The accidents are characteristic of the system itself

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival. Page 102.

Perrow's Normal Accidents, first published in 1984, is a work of seminal importance because of its unusual thesis: That in certain kinds of systems, large accidents, though rare, are both inevitable and normal. The accidents are characteristic of the system itself, he says. His book was even more controversial because he found that efforts to make those systems safer, especially by technological means, made the system more complex and therefore more prone to accidents.

In system accidents, unexpected interactions of forces and components arise naturally out of the complexity of the system. Such accidents are made up of conditions, judgments and acts or events that would be inconsequential by themselves. Unless they are coupled in just the right way and with just the right timing, they pass unnoticed. . . . Perrow's point is that, most of the time, nothing serious happens, which makes it more difficult for the operators of the system (climbers, in this case). They begin to believe that the orderly behavior they see is the only possible state of the system. Then at the critical boundaries in time and space, the components and forces interact in unexpected ways, with catastrophic results.

They have no criteria

Ezra Pund:

There is no use talking to the ignorant about lies, for they have no criteria.

You can slide through time to a world which does not yet exist

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival. Page 80.

Sometimes an idea can drive action as powerfully as an emotion. Plans are an integral part of survival. Plans are generated as one of the many outputs of the brain as it goes about its business of mapping the body and the environment, along with the events taking place in both, resulting in adaptation. Planning is a deep instinct. Animals plan, and a bird that hides seeds has a larger hippocampus than others, suggesting a larger capacity for spatial memory. But planning - predicting the future - may be even more fundamental than animal abilities suggest. In his book Complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop points out that "All complex adaptive systems anticipate the future. . . . Every living creature has an implicit prediction encoded in its genes . . . every complex adaptive system is constantly making predictions based on its various internal models of the world. . . . In fact, you can think of internal models as the building blocks of behavior. And like any other building blocks, they can be tested, refined, and rearranged as the system gains experience."

The human brain is particularly well suited to making complex plans that have an emotional component to drive motivation and behavior. Plans are stored in memory just as past events are. To the brain, the future is as real as the past. The difficulty begins when reality doesn't match the plan.

Memories are not emotion, and emotion is not memory, but the two work together. Mental models, which are stored in memory, are not emotions either. But they can be engaged with emotion, motivation, cognition, and memory. And since memories can exist in either the past or the future, to the brain it's the same thing. You bookmark the future in order to get there. It's a magic trick: You can slide through time to a world which does not yet exist.

His concern seems well-grounded

As sometimes occurs, there is a fun dispute going on in one of the children's literature list-servs to which I belong. The catalyst is an essay/review by Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal, What Killed American Lit. by Joseph Epstein.

It is interesting to look at the responses to this reasonably straightforward essay as some sort of Rorschach test. People seem to see in it what they wish to see (a pretty common response). But what I find most interesting is the lack of real argumentation. Most of the response falls into various logical fallacies – ad hominem attacks, guilt by association, misattribution, argument by assertion, misdirection, false strawmen, argument by disparagement, and red herrings. There appears to be little engagement with his actual argument.

Epstein's central argument – English Departments at American Universities are doing a disservice to literature by focusing on obscure, ideological or faddish issues (exemplified by the common prism of race, class and gender) at the expense of teaching a love of reading and a common grounding in literature. The evidence to support this is the declining undergraduate interest and increasing irrelevance of English Department luminaries in the wider culture. He ascribes this decline to a loss of standards (his terms are high and low culture) and the former practice of distinguishing between them.

Epstein’s essay would seem to be part of a larger lament of the passing of the Classical Liberalism of the Enlightenment era augmented by the empiricism of later practitioners. Basically the economic, political and cultural world created by Newton, Smith, Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and Darwin. It seems indisputable that these Classical Liberals find little shelter in many English Departments today – as little shelter as there is comprehension of their works and the context of their times. Hirsch, Postman, et al. have made similar arguments.

Epstein has written what is nominally a book review but used that as a platform to make a larger argument. That isn’t an uncommon approach. Does his essay fall short in terms of a book review? Probably. He advances enough information to give you a sense of the book but not enough to make independent judgments. However, given its form, one has to judge the essay as an argument rather than as a review. So what is his argument? It seems that he is arguing that the intrusion of ideology, history and other issues into the study of Literature along with the abandonment of some means of distinguishing “good” books from “less good” books has led to a disengagement on the part of university students from the study of Literature and a consequent failure to cultivate a love of Literature. He advances the information that undergraduates taking a degree in English has shrunk from 7.6% of the student body to 3.9%.

There are five pertinent questions – 1) Is it real?, 2) Do we understand the causes?, 3) Can we change it?, 4) Is it important?, 5) Is it worth it?

Is the decline real? – Probably worth checking the numbers but his numbers are consistent with others I have seen.

Do we understand the causes for the decline? – Here is where things come off the rails. He proposes that the cause is a change in focus of Literature teaching away from standards to an increased focus on ideological and historical issues (race, class, gender). He makes a logical argument with some indicative but not by any means conclusive observations. There are certainly alternate propositions (which might include - increasing focus in the culture on training rather than education, cost of university versus the anticipated remuneration of a Literature major, shortened student attention spans, etc.)

Can we change the decline? – Possibly but depends on what the true nature of the decline might be – what are the root causes? If it is ideological infusion, then we can change it. If it is increased focus on monetizing education, then that might be more problematic.

Is it important to halt the decline? – Important to whom and for what reasons? To professors? Sure it is important. To students? Maybe, maybe not. To the continuity of our culture? I would argue yes.

Is it worth it? – The existential question.

I would argue that Epstein has a legitimate issue (decline of Literature education), has a rational but incomplete proposition for cause, and that he has not made the case for whether the decline can be or should be halted.

What I find interesting is that no one contests Epstein’s observation (declining English majors), no one offers an alternate explanation for why the decline is happening (other than that he is incorrect about the cause), no one argues that the decline can be halted and no one makes the case for why it ought to be halted.

Following are some of the criticisms advanced against Epstein's essay which seem to me to be irrelevant, and yet which seem to the primary counter-arguments.

Criticisms – “Can’t do maths” In maths we speak of decline in relative or absolute terms. In the context of Epstein’s essay, it is clear that he is speaking of relative decline, a declining percentage of students are committing themselves to the pursuit of an English major. Only about half as many students graduating university with a degree are pursuing English as a degree (from 7.6% to 3.9%). That is a clear signal, however you wish to interpret it. The assertion that he “can’t do maths” is simply wrong.

Guilt by association – His essay and argument can be dismissed because of his associations; i.e. a recommendation from Buckley, and publication in what are apparently deemed the wrong magazines, The Weekly Standard, The New Criterion, and Commentary.

False attribution – One critic attributes a view to Epstein, that the “decline in English majors is due to the fact that we now teach classes about science fiction, fantasy, children's literature, pop culture, women's fiction, Af-Am fiction, etc.” What he actually said was “at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture).” He ascribes the decline to loss of focus on great books. The proliferation of classes in other topics is a symptom of that loss of focus, not an independent cause.

Mischaracterization - “The automatic leftism behind this picture is also part of the reigning ethos of the current-day English Department.” It seems to me that Epstein is advancing this as evidence that the current curricula is an incomplete and misrepresentative presentation of history. Not that “Leftists ruined everything” but rather that the overrepresentation of the Leftist (on the US spectrum) weltanschauung distorts the choices about how to present English literature. He doesn’t mention the supporting evidence but it is certainly available in both studies and in the obvious disconnect between humanities academia and the public at large.

Argument by assertion – “this is why students don't want to be English majors any more. That assertion indicates such an ignorance of how the social sciences work that it takes the breath away from my inner undergraduate, who was a sociology major. His argument for the cause of the decline is “There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.”

Why is that ignorant? I might agree or disagree but just asserting that it is ignorant doesn’t make it so. There is nothing inherently illogical about his correlation: Loss of focus and intrusion of ideology into English Departments leads to a decline in the percentage interested in majoring in English. Is there data to support it – don’t know but it isn’t on the face of it illogical and therefore ought not to be dismissed by simple assertion. Especially when no alternative explanation is offered.

Argument by disparagement - “officious piece of nonsense”, “cantankerous ideological cant”

Misdirection – “The issue, of course, is that he blames leftists for all that is "wrong" with literature academia today.” But of course he doesn’t blame Leftists. He blames “The automatic leftism behind this picture is also part of the reigning ethos of the current-day English Department.” As mentioned earlier, there are plenty of surveys that document the wide mismatch between the political orientations within academia (and the humanities in particular), and the citizenry of the nation. Epstein is making the argument that that left-oriented world-view within academia has led to a means of teaching English which is of less and less interest to undergraduates.

Misdirection – “As to the experiences of those not of Western Europe in the US...I'd say "exploitation, racism, and prejudice" is a fairly accurate description.” He is not arguing whether history is informed by exploitation, racism, and prejudice. I think he is arguing that an over-focus on those issues (which might be better characterized as History, or Politics, or Philosophy rather than Literature) contributes to a decline in focus on Literature. Just as an historian turns to the literature of the day to inform their understanding of the history, so a person focusing on Literature legitimately turns to the history to inform their judgments of the literature. I think Epstein is pointing out that the one is not the other and that an overemphasis on the non-Literature issues undermines the cultivation of a love of literature. And then there are the occasions when both angles meet in the middle such as Louise MacNeice’s The Gloomy Academic. Whether the worldview that believes that the West is to blame for any or all of the world’s current problems is accurate or not is an entirely different issue from that which Epstein addresses – decline in the study of Literature.

False Strawman – “Ah, yes, the good old days, when old white men ruled the world (and ruled literature, history, and anthropology departments, too, of course), and all the gender bias, colonialism, and racism was simply taken for granted as the way things were and had to be.” I think it is a reach to assume that that is what Epstein is nostalgic for and a slander to ascribe that to him. He seems fairly explicit that his regret is that departments “have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.” I’ll grant you that what constitutes “good books” is a truck-sized gateway for discussion about various biases and prejudices but he seems to be interested in exactly that – what constitutes great literature rather than what are the histories and ideologies attendant to literature?

False strawman – “it seems to mean that multicultural literature--by which, I assume, he means texts by people of colour?--is all inherently and inevitably part of what he calls low culture” imputes to Epstein what is in the mind of his critic. Epstein is explicit that the problem is not “works of all cultures” but that the problem is ascribing an “equivalence of value to the works of all cultures”. If there is no set of standards or means of differentiation then Literature is really just a subset of the other disciplines (History, Philosophy, Politics). Epstein would appear to believe that there is a means for ranking some sort of aesthetic value to different works and that study of aesthetic values in the written word is what constitutes Literature. If he is correct then his concern seems well-grounded. If he is not correct then it would seem to call into question the study of Literature outside the other disciplines.

Surprising lapses in the way we process the world

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival. Page 71.

One of the reasons magic tricks work can be explained through a brain system called working memory. It is a general purpose workspace, and most of us experience it as attention or conscious thought. In addition, there are specialized systems for verbal and nonverbal information, and they have a type of short-term memory that allows perceptions to be compared with one another over the span of a few seconds. The general purpose area can take in information from the specialized systems (sight, smell, sound, and so on) and can integrate and process that information through what LeDoux calls "an executive function." That area of the brain, located mostly in the frontal lobes, is responsible for making decisions and voluntary movements, as well as directing what sensory input we're paying attention to. It's why we can still carry on a conversation in a room where many people are talking and music is playing. It's why we can choose between getting up and putting on a sweater or turning the thermostat up.

As LeDoux and others have explained, working memory can hold only a few things at once, perhaps half a dozen or so, and when something new commands attention, those things are forgotten. Working memory can also retrieve information from long-term memory. The fact that you can read this long sentence is the result of your working memory's ability to hold the beginning, the middle and end all at once and to retrieve definitions and associations from long-term memory and use them to make sense of the words. It is also the result of the fact that you have created mental models of the words. You don't read each letter to decode the word, as a child who is learning to read must. But if you come across words that are too similar, such as psychology and physiology, you may have to pause.

The fact that new information, especially emotionally charged information, forces things out of working memory means that we can't pay active attention to too many things at once. Unless something is successfully transferred from working memory into long-term memory, it is lost. We all have this experience when we try to memorize something that has no emotional content, such as an address or driving directions. In most people, the executive function can do one task at a time, and attempting to perform simultaneous tasks that involve a conflict begins to break it down. For example, if you flash the word "blue" printed in green ink on a screen for a second and then ask someone to say the word or the color, he'll have to stop and think before he answers.

The limited nature of working memory (attention) and the executive function, along with the shorthand work of mental models, can cause surprising lapses in the way we process the world and make conscious or unconscious decisions. That is why even experts can miss things that are right under their noses.

We often turn out to be wrong, even with giant, classic papers

Studies of studies show that we get things wrong by Ben Goldacre.

In 2005, John Ioannidis gathered together all the major clinical research papers published in three prominent medical journals between 1990 and 2003: specifically, he took the "citation classics", the 49 studies that were cited more than 1,000 times by subsequent academic papers.

Then he checked to see whether their findings had stood the test of time, by conducting a systematic search in the literature, to make sure he was consistent in finding subsequent data. From his 49 citation classics, 45 found that an intervention was effective, but in the time that had passed, only half of these findings had been positively replicated. Seven studies, 16%, were flatly contradicted by subsequent research, and for a further seven studies, follow-up research had found that the benefits originally identified were present, but more modest than first thought.

This looks like a reasonably healthy state of affairs: there probably are true tales of dodgy peer reviewers delaying publication of findings they don't like, but overall, things are routinely proven to be wrong in academic journals. Equally, the other side of this coin is not to be neglected: we often turn out to be wrong, even with giant, classic papers. So it pays to be cautious with dramatic new findings; if you blink you might miss a refutation, and there's never an excuse to stop monitoring outcomes.

As societies modernize, they become less dependent on local agricultural output

The Climate Wars Myth by Dr. Bruno Tertrais.

Since the dawn of civilization, warmer eras have meant fewer wars. The reason is simple: all things being equal, a colder climate meant reduced crops, more famine and instability.4 Research by climate historians shows a clear correlation between increased warfare and cold periods.5 They are particularly clear in Asia and Europe, as well as in Africa.6 Interestingly, the correlation has been diminishing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: as societies modernize, they become less dependent on local agricultural output.7

You see what you expect to see

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival. Page 69.

As complex as the brain is, the world is more so. The brain cannot process and organize all the data that arrive. It cannot come up with a reasonable course of action if everything is given equal weight and perceived at equal intensity. That is the difficulty with logic: It's step-by-step, linear. The world is not.

Perceptions come at you like the six million hits you get when you do an internet search. Without a powerful search engine, you're paralyzed. One search engine involves emotional bookmarks, in which feelings help direct logic and reason to a place where they can do useful work. A second strategy the brain uses for handling complicated problems is to create mental models, stripped-down schematics of the world. A mental model may tell you the rules by which an environment behaves or the color and shape of a familiar object.

Suppose you're searching the house for your copy of Moby-Dick, and you remember it being a red paperback but you don't know where you left it. When you search, you don't examine every item in the house to see if it's Moby-Dick. That would be logical, a strict use of the faculty of reason. But it would also be tedious and would take too long. That's how a computer would do it. The fact that you have a mental model of the red paperback copy of Moby-Dick, allows you to screen out nearly everything you see until, at last, a red book blossoms in your field of vision. But if you're wrong and it's a blue hardback edition of Moby-Dick, chances are that you won't find it even if the title comes into view.

Everyone is familiar with finding something "right under my nose." A faulty mental model is part of the explanation. It's the reason you can get off an elevator on the wrong floor. It's the reason that many card tricks and magic acts work: You see what you expect to see. You see what makes sense, and what makes sense is what matches the mental model. If you do suucceed in finding your copy of Moby-Dick, your pupils will dilate at the moment you recognize what you're looking for, as they do when you reach the solution to a mathematical problem or see something you like.

No bears in this house

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival discusses adaptation. Page 63.

Only in recent years has neuroscience begun to understand the detailed physiology of emotional states such as fear. The neocortex is responsible for your IQ, your conscious decisions, your analytical abilities. But the amygdala stands as a sort of watchdog for the organism. Amelia, who is the younger of my two daughters, has a chocolate Lab, Lucy. Lucy sometimes reminds me of the amygdala: When anyone comes to the door, she barks before I even hear it.

Perceptions from the world around us (sight, for example) reach the the thalamus first. In the case of vision, axons from the retina go to the visual thalamus (there are two, one in each side of the brain, receiving information from each side of the body). From there, the sight signals travel by way of axons from the visual thalamus to the middle layer of the neocortex and from there are sent out to the other five layers for processing. What emerges is a perception of sight. But before all that can be completed, a rough form of the same sensory information reaches the amygdala by a faster pathway. The amygdala screens that information for signs of danger. Like Lucy, the amygdala isn't very bright, but it detects a hazard, or anything remotely resembling one, before you're even conscious of the stimulus, it initiates a series of emergency reactions. The approach is: Better safe than sorry. (Unlike Lucy, the amygdala also is capable of ignoring a a lot of information as irrelevant.) It is a primitive but effective survival system that causes the rabbit that visits our backyard every morning to freeze and then run when she sees Amelia let Lucy out. Like Lucy, the amygdala is wrong a lot of the time: There is no danger. But in the long course of evolution, it has been a successful strategy.

So information from the senses takes a neural route that splits, one part reaching the amygdala first, the other arriving at the neocortex milliseconds later. Rational (or conscious) thought always lags behind the emotional reaction. Anyone can demonstrate this at home: Everyone has been startled by someone. It's a powerful response, marked by the familiar rocket rush of adrenaline (actually catecholamines), increased heart rate, flushing and panting. Then, as soon as you realize the person is someone you know, the response deescalates. But it takes a while to metabolize all those chemicals. It's a powerful emergency reaction and completely illogical, because you know the person and are not in any danger. But the reason you can't think of that logically before reacting is because visual signals reach the amygdala first. It's a big shadowy form: It could be a spouse, it could be a bear - you don't know. Only later (in milliseconds) does the visual cortex piece together an accurate picture that let's you in on who it is. Only later can you reason: No bears in this house.

We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival discusses adaptation. Page 63 on risk perceptions and trade-off decision-making in the context of an avalanche rescue.

There was another fundamental difficulty that the snowmobilers faced. Our sense of a mountain, the earth, is a sense of something solid, and our experience confirms that. Nothing in our learning tells us that a mountain is going to come apart before our eyes. It makes no sense. It hasn't happened, therefore it cannot happen. The mountain certainly didn't look fragile. The snowmobilers literally couldn't believe it. We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.