Troubleshooting and Understanding

For more than two decades I have known that civilization and possibly the life of our entire species might end before I would naturally be expected to die. The past year brought ample evidence that it was likely. Most significantly, there was a growing lack of interest and will on the part of millions to help protect other people and other species from increasingly catastrophic consequences of their behavior. From the spread of disease and misinformation to the destruction of ecosystems by creation and distribution of waste, the ability of life to support life has been degraded to the point where a cascade of death like the collapse of a house of cards is virtually certain to be unstoppable.

A big part of my personal effort to forestall this catastrophe has been to use imaginative thinking coupled with communication and troubleshooting skills to identify and motivate actions that a critical fraction of the population can take physically and socially to achieve the best possible outcome. I have been both heartened and dismayed that others far more knowledgeable and skilled than me have made a lot of progress along similar lines, but with nowhere near the success that’s needed. This has been a variation of a lesson learned and relearned at various times and scales: if you’re not going where you want to go, try going somewhere else that’s as good or better.

An effective approach to testing and troubleshooting in both my professional personal experience has been to observe the behavior of something and attempt to identify basic variables in its makeup and its environment that can help to predict that behavior. Changing conditions to establish how values of those variables are associated with behavior of interest is then done creatively so that the relationships between the variables along with the behavior can be represented in a conceptual or quantitative model. The model is then tested for its correspondence with reality while being used to converge on a solution to a problem at hand, which is essentially a question that needs answering and can lead to other questions whose answers deepen understanding of the system and help identify other behaviors that might be of interest.

Arguably the most wanted result of troubleshooting is a simple summary of a problem’s cause and a single, easily implemented solution. The least wanted result includes a detailed description of what was learned and could be learned, along with a list of potential new problems. As a scientist by personality and training, I tend to favor the least wanted result, which is also the least conducive to convincing people to act, no matter how well it is communicated. I’ve found that communicating the most wanted result is easy and effective, but only if the problem completely disappears after the solution is implemented and nothing obviously related to it takes its place.

In the case of the multiple threats facing humanity’s survival, the complexity of the involved systems and their behaviors makes it highly unlikely that simple and practical solutions can be found and acted upon. Essentially, we all must become experts in understanding at least some of the systems and both their healthy and unhealthy behaviors. Scientists and engineers who have studied and worked with many of the systems out of curiosity or affinity can provide some guidance to the rest of us, but they cannot impart the understanding needed by us to manipulate the required variables on an ongoing basis; we must get it for ourselves and become effective troubleshooters.

Lay of The Landscape

For many years I had a bad sense of direction when thinking about how to get from one place to another. One way I learned to cope with that condition was to embrace getting lost as a learning experience and develop a “feel” for the organization of the places around me. By focusing on exploration instead of going somewhere, I became aware of the many ways that places are connected as a landscape instead of as a network of paths.

When someone would tell me how to go someplace, or how to achieve a particular objective, I would use their procedure to imagine a landscape being revealed. What my guide considered useful features along a chosen path, I found to be slivers of visibility into a system-as-landscape that the path and its endpoints were likely just a minor part of. 

If I was responsible for achieving a particular objective, and therefore forced to limit my exploration, I would focus on how being at that end would look and feel, discovering what variables most clearly de-fined it in a way that could be experienced through translation into ideas that made intuitive as well as abstract sense. In many cases, “navigation” involved changing the configuration of a system either directly or by integrating myself into it, where the feeling was largely one of artistically sculpting experience until it matched my definition of the system’s end state.

Often in my careers as a test engineer and technical writer, I was tasked with helping others achieve a given objective; and my exploration expanded to include the people I was helping, as part of the inhabited space. Understanding it as the flip side of being helped, where I had to translate what others shared with me, either by communication or shared experience, I included helping their translation as part of my personal interpretation of the task (a service I greatly appreciated when people would do the same for me). 

I became more conscious of these facts as a consequence of trying to distill a lifetime of experience into a framework for dealing with multiple existential crises that threaten both personal and societal longevity. My personal longevity crisis is simply one of age: biological breakdown is inevitable and imminent for someone this close to his life expectancy. Society, which I think of as the whole of organized humanity, is facing a limit to lifetime that is more self-imposed than inherently inevitable. If the whole of experience is a landscape, the part we share, as well as our own lives, has a rapidly approaching edge. Death defines the space beyond the edge, a world without us.

Taken as merely a region in a vastly larger landscape, our experience may be unique, but it is hardly special in any universal sense. As co-creators of our experience with its many components, we arbitrarily assign value to both it and parts of it, with differences in value a function of how we choose to define it. Large differences in value create contrast in our minds, which we associate with degrees of “specialness” of the underlying experience. Since value is purely arbitrary and we can’t physically access the full range of experiences it would take to define a common standard, we can either acknowledge or deny the limitations of our experience and perception of it. 

At some deep level, I think I have always distrusted people who act certain that where they want to go is the right way to go. That attitude suggests a belief that their experience and their judgment are innately more valuable than the experience and judgment of others. Alternatively, I have no problem with someone who has learned enough to make more useful guesses about how to get somewhere as long as they are honest about what they don’t know and can’t do; and are willing to learn and adapt, encouraging the same for those they might lead. People I trust the most, and who I’ve chosen to emulate, are willing to challenge what they know and what they value, learning and testing both of these by getting more experience and engaging in respectful collaboration with other people. In short, I tend to distrust those who deny limitations and trust those who acknowledge them; but overall, in the spirit of acknowledging limitations, trust is always provisional - especially trust in myself – which might ultimately be the reason I got lost so easily.

Self-confidence is, literally, trust in yourself. With it comes a sense of power and focus that encourages action. The opposite is what I feel as fear and disorientation that elicits indecision to the point of paralysis. An early lesson I learned from my father and later proved for myself through living was that trust must be earned and its basis always tested through observation. This lesson demands a range of caution that accompanies every action and is proportional to uncertainty that never falls to zero (which an honest person knows is impossible) and has an upper limit that enables learning through experience. 

Discomfort is always present but doesn’t have to be intolerable. I discovered what can best be described as fun fatalism: playfully creating new experience that reflects my chosen values that will be frozen in space and time beyond the boundaries of my life wherever and whenever those boundaries might be. The discomfort of provisional trust in myself thus became comparable to the aching of muscles that are stretched will per-forming one’s favorite sport, which in my case is exploring the lay of the landscape of my limited existence.

Note: This post was updated on 2/4/2023 with the image above. It depicts relationships of variables in my Timelines model: population (yellow), remaining nature (green), and happiness (red), as functions of habitat density (horizontal, left to right) and waste per person (depth, close to far).

Learning As We Go

This week my contract ended and I'm available for work. I've done technical writing about as long as test engineering (14-15 years). Add 12 years of part-time or full-time educational research. Throw in “free time” of writing, research, and other art of my own, and it’s a start.

I try to learn as much as I can so - given enough time - quality matches or exceeds quantity of what I produce. Positive experience is most likely if the definition of quality is the same for producers and consumers, so finding what it is for each is part of that learning.

Understanding the time and resources needed to achieve mutually acceptable quality is part of learning that can ensure fair trade of products and services that embody them. That trade is also part of the experience, beyond use of what’s traded.

Effects of producing and trading on others (not just people) should also be understood, since they have value that may not be included in definitions of quality for what is traded. Neglecting this third “dimension” of learning is fraught with danger for all concerned.

What I’ve learned and ways to better learn are what I’ve carried with me from job to job, while money has evaporated and sometimes the projects have too. For me they’re embodied in the process of living, which I’m doing wherever I am, increasing them however possible.

A “job” in the wild is how one contributes to the life support system that everyone is an integral part of. The key feature, life, is increasingly optional in the substitute systems we humans create and inhabit, where quality can be defined with or without it.

In my “free time” research, I’ve learned that life support isn’t just getting what we need to live, it’s supporting the life that provides it by not consuming too much of it and the life it depends on. Whatever we do must include that as a priority, or risk mass death.

Getting to the point where I understand all of this ideally should have been a “start” to my career instead of coming so close to its end. My skills and hopes are based on the trajectory I followed, which diverges radically from the path I and the world must follow next.

Shutdown Time

With evidence continuing to mount that our ability to survive on this planet depends on stopping the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, it's time to start holding all governments and corporations responsible for the planning and implementation of a swift and safe reduction of the global ecological footprint to no more than half what it was in 2013, beginning with the total elimination of operations involving the use of fossil fuels. In short, it is now time for what I referred to in an earlier blog post as a "graceful shutdown" and bringing safe alternatives online that provide the basic physical and social needs of everyone alive today.

Reducing our footprint involves both lowering our consumption of ecological resources and rendering harmless the pollution we've dumped into places that harm the world's ecosystems, including the atmosphere. We also need to secure or render harmless substances like nuclear fuel that could potentially become harmful pollution.

Individuals and communities can do some of this on their own, perhaps best by using the concepts and techniques collectively known as "permaculture" and explored in test cases by the international Transition movement. By changing what they buy, who they vote for, and who they work for, as well as advocating for shutdown by the organizations they are part of, people can have a considerable impact on the probability of success.

Much of my recent writing has been devoted to exploring how long it takes to perform tasks, as well as the complexity of events and activities. This may have seemed tangential to my main focus of studying our potential future and how to avoid its negative trajectories. In fact, I have been using this immediately practical knowledge to start laying groundwork for how to plan humanity's next moves (and personally determine how I can maximize my contribution to creating a healthier world). Understanding learning curves helps us as individuals to judge the honesty and competence of organizations who we support or might potentially support, as well as the quality of what we do and what we get from others based on complexity. More than this, we have a useful tool for deciding between alternative actions that could get us to a goal or set of goals. My discussions of values, competition, and cooperation were intended to explore another, critical dimension to making plans: that of amplifying collective effort to accelerate progress instead of reduce it – or worse.

I spent a lot of time determining the likely trajectories of population and consumption, largely to assess the large-scale context for making responsible decisions. I focused particularly on the timing of the crisis revealed by the variables I analyzed, which has closely followed the projections made by many real experts in the social and environmental sciences and therefore gives me more confidence in what they are saying. It seems that no matter what angle is used for examining our immediate future, the conclusions are the same, and they are at odds with the technologically and economically optimistic orientation of most businesses I have studied in my attempt to meet personal financial responsibilities in the short term. From within a socio-economic system fixated on eternal growth in physical consumption and consolidation of power, the very concept of voluntary shutdown is akin to the worst form of heresy in the most conservative of religions, and I understand the potential costs of even suggesting it; yet the costs of not doing so and going further are likely to be much, much higher.

In future writing, I intend to explore what shutdown plans might need to include, and what they may look like in some detail. I also expect to discuss what "holding responsible" means, especially as means of assessing the legitimacy of organizations and their operating principles.