinced me to write some of them down, at least enough to see if there’s some “there” there. 

Rhetoric and reality -- a systems example

It is surprising – at least I find it surprising – that the idea there is an underlying complex structure underlying social systems is not more widely acknowledged and accepted. This is especially true as this complex social system goes by another name, “reality.” I claim that this reality is composed of a number of systemic tensions that give rise to our ongoing political debates, so it would be reasonable to ask that at least one tension be articulated. While there are many from which to choose – positive and normative, innocence and experience, affect and cognition, elitism and democracy – I’m going to start with rhetoric and reality because it reveals the others. In political science school, the role communication is ignored, or at least was ignored while I was there, but increasingly it seems to play a determinative role in politics. Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message,” and while true, the dictum is too abstract and compressed. The Rhetorical President by Jeffrey K. Tulis helps to explain and make clear the changes in the American polity that have led to our present state. That is, in the 20^th century there has been an increased reliance on information gained over an increasingly potent media rather than actual experience, and this has numerous political consequences.

I first thought about this while reading On Democracy: Toward a transformation of American society by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers (1983), which is part of the “third-way” saving socialism literature. Cohen and Rogers argue that instead of all economic decisions being made by a central government committee, which didn’t work, then all decisions should be made by voting. Interestingly, this book was reviewed favorably by Frances Fox Piven of Cloward-Piven Strategy fame. The obvious problem with Cohen and Rogers’ argument is that if central-committee socialism failed because of distorted information channels, wouldn’t democracy-based decisions be subject to similar problematic information distortion? Part of this insight came from my experience in California elections in which tens of different ballot initiatives were put forth on a range of important topics. I know I didn’t know enough to make an informed decision, and I was probably more informed than most of my fellow voters, which made California’s extreme democracy inherently problematic. As a side not, Joshua Cohen’s response to this argument was to become incandescently angry, which was first experience “arguing” with progressives.

The point though is that communicating with a mass audience through a technical information channel – whether it be radio, TV, movies, or written media – rewards clarity and simplicity. The problem is that reality is complex, which argues against clarity. This makes the ascendency of the rhetorical presidency especially problematic because as we increasingly select our leaders based on their speaking capability, this will come at the expense of the experience that underlies an appreciation of our American complex social system that is necessary for effective policy. We need only look to the Affordable Care Act (i.e., “Obamacare”) to see the problems associated with selecting leaders based on their ability to communicate clearly and convincingly rather than, say, having a deep and accurate understanding of the subjects about which they’re talking. This is an enduring political system tension with a history going back to Plato’s Gorgias. Today’s media gives weight to rhetorical rather than technical expertise, hence the ongoing litany of policy failures and search for scapegoats.

Just to give a center to the argument, I find it curious that MIT, supposedly a hotbed of logical thought – and it certainly is with regards to engineering, physics, and computer science – continue to spew forth extreme leftists like Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, and Joshua Cohen. In the context of this argument, these thinkers are problematic because they dispense policy advice based on their own perspective rather than what’s actually workable or at least likely to work. Obamacare is only the most recent example of policies that are sold rhetorically only to fail in the real world. And these problems are entirely predictable and due to an overreliance on rhetoric. Richard Feynman (MIT 1939) got at the crux of this issue when he said,

The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straightjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. I’m not going to assume that maybe the laws of physics have changed, then I can design something. But I try --  supposing it’s everything that we know is true – as we think it is. If we do…. if we’re wrong, of course then we can design something with the new laws later. But the game is to try and figure out, with what we know what’s possible. So it requires imagination to think of what’s possible.  Then it requires an analysis back, a checking, to see whether it fits – it’s allowed with what is known.

So with regard to Cohen and Rogers’ On Democracy, it seems that they used imagination to articulate a new and camouflaged type of socialism but failed to perform the “analysis back” or the “checking” to see if it squares with what we know is possible. If centrally planned socialism fails do to information distortion, then it seems reasonable that democratically driven socialism by which decisions are made by voting rather than local expertise, is also problematic. This is the root cause of today’s political problems, and the evidence for media-based information distortion is accumulating steadily. Cohen’s response to this argument was basically the same as Herman Finer’s reaction to Friedrich von Hayek in Road to Reaction, which Hayek said was, "a specimen of abuse and invective which is probably unique in contemporary academic discussion." Of course, that was an earlier and gentler time, and such abuse and invective is becoming more frequent and regular from an increasingly beleaguered progressive movement. 

Fundamental tensions

In thinking about politics and its characteristics and contours, I take a systems approach, which implies several things. First, social systems are complex systems. Second, social systems include physical systems that have enduring characteristics – that is, a nature that can’t be wished away or changed. Third, there are a host of general rules or system guidelines that have been created to provide insight into the formation of policy and the maintenance of governance of social systems, which should be understood and applied by those who implement policy, but that is most certainly not the case currently.

The motivation here is to improve policy understanding the character of the system being governed. Without such an understanding, policies are implemented by aspiration or popularity resulting in the advertising ethic, “the truth is that which sells” – what the founding fathers called demagoguery. The problem is, policy should be judged by its long-term results, which has been more correctly characterized by the phrase, “a tree is known by its fruits,” which has been proven by the test of time.

This observation that all politics involves complex social systems is not new, with multiple philosophical constructs alluding to its enduring character including teleology, Trinitarianism, and dialecticism (and from the East, yin-yang-ism). However, what makes these subjects worth revisiting are the modern computational tools that allow progress to be make on achieving a deeper and more grounded understanding of these topics. That is, while previous generations of thinkers could only describe such systems in prose, modern computers allow us to actually specify, quantify, and analyze such systems.

Concentrating on a single thinker, Hegel provided a systemic understanding of political systems and also introduced the notion of history in the sense of dynamic complexity and the difficulties associated with understanding and predicting system behavior over time. This interplay between system dynamics and structure (what has been called “macrodynamics from mictrostructure”) isn’t just a theoretical exercise – indeed, for these observations to have any worth they must have consequences in the real-world. And that’s the point of this post, just to say that many of today’s debates provide insight into the deeper, underlying, complex and obscured systematic structures. However, we know enough today to start to articulate and define these structures, and the benefit of doing so is that they will allow for more effective policy, which is important because, per the aforementioned system guidelines, “high morality depends on accurate prophecy.” Today’s demagogic policy, in contrast, employs unrealistically optimistic prevarications to get enacted and then provides inevitably disappointing results, the antithesis of morality.

 So how do these systemic aspects get revealed, and what difference do they make? My contention is that these fundamental systemic tensions get revealed through enduring political debates. The debates we have, and their enduring nature reveals the contours of the underlying system if we’re sensitive to them and understand their nature – what might be characterized as complex conservatism. My next several posts will attempt to reveal some of these fundamental systemic tensions. 

Complex Conservatism: The math behind "The Great Relearning"

There are a couple of things that I take for granted, assuming that everybody knows, but that may not be the case. For example, conservatism in my mind consists of a set of truths or rules or lessons that have guided society and that every generation should learn. I almost wrote "must" learn but the need not learn these rules, but if they don't, the trouble will almost certainly result. These rules used to go by the name of Western Civilization or Christianity. Now not all the rules are "true," but they are very good, and the rules are ignored or disobeyed at society's peril.

However, the academy is populated by innovators who make it their life's work to analyze, criticize, and disobey this received wisdom. However, this has been going on long enough that there is a record that can be evaluated, and the long-term viability of these innovations has been found wanting. Tom Wolfe wrote about this memorably in "The Great Relearning," (TGR) which looks at the unintended consequences of AIDS brought about through the sexual revolution. Now these unintended consequences are brought about by the complexity of the social system, especially when contrasted with the human mind - the key insight being that the complexity of the social system is much greater than the human mind can comprehend. However, if people concentrate on evaluating these consequences, then patterns can be discovered over time. These semi-unpredictable dynamics over time take on the character of evolution, containing certain elements of predictability and unpredictability. Viewed from this perspective, The Holy Bible contains the life lessons from previous generations being passed down from forefathers who love their children and don't want to see them get hurt. However, passing down tightly argued "proofs" tend not to be convincing or memorable to children, so these lessons have been passed down in the form of stories. What makes these stories valuable and worth preserving is their viability over time and their value in constructing viable societies. So rather than religion competing with evolution, religion actually depends on and explains evolution insofar as it articulates regularities and lessons.

With the advent of powerful computers, the contours of these complex social systems can begin to be articulated. Jay W. Forrester, in his "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems," begins to articulate some of the lessons learned from evaluating the consequences of policy implementations. First, social systems are inherently insensitive to most policy changes that people choose in an effort to alter the behavior of systems. This indicates that changing social systems is much harder than it might first appear, which explains the failed social experiments described by Wolfe in TGR. Second, social systems seem to have a few sensitive influence points through which behavior can be changed. Moreover, the places where social systems can be influences tend to be non-intuitive, so ways in which society can actually be changed appear to be unimportant, and ways that appear to be obvious tend to be ineffective. Third, social systems exhibit a conflict between short-term and long-term consequences of a policy change. So policies that appear to be beneficial and effective in the short-term may in fact turn out to be costly and ineffective over the long-term. Conversely, policies that appear to be counterproductive and costly in the short-term may turn out to be beneficial and effective in the long-term. These observations can prove especially problematic in a democratic age in which emphasis is place on the intuitively convincing and short-term rather than the proven and long-term. This might help explain why failed policies continue to be repeated, precisely because they "seem" right.

Forrester developed a simulation methodology that captured what he meant by "complex," which is important because mostly such terms go undefined and unspecified. Forrester defined complex social systems as marked by nonlinear, stock-flow, and feedback causal relationships. Each of these are confusing to the human mind, and together they can be mystifying. Recently, network relationships should be added to this list. However, the policy consequences remain the same: these system features are ignored to a society's peril. And the ongoing record of failed social experiments indicates that people should be more circumspect of social innovation - that is, conservative. Wolfe ends his essay by saying that this process of realizing the value of and relearn these lessons will be known as The Great Relearning, "if anything so prosaic as remedial education can be called 'great'."

Policy excellence 1

I today’s media saturated age, it’s difficult to know what “politics” really means anymore. Is it elections? Is it government institutions? Is it a TV debate? What politics should constitute is the study of rightly ordered personal relationships, but despite all the expended argument, emotion, and “rationality,” it seems that things are getting worse rather than better. Pick your measure—government debt, crime, mental health, graduation rates, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation—the trend seems to be in the wrong direction. How could so much time, money, education, and energy be expended with such piddling results? This is the fundamental question behind this blog, what I call the policy problématique. That is, how can we move from what we have, policy failure to policy excellence.

But is the term “policy failure” too harsh? Is it, in today’s vernacular, unfair? If it evaluated in terms of pursuing actions with the plan of achieving intended and desirable results, then in too many instances it is all too accurate. Much of the reason has to do with they pay politics is pursued and scored. It is based on persuasion rather than accuracy; on the short rather than long-term; on emotion rather than logic; on simplicity rather than complexity. In other words, we no longer pursue ethics traditionally understood; we pursue the advertising ethic which holds that, “The truth is that which sells.”

The argument proceeds by recognizing that politics is complex. So far as the policy problématique is concerned, the difficulty of pursuing courses of action that achieve their intended effects is driven by the complex of system being influenced. Were the system simple, then the consequences could be easily predicted. However a complex, social system yields unintended consequences. Achieving policy excellence therefore requires addressing, acknowledging, and accounting for the complexity of social systems. The question is, how best to do this? The current answer is democracy, having people vote and the majority rules. We live in a democratic age, and this seems so normal, so right, so stable, and so reified that how could it be any other way? However, Tocqueville pointed out the costs of democracy and noted that in a democratic society, it is difficult to imagine anything else. Moreover, once the majority have pronounced their judgment on an issue, it is absolute. But democracy need not be reified because, as Herbert Simon points out, there are multiple ways to reach policy decisions. The most important thing, recognizing the complexity of social systems, is to find a way to address the complexity. Democracy is naturally flawed because the very notion of complexity is measured against the well-known limitation of human rationality. So fundamental is this limitation that Simon coined the term bounded rationality to describe it. The key problem with democracy is that it is fundamentally driven by a collection of limited human brains, and increasing their number can help but ultimately brains will not do what they cannot do. Also, in a media age, there is an argument to be made that increasing that democracy results in demonstrably worse policy outcomes.

So how can the complexity of social systems be addressed? Recognizing the cognitive limitations associated with bounded rationality, it is natural to seek a cognitive prosthetic—that is, a way to supplement and assist the brain, and one way to do that is through a computer. Three challenges and observations immediately present themselves. First, how does one actually execute computer-based policy, both the creation of the computer model and its implementation within an organization? Second, pushing some of the decision making responsibility to a computer works against the democratic ethic, which, because it has devolved in the advertising ethic, is actually beneficial from a policy excellence perspective. Third, recall that the genius of The Constitution was a stepping back in 1787 from the ineffective Articles of Confederation which had been in place since 1776. So perhaps, what is being recommended here, is correcting a political system that has been pushed out of balance by information technology—that is, today’s media—with the application of another technology, the computer-aided quantitative analysis. 

AFG 1

As the US military's effort winds down in Afghanistan and their elections approach - which are supposed to solve many problems but won't - now might be a good time to engage in some reflection on the engagement. The military have an acronym for this, as they do for most things - AAR or "after action review." First, let me state my opinion that the Afghanistan hasn't worked out that well, so there has to be a mismatch between expectations and outcomes, especially with regard to execution. Second, this is in no way a criticism of the people in uniform, though i may be critical to their leaders and policy makers.

Because I was feeling that Afghanistan was turning into a modern-day Vietnam, I revisited A Bright Shining Lie and found some criticisms by LTC Daniel Davis who complained loudly that the war in Afghanistan was failing. He made several arguments as to why including the corruption of the Afghans, the failure to report status and progress accurately, and wasted aid money. Even though LTC Davis traveled widely around Afghanistan, those who defended our efforts said that he had a distorted and limited view of the situation. We;;. sounds like these critics are defending, because for what analysis can't that be said? Davis to me said some pretty reasonable things because I had similar experiences there. There was this curious dynamic in which people in uniform would take me aside and vent about what was going on in the vague hope that I, as a civilian, could influence what was going on.

So I could indeed add my personal observations to the list of people coming back from Afghanistan, but those too could be semi-easily invalidated by a government official who has access to greater information and the news media. However, Davis offered a pretty insightful observation, that there has been no clear articulation of the long-term strategic objectives, and that matches with my experience. I heard one general say that going to Afghanistan was in America's national interest, but that struck me as wrong. Why do we need to go, and possibly die, in an impoverished, land-locked, and resource-less country on the other side of the world. To my way of thinking, that's the opposite of national interest. Of course we had to go there in 2001, but for such an extended time to the tune of $700 billion? I don't get it. And when I got there, another general told me that in ten years, when Afghanistan was a great, modern, and successful country, then we'd understand why we were away from our families. That struck me as almost Obama-esque levels of aspirational as opposed to realistic language.

In opposition to these aspirational or purportedly inspirational arguments, Davis asked three strategic questions: (1) What metrics characterize Afghanistan? (2) How should the change over time? and (3) How do US military missions contribute to these metrics? This seems to be baseline and fundamental level of analysis before committing thousands of Americans and hundreds of billions of dollars, but apparently that wasn't done, especially as aspirational and inspirational rhetoric is easier to generate, more convincing, and less rigorous.

So how does one go about creating a quantitative strategic analysis that stands up better under criticism and informs operations? First of all, you can check out the book Estimating Impact by Kott and Citrenbaum, but I'm going to try to apply that framework to Afghanistan over the next few months as a way to improve policy because, while I greatly admire the efforts and bravery of my colleagues in Afghanistan, I don't they were as effective as they might have been because they were not well led.

Happy 2014

Was at a party jamming with Alan of Alan and the Aligators as 2014 arrived, which is definitely a good sign.