Coordination Problem Quotes

Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

Mutual aid projects let us practice meeting our own and each other’s needs, based in shared commitments to dignity, care, and justice. They let us practice coordinating our actions together with the belief that all of us matter and that we should all get to participate in the solutions to our problems. They let us realize that we know best how to address the crises we face.

The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it. Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.

You think the world begins and ends with you and your perfect little family and your perfect little life and you think stress is finding the perfectly color-coordinated cushions for your new $10,000 sofa.

A Cephalopod Wish by Stewart Stafford O, to be an Octopus, Sporting three hearts, Two that won't break, To go on and love more. O, to have its nine brains, To spread a migraine load, Fogless coordinates clear, A tower fire, now contained. O, to have a boneless form, A body fitted to life problems, Not ail from a tumour's grasp, Flee to safety in inky clouds. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved

She had sleep and attention problems (brainstem), difficulties with fine motor control and coordination (diencephalon and cortex), clear social and relational delays and deficits (limbic and cortex), and speech and language problems

My earliest memories are of CP4 — that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex directions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" — he motioned at the surrounding more-or-less-Euclidean space — for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single three-dimensional space.

Compared to kids confined indoors, children who regularly play in nature show heightened motor control—including balance, coordination, and agility. They tend to engage more in imaginative and creative play, which in turn fosters language, abstract reasoning, and problem-solving skills, together with a sense of wonder. Nature play is superior at engendering a sense of self and a sense of place, allowing children to recognize both their independence and interdependence. Play in outdoor settings also exceeds indoor alternatives in fostering cognitive, emotional, and moral development. And individuals who spend abundant time playing outdoors as children are more likely to grow up with a strong attachment to place and an environmental ethic.

In all of these areas, the human brain is asked to do and handle more than ever before. We are dealing with several fields of knowledge constantly intersecting with our own, and all of this chaos is exponentially increased by the information available through technology. What this means is that all of us must possess different forms of knowledge and an array of skills in different fields, and have minds that are capable of organizing large amounts of information. The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. And the process of learning skills, no matter how virtual, remains the same. In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them—those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn. The Apprenticeship Phase is more relevant and important than ever, and those who discount this notion will almost certainly be left behind. Finally, we live in a culture that generally values intellect and reasoning with words. We tend to think of working with the hands, of building something physical, as degraded skills for those who are less intelligent. This is an extremely counterproductive cultural value. The human brain evolved in intimate conjunction with the hand. Many of our earliest survival skills depended on elaborate hand-eye coordination. To this day, a large portion of our brain is devoted to this relationship. When we work with our hands and build something, we learn how to sequence our actions and how to organize our thoughts. In taking anything apart in order to fix it, we learn problem-solving skills that have wider applications. Even if it is only as a side activity, you should find a way to work with your hands, or to learn more about the inner workings of the machines and pieces of technology around you. Many Masters

Palestinian guerrillas, in a bold and coordinated action, created this newest crisis Sunday, and in doing so they accomplished what they set out to do: they thrust back into the world’s attention a problem diplomats have tended to shunt aside in hesitant steps towards Middle East peace.

The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

But according to Forbes, the employees of 2020 need: 1) complex problem solving, 2) critical thinking, 3) creativity, 4) people management, 5) coordinating with others, and 6) emotional intelligence. Employers want innovative thinking, independence, initiative.3 These were not coveted skills in our grandparents’ time.

How often do we hear from the local diocesan people—the bishop, the communications director, the victim assistance coordinator, and others—that this abuse is not restricted to clergy, but, rather, it is a societal problem? It does occur outside in the public realm. When was the last time you heard of a sex offender not being held accountable for his actions once caught? The Church treated the abuse as a sin only and nothing more. Out in society, sex offenders are not moved to another community quietly. “But protest that priests are 'no worse' than other groups or than men in general is a dire indictment of the profession. It is surprising that this attitude is championed by the Church authorities. Although the extent of the problem will continue to be debated, sexual abuse by Catholic priests is a fact. The reason why priests, publicly dedicated to celibate service, abuse is a question that cries out for explanation. Sexual activity of any adult with a minor is a criminal offense. By virtue of the requirement of celibacy, sexual activity with anyone is proscribed for priests. These factors have been constant and well-known by all Church authorities” (Sipe 227−228).

Market economies, in addition to reaping the benefits of specialization and providing incentives for people to produce things that other people want, solve the problem of coordinating the efforts of hundreds of millions of people by using prices to propagate information about need and availability far and wide, a computational problem that no planner is brilliant enough to solve from a central bureau.

When I went to medical school, I was taught that the cerebellum’s only job was to coordinate fine muscle movements learned from years of practice. But new studies published in the past few years have shown that increased activity in the cerebellum is directly linked to creative problem-solving. It coordinates creative thinking, we now believe, just as it coordinates the fine muscle movements of an athlete.

Philosophy, as defined by Fichte, is the "science of sciences." Its aim was to solve the problems of the world. In the past, when all exact sciences were in their infancy, philosophy had to be purely speculative, with little or no regard to realities. But if we regard philosophy as a Mother science, divided into many branches, we find that those branches have grown so large and various, that the Mother science looks like a hen with her little ducklings paddling in a pond, far beyond her reach; she is unable to follow her growing hatchlings. In the meantime, the progress of life and science goes on, irrespective of the cackling of metaphysics. Philosophy does not fulfill her initial aim to bring the results of experimental and exact sciences together and to solve world problems. Through endless, scientific specialization scientific branches multiply, and for want of coordination the great world-problems suffer. This failure of philosophy to fulfill her boasted mission of scientific coordination is responsible for the chaos in the world of general thought. The world has no collective or organized higher ideals and aims, nor even fixed general purposes. Life is an accidental game of private or collective ambitions and greeds.

Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King’s polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out, fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the chandelier-—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, “Hurrah! Victory!!

With events that have passed there is no problem, provided we don't attempt to be wiser that they are, provided we can't use them to further own own ends. If we let them be, the turn into a marvelous solution, a magical acid that dissolves time and space, eats calendars and atlases, and turns the coordinates of action into sweet nothingness. What is the meaning of the riddle? What is the use to anyone of chronology, sister of death?

the 1950s, the top skills employers wanted were: 1) the ability to work rapidly and for long periods of time, 2) memory for details and directions, and 3) arithmetic computation.2 But according to Forbes, the employees of 2020 need: 1) complex problem solving, 2) critical thinking, 3) creativity, 4) people management, 5) coordinating with others, and 6) emotional intelligence. Employers want innovative thinking, independence, initiative.

In the 1950s, the top skills employers wanted were: 1) the ability to work rapidly and for long periods of time, 2) memory for details and directions, and 3) arithmetic computation.2 But according to Forbes, the employees of 2020 need: 1) complex problem solving, 2) critical thinking, 3) creativity, 4) people management, 5) coordinating with others, and 6) emotional intelligence. Employers want innovative thinking, independence, initiative.3 These were not coveted skills in our grandparents’ time.

The coordinated volley of firing in the amygdala in response to danger is central to the felt experience of fear, as we know from studying patients like S.M. who lack both an amygdala and the ability to experience fear and from studying psychopaths in whom both the amygdala and the experience of fear are stunted. So yes, it’s certainly possible that amygdala responses to fearful expressions represent a learned response that these expressions signal the presence of danger. But there are also problems with this explanation.

Lenin was once asked to define communism in a single sentence. ‘Communism is power to worker councils,’ he said, ‘plus electrification of the whole country.’ There can be no communism without electricity, without railroads, without radio. You couldn’t establish a communist regime in sixteenth-century Russia, because communism necessitates the concentration of information and resources in one hub. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ only works when produce can easily be collected and distributed across vast distances, and when activities can be monitored and coordinated over entire countries. Marx and his followers understood the new technological realities and the new human experiences, so they had relevant answers to the new problems of industrial society, as well as original ideas about how to benefit from the unprecedented opportunities. The socialists created a brave new religion for a brave new world. They promised salvation through technology and economics, thus establishing the first techno-religion in history, and changing the foundations of ideological discourse. Before Marx, people defined and divided themselves according to their views about God, not about production methods. Since Marx, questions of technology and economic structure became far more important and divisive than debates about the soul and the afterlife. In the second half of the twentieth century, humankind almost obliterated itself in an argument about production methods. Even the harshest critics of Marx and Lenin adopted their basic attitude towards history and society, and began thinking about technology and production much more carefully than about God and heaven.

Here are the commons symptoms that result from micromanagement: 1. The team shows a lack of initiative. Members will not take action unless directed. 2. The team does not seek solutions to problems; instead, its members sit and wait to be told about a solution. 3. Even in an emergency, a team that is being micromanaged will not mobilize and take action. 4. Bold and aggressive action becomes rare. 5. Creativity grinds to a halt. 6. The team tends to stay inside their own silo; not stepping out to coordinate efforts with other departments or divisions for fear of overstepping their bounds. 7. An overall sense of passivity and failure to react.

Chronic abuse and neglect in childhood interfere with the proper wiring of sensory-integration systems. In some cases this results in learning disabilities, which include faulty connections between the auditory and word-processing systems, and poor hand-eye coordination. As long as they are frozen or explosive, it is difficult to see how much trouble the adolescents in our residential treatment programs have processing day-to-day information, but once their behavioral problems have been successfully treated, their learning disabilities often become manifest. Even if these traumatized kids could sit still and pay attention, many of them would still be handicapped by their poor learning skills.22

The first to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia. There, a scorching sun beating upon rich muddy plains produced plentiful harvests and prosperous towns. As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs. Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.

In the factory era, the goal was to have the highest PERL. Think about it. If you can easily replace most of your workers, you can pay them less. The less you pay them, the more money you make. The city newspaper, for example, might have four hundred employees, but only a few dozen salespeople and columnists were hard to replace on a moment’s notice. The goal was to leverage and defend the system, not the people. So we built giant organizations (political parties, nonprofits, schools, corporations) filled with easily replaced laborers. Unions fought back precisely because they saw coordinated action as the only way to avoid becoming commodities. Ironically, the work rules they erected merely exacerbated the problem, making every union worker just as good as every other.

In real brains neural networks do not exist in isolation. They communicate with other networks by way of synaptic transmission. For example, in order to see an apple, instead of a roundish, reddish blob, the various features of the stimulus, each processed by different visual subsystems, have to be integrated. As we saw in Chapter 7, the problem of understanding the manner in which this occurs is called the binding problem. One popular solution to this problem is based on the notion of neuronal synchrony. Synchronous (simultaneous) firing, and thus binding, has been proposed as an explanation of consciousness (chap. 7), but our interest here is more in the ability of synchronous firing between cells in different interconnected regions to coordinate plasticity across the regions.

Having a biological system that keeps pumping out stress hormones to deal with real or imagined threats leads to physical problems: sleep disturbances, headaches, unexplained pain, oversensitivity to touch or sound. Being so agitated or shut down keeps them from being able to focus their attention and concentration. To relieve their tension, they engage in chronic masturbation, rocking, or self-harming activities (biting, cutting, burning, and hitting themselves, pulling their hair out, picking at their skin until it bled). It also leads to difficulties with language processing and fine-motor coordination. Spending all their energy on staying in control, they usually have trouble paying attention to things, like schoolwork, that are not directly relevant to survival, and their hyperarousal makes them easily distracted.

Descartes was a philosopher, a mathematician, and a man of science. In philosophy and mathematics, his work was of supreme importance; in science, though creditable, it was not so good as that of some of his contemporaries. His great contribution to geometry was the invention of co-ordinate geometry, though not quite in its final form. He used the analytic method, which supposes a problem solved, and examines the consequences of the supposition; and he applied algebra to geometry. In both of these he had had predecessors—as regards the former, even among the ancients. What was original in him was the use of co-ordinates, i.e. the determination of the position of a point in a plane by its distance from two fixed lines. He did not himself discover all the power of this method, but he did enough to make further progress easy.

National Security demanded that this entire matter be kept quiet at all costs. No cost was spared in doing so. But there was one very large and busy fly in this ointment: The ETs were flying over the skies of America, sometimes in formation and before thousands of witnesses. How do you hide that? The answer is―the mind hides it. In an Orwellian twist, it was found from past psychological warfare efforts that if you told a lie often enough and the lie is repeated by “respected” authority figures, the public will believe it. One of the masters of psychological warfare during WWII was put in charge of this diversionary tactic in the late 1940s. General Walter Bedell Smith helped coordinate the psychological warfare components of this ET problem and launched the big lie: UFOs, even though thousands of people had reported seeing them, did not exist.

At last we realized that all this cross-team communication didn’t really need refinement at all—it needed elimination. Where was it written in stone that every project had to involve so many separate entities? It wasn’t just that we had had the wrong solution in mind; rather, we’d been trying to solve the wrong problem altogether. We didn’t yet have the new solution, but we finally grasped the true identity of our problem: the ever-expanding cost of coordination among teams. This change in our thinking was of course nudged along by Jeff. In my tenure at Amazon I heard him say many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. When you view effective communication across groups as a “defect,” the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional

What do you see when you look at me?” “I see you,” he answered as if it was obvious. “It’s not like I see a place, or a time, or a name: just you. Your essence. Your soul. That’s how I find you every time you come back. I know it’s hard to understand, but your soul calls me…and I’m drawn to it. I couldn’t keep away if I tried.” Sage raised his hand to my cheek, cupping it gently. I closed my eyes, resting against the warmth of his palm. When I opened them he had moved closer. I closed the distance between us and kissed him. I felt dizzy and hot and floaty, like every cliché…but it was true. I couldn’t feel my feet. I finally felt like I was where my soul belonged. There was only one problem. The gearshift was digging into my side. “Ow!” I winced. “You okay?” “Yeah…it’s just…” I gestured down, feeling like an idiot for ruining the moment. Sage didn’t seem to mind. He reached down and moved his seat back to its maximum leg room, then held out his hand. I grabbed it and clambered over the center console, clumsily ducking and folding myself until I finally settled onto his lap, straddling his legs. It was the least coordinated act of seduction ever. “Better?” he asked. “Better.” He kissed me, sliding his hands up the back of my shirt. It felt incredible. Without breaking away from his lips, I reached underneath his tee and felt his bare, sleek chest. My breath came faster, caught up in the frenzy of finally letting go and doing what I’d been dying to do from the second I’d seen Sage on the beach. “Wait,” he said. He reached down and pulled a lever. I let out a little scream as his seat back dropped all the way and I fell on top of him. I loved the feel of his body under mine. I didn’t want a single part of us not touching. “Better now?” Sage murmured into my ear. It wasn’t fair of him to ask me a question when he was doing that. I could barely function, never mind put together an answer. “Much better,” I said. “It’s practically a bed.” “Is it?” Sage agreed, and in his eyes I saw exactly what that could mean. “Oh,” I said, suddenly nervous. “But…we can’t. I mean, we don’t have…” “I do,” he said, leaning down to kiss the hollow where my neck met my shoulder. “You do?” I tensed up. Why did he have one? For who? The corner of Sage’s mouth turned up. “For us, Clea. The drugstore in Rio? I kind of had a feeling…” He moved his lips back to my neck. He nibbled on my earlobe, and I whimpered. “Oh,” I managed. “Well…then…” “I love you, Clea.” Everything tunneled in, and I heard the words echo in my head. Sage loved me. Me. I didn’t even realize I’d stopped breathing until he said my name, concerned. “Clea?” I looked at him and immediately relaxed. “I love you, too.” We kissed, and I actually felt myself melting into him as my last coherent thoughts gave way to pure sensation.

Nearly a century ago, French engineer Max Ringelmann (reported by Kravitz & Martin, 1986) found that the collective effort of tug-of-war teams was but half the sum of the individual efforts. Contrary to the presumption that “in unity there is strength,” this suggested that group members may actually be less motivated when performing additive tasks. Maybe, though, poor performance stemmed from poor coordination—people pulling a rope in slightly different directions at slightly different times. A group of Massachusetts researchers led by Alan Ingham (1974) cleverly eliminated that problem by making individuals think others were pulling with them, when in fact they were pulling alone. Blindfolded participants were assigned the first position in the apparatus and told, “Pull as hard as you can.” They pulled 18 percent harder when they knew they were pulling alone than when they believed that behind them two to five people were also pulling.

So who does run a company these days? Not the shareholders or the board. They largely find out after the fact that things have gone well or badly. Nor are firms cooperatives. Anybody who has tried to run a company by consensus will tell you how disastrously bad an idea that is. Interminable meetings follow hard upon each other’s heels as everybody tries to get everybody else to see his or her point of view. Nothing gets done, and tempers fray. The problem with consensus is that people are not allowed to be different. It’s like trying to drive a car in which the brake and the accelerator have to do similar jobs. No, what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you’re good at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and we’ll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most companies, and good management means good coordination. The employees specialise and exchange, just like participants in a market, or citizens in a city. The

So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment -- by simulation, that is mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann's Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F_1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the chandelier—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, "Hurrah! Victory!!

recent research indicates that unstructured play in natural settings is essential for children’s healthy growth. As any parent or early childhood educator will attest, play is an innate drive. It is also the primary vehicle for youngsters to experience and explore their surroundings. Compared to kids confined indoors, children who regularly play in nature show heightened motor control—including balance, coordination, and agility. They tend to engage more in imaginative and creative play, which in turn fosters language, abstract reasoning, and problem-solving skills, together with a sense of wonder. Nature play is superior at engendering a sense of self and a sense of place, allowing children to recognize both their independence and interdependence. Play in outdoor settings also exceeds indoor alternatives in fostering cognitive, emotional, and moral development. And individuals who spend abundant time playing outdoors as children are more likely to grow up with a strong attachment to place and an environmental ethic. When asked to identify the most significant environment of their childhoods, 96.5 percent of a large sample of adults named an outdoor environment. In

Addicts should not be coerced into treatment, since in the long term coercion creates more problems than it solves. On the other hand, for those addicts who opt for treatment, there must be a system of publicly funded recovery facilities with clean rooms, nutritious food, and access to outdoors and nature. Well-trained professional staff need to provide medical care, counseling, skills training, and emotional support. Our current nonsystem is utterly inadequate, with its patchwork of recovery homes run on private contracts and, here and there, a few upscale addiction treatment spas for the wealthy. No matter how committed their staff and how helpful their services may be, they are a drop in comparison to the ocean of vast need. In the absence of a coordinated rehabilitation system, the efforts of individual recovery homes are limited and occur in a vacuum, with no follow-up. It may be thought that the cost of such a drug rehabilitation and treatment system would be exorbitant. No doubt the financial expenses would be great — but surely less than the funds now freely squandered on the War on Drugs, to say nothing of the savings from the cessation of drug-related criminal activity and the diminished burden on the health care system.

Intellectuals and manufactured problems The greater a persons knowledge of political and economic facts, the more sensitive and vulnerable is his judgment. Intellectuals are most easily reached by propaganda, particularly if it employs ambiguity. The reader of a number ol newspapers expressing diverse attitude — just because he is better informed - is more subjected than anyone else to a propaganda that he cannot perceive, even though he claims to retain free choice in the mastery of all this information. Actually, he is being conditioned to absorb all the propaganda that coordinates and explains the facts he believes himself to be mastering. Thus, information not only provides the basis for propaganda but gives propaganda the means to operate; for information actually generates the problems that propaganda exploits and for which it pretends to offer solutions. In fact, no propaganda can work until the moment when a set of facts has become a problem in the eyes of those who constitute public opinion. At the moment such problems begin to confront public opinion, propaganda on the part of a government, a party, or a man can begin to develop fully by magnifying that problem on the one hand and promising solutions for it on the other. But propaganda cannot easily create a political or economic problem out of nothing. There must be some reason in reality. The problem need not actually exist, but there must be a reason why it might exist.

The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul. Obviously, this work cannot be wrought by turning back, or away, from what has been accomplished by the modern revolution; for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the modern world spiritually significant—or rather (phrasing the same principle the other way round) nothing if not that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life. Indeed, these conditions themselves are what have rendered the ancient formulae ineffective, misleading, and even pernicious. The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the in-group now can only break it into factions. The national idea, with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. Its parody rituals of the parade ground serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon, not the God in whom self-interest is annihilate. And the numerous saints of this anticult—namely the patriots whose ubiquitous photographs, draped with flags, serve as official icons—are precisely the local threshold guardians (our demon Sticky-hair) whom it is the first problem of the hero to surpass.

The motor activities we take for granted—getting out of a chair and walking across a room, picking up a cup and drinking coffee,and so on—require integration of all the muscles and sensory organs working smoothly together to produce coordinated movements that we don't even have to think about. No one has ever explained how the simple code of impulses can do all that. Even more troublesome are the higher processes, such as sight—in which somehow we interpret a constantly changing scene made of innumerable bits of visual data—or the speech patterns, symbol recognition, and grammar of our languages.Heading the list of riddles is the "mind-brain problem" of consciousness, with its recognition, "I am real; I think; I am something special." Then there are abstract thought, memory, personality,creativity, and dreams. The story goes that Otto Loewi had wrestled with the problem of the synapse for a long time without result, when one night he had a dream in which the entire frog-heart experiment was revealed to him. When he awoke, he knew he'd had the dream, but he'd forgotten the details. The next night he had the same dream. This time he remembered the procedure, went to his lab in the morning, did the experiment, and solved the problem. The inspiration that seemed to banish neural electricity forever can't be explained by the theory it supported! How do you convert simple digital messages into these complex phenomena? Latter-day mechanists have simply postulated brain circuitry so intricate that we will probably never figure it out, but some scientists have said there must be other factors.

It is conceivable that an interplay of genes and epigenes coordinates human embryogenesis. Let us return, yet again, to Morgan's problem: the creation of a multicellular organism from a one-celled embryo. Seconds after fertilization, a quickening begins in the embryo. Proteins reach into the nucleus of the cell and start flicking genetic switches on and off. A dormant spaceship comes to life. Genes are activated and repressed, and these genes, in turn, encode yet other proteins that activate and repress other genes. A single cell divides to form two, then four, and eight cells. An entire layer of cells forms, then hollows out into the outer skin of a ball. Genes that coordinate metabolism, motility, cell fate, and identity fire "on." The boiler room warms us. The lights flicker on in the corridors. The intercom crackles alive. Now a second code stirs to life to ensure that gene expression is locked into place in each cell, enabling each cell to acquire and fix an identity. Chemical marks are selectively added to certain genes and erased from others, modulating the expression of the genes in that cell alone. Methyl groups are inserted and erased, and histones are modified to repress or activate genes. The embryo unfurls step by step. Primordial segements appear, and cells take their positions along various parts of the embryo. New genes are activated that command subroutines to grow limbs and organs, and more chemical marks are appended on the genomes of individual cells. Cells are added to create organs and structures-forelegs, hind legs, muscles, kidneys, bones, eyes. Some cells die a programmed death. Genes that maintain function, metabolism, and repair are turned on. An organism emerges from a cell.

In this simple observation about the nature of human consciousness lies a challenge that was taken up sometime in the course of Hinduism’s long development: focus the mind so that the tumble of extraneous thoughts is slowed, then stilled altogether. The practice that developed, which we know as meditation, is of unknown antiquity. It was certainly already in use when the Upanishads were put into writing circa –6C. An archaic form may be inferred from the Rig Veda, which takes the practice back at least to –1200. If recent arguments that the Rig Veda dates to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization hold up, then we must think in terms of an additional millennium or two during which some form of meditation was practiced. I have dated the culmination of the development of meditation to –2C because that is the most popular dating for the life of Patanjali, the Hindu sage who is seen as the progenitor of classical Yoga, an advanced system of meditation. Since its initial development in India, forms of meditation have become part of most religions and of a wide range of secular schools as well. In the West, despite the importance of forms of meditation in Catholicism and some Protestant Christian churches, the word meditation has become identified with some of the flamboyant sects that attracted publicity in the 1960s and 1970s. In some circles, meditation is seen as part of Asian mysticism, not a cognitive tool. This is one instance in which Eurocentrism is a genuine problem. The nature of meditation is coordinate with ways of perceiving the world that are distinctively Asian. But to say that the cognitive tool called meditation is peculiarly useful to Asians is like saying that logic—my next meta-invention—is useful only to Europeans. Meditation and logic found homes in different parts of the world, but meditation, like logic, is a flexible, powerful extension of human cognitive capacity.

In a typical crash, for example, the weather is poor—not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual. In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start—and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another and another, and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster. These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps—and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them. “The whole flight-deck design is intended to be operated by two people, and that operation works best when you have one person checking the other, or both people willing to participate,” says Earl Weener, who was for many years chief engineer for safety at Boeing. “Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don’t do things right. And for a long time it’s been clear that if you have two people operating the airplane cooperatively, you will have a safer operation than if you have a single pilot flying the plane and another person who is simply there to take over if the pilot is incapacitated.

Give us an idea of…” Noya Baram rubs her temples. “Oh, well.” Augie begins to stroll around again. “The examples are limitless. Small examples: elevators stop working. Grocery-store scanners. Train and bus passes. Televisions. Phones. Radios. Traffic lights. Credit-card scanners. Home alarm systems. Laptop computers will lose all their software, all files, everything erased. Your computer will be nothing but a keyboard and a blank screen. “Electricity would be severely compromised. Which means refrigerators. In some cases, heat. Water—well, we have already seen the effect on water-purification plants. Clean water in America will quickly become a scarcity. “That means health problems on a massive scale. Who will care for the sick? Hospitals? Will they have the necessary resources to treat you? Surgical operations these days are highly computerized. And they will not have access to any of your prior medical records online. “For that matter, will they treat you at all? Do you have health insurance? Says who? A card in your pocket? They won’t be able to look you up and confirm it. Nor will they be able to seek reimbursement from the insurer. And even if they could get in contact with the insurance company, the insurance company won’t know whether you’re its customer. Does it have handwritten lists of its policyholders? No. It’s all on computers. Computers that have been erased. Will the hospitals work for free? “No websites, of course. No e-commerce. Conveyor belts. Sophisticated machinery inside manufacturing plants. Payroll records. “Planes will be grounded. Even trains may not operate in most places. Cars, at least any built since, oh, 2010 or so, will be affected. “Legal records. Welfare records. Law enforcement databases. The ability of local police to identify criminals, to coordinate with other states and the federal government through databases—no more. “Bank records. You think you have ten thousand dollars in your savings account? Fifty thousand dollars in a retirement account? You think you have a pension that allows you to receive a fixed payment every month?” He shakes his head. “Not if computer files and their backups are erased. Do banks have a large wad of cash, wrapped in a rubber band with your name on it, sitting in a vault somewhere? Of course not. It’s all data.” “Mother of God,” says Chancellor Richter, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

look at your child next time he is watching television and ask yourself what he is doing—or, better yet, what he is not doing. , the child is not: • Scanning • Practicing motor skills, gross or fine • Practicing eye-hand coordination • Using more than two senses • Asking questions • Exploring • Exercising initiative or motivation • Being challenged • Solving problems • Thinking analytically • Exercising imagination • Practicing communication skills • Being either creative or constructive

That forum would hardly be the last time Hillary—or, for that matter, half the primary field—outperformed me, for it soon seemed as if we were gathered for a debate once every two or three weeks. I had never been particularly good in these formats myself: My long windups and preference for complicated answers worked against me, particularly onstage with seven savvy pros and a single timed minute to answer a question. During our first debate in April, the moderator called time at least twice before I was done speaking. Asked about how I’d handle multiple terrorist attacks, I discussed the need to coordinate federal help but neglected to mention the obvious imperative to go after the perpetrators. For the next several minutes, Hillary and the others took turns pointing out my oversight. Their tones were somber, but the gleam in their eyes said, Take that, rookie. Afterward, Axe was gentle in his postgame critique. “Your problem,” he said, “is you keep trying to answer the question.” “Isn’t that the point?” I said. “No, Barack,” Axe said, “that is not the point. The point is to get your message across. What are your values? What are your priorities? That’s what people care about. Look, half the time the moderator is just using the question to try to trip you up. Your job is to avoid the trap they’ve set. Take whatever question they give you, give ’em a quick line to make it seem like you answered it…and then talk about what you want to talk about.” “That’s bullshit,” I said. “Exactly,” he said.

Applying this approach to measuring the value of impact investments generates thorny methodological problems. The first is that blended value often comes with public and collective good characteristics. Like the meadow that creates a feeding ground for migratory birds, they often create value that is enjoyed by those who do not pay for it. They also often require coordination between both customers and others, such as a drinking water business that relies on many noncustomers to keep the aquifer where it sources the water clean.

I felt super-frustrated. We’d hired all these talented people and were spending tons of money, but we weren’t going any faster. Things came to a head over a top-priority marketing OKR for personalized emails with targeted content. The objective was well constructed: We wanted to drive a certain minimum number of monthly active users to our blog. One important key result was to increase our click-through rate from emails. The catch was that no one in marketing had thought to inform engineering, which had already set its own priorities that quarter. Without buy-in from the engineers, the OKR was doomed before it started. Even worse, Albert and I didn’t find out it was doomed until our quarterly postmortem. (The project got done a quarter late.) That was our wake-up call, when we saw the need for more alignment between teams. Our OKRs were well crafted, but implementation fell short. When departments counted on one another for crucial support, we failed to make the dependency explicit. Coordination was hit-and-miss, with deadlines blown on a regular basis. We had no shortage of objectives, but our teams kept wandering away from one another. The following year, we tried to fix the problem with periodic integration meetings for the executive team. Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. No one left the room until we’d answered some basic questions: Are we meeting everyone’s needs for buy-in? Is a team overstretched? If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?

In a second experiment, researchers did not prime race, but instead the students were randomly assigned to one of two treatments.41 In both groups, the instructions said the exercises would become increasingly challenging. In one group, the instructions said the test was designed to measure personal factors correlated with natural athletic ability. Natural athletic ability was defined as “one’s natural ability to perform complex tasks that require hand-eye coordination, such as shooting, throwing, or hitting a ball or other moving objects.” In the other, the same test was presented as measuring “sports intelligence,” or “personal factors correlated with the ability to think strategically during an athletic performance.” In the “natural ability” condition, the African Americans did much better than the whites. In the “sports intelligence” condition, the whites did much better than the African Americans. Everyone, including the blacks themselves, had bought into the stereotype of the African American natural athlete and the white natural strategic player.

Having hit on this “theory,” I began to recognize checklists in odd corners everywhere—in the hands of professional football coordinators, say, or on stage sets. Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse. As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error.… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor. “David Lee Roth had a checklist!” I yelled at the radio.

I’m Jay Powers, the circulating nurse”; “I’m Zhi Xiong, the anesthesiologist”—that sort of thing. It felt kind of hokey to me, and I wondered how much difference this step could really make. But it turned out to have been carefully devised. There have been psychology studies in various fields backing up what should have been self-evident—people who don’t know one another’s names don’t work together nearly as well as those who do. And Brian Sexton, the Johns Hopkins psychologist, had done studies showing the same in operating rooms. In one, he and his research team buttonholed surgical staff members outside their operating rooms and asked them two questions: how would they rate the level of communications during the operation they had just finished and what were the names of the other staff members on the team? The researchers learned that about half the time the staff did not know one another’s names. When they did, however, the communications ratings jumped significantly. The investigators at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had also observed that when nurses were given a chance to say their names and mention concerns at the beginning of a case, they were more likely to note problems and offer solutions. The researchers called it an “activation phenomenon.” Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up. These were limited studies and hardly definitive. But the initial results were enticing. Nothing had ever been shown to improve the ability of surgeons to broadly reduce harm to patients aside from experience and specialized training. Yet here, in three separate cities, teams had tried out these unusual checklists, and each had found a positive effect. At Johns Hopkins, researchers specifically measured their checklist’s effect on teamwork. Eleven surgeons had agreed to try it in their cases—seven general surgeons, two plastic surgeons, and two neurosurgeons. After three months, the number of team members in their operations reporting that they “functioned as a well-coordinated team” leapt from 68 percent to 92 percent. At the Kaiser hospitals in Southern California, researchers had tested their checklist for six months in thirty-five hundred operations. During that time, they found that their staff’s average rating of the teamwork climate improved from “good” to “outstanding.” Employee satisfaction rose 19 percent. The rate of OR nurse turnover—the proportion leaving their jobs each year—dropped from 23 percent to 7 percent. And the checklist appeared to have caught numerous near errors. In

Emotional self-regulation isn’t just “emotional” in the sense of feelings, such as anger, shame, guilt, and resentment. It’s physical, in the form of bundles of neurons that fire together and wire together, sometimes communicating with distant parts of the brain. Behavior that demonstrates poor emotional self-regulation is the external evidence of the activity of neural pathways deep inside the limbic system. In people who are depressed, the hippocampus shrinks over time. In people with chronic PTSD, high cortisol levels produce calcium deposits on the hippocampus. You want lots of calcium in your bones and teeth. You certainly don’t want it ossifying your brain’s memory and learning center. Conversely, people with effective emotional self-regulation grow a larger hippocampus and much greater volumes of neural tissue in substructures like the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus that coordinates emotional control among different parts of the brain. As happy people practice the emotional regulation required to shift their focus away from random thoughts and the problems of life, they turn states to traits.

Richard found a job at the Holiday Inn, keeping the place clean, carrying luggage, and doing light maintenance work. The money wasn’t bad and there were lots of women for him to look at. He had become acutely aware of women and sex; he would masturbate frequently as he imagined different scenarios—most involving bondage—with the attractive women he saw around the hotel. His first problems at the Holiday Inn occurred when he was in the hotel elevator with two girls in their teens. He smiled at one of them and told her he thought she was pretty. She said thank you and promptly told her parents Richard had made a pass. Her parents complained to the assistant manager, who told the manager, who promptly summoned Richard to the office. Richard was told he was not to flirt with the guests’ daughters and was warned that if another such incident happened he’d be fired. He promised it wouldn’t. The manager made him apologize to the girls’ parents and the incident was forgotten. After being employed at the Holiday Inn for three months, Richard was given a master key to the hotel’s rooms. He says he got it from his friend, who had worked at the hotel but had been fired for being late and not showing up. By now Richard was 5′10″ with taut, sinewy muscles. He was very well coordinated, the fastest runner in his class. He was still enrolled in Jefferson High, but for the most part he didn’t attend classes. From the very first, Richard had gone back to the hotel at night to look in the windows. The hotel had curtains of stiff fabric, and there was frequently an inch or two where someone could look in. The unsuspecting guests had no idea he was there, spying on them, fantasizing about them. He began testing himself, becoming bolder and entering the rooms with his pass key while the guests were sleeping. That’s when the most valuables were there, he realized.

These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps—and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them.

Milliseconds after the brain is presented with input it starts organizing the meaning of the incoming information. Normally, all regions of the brain collaborate in a synchronized pattern (left), while the brainwaves in PTSD are less well coordinated; the brain has trouble filtering out irrelevant information and has problems attending to the stimulus at hand.

Controls are the mechanisms that you use to align with other leaders you work with, and they can range from defining metrics to sprint planning (although I wouldn’t recommend the latter). There is no universal set of controls—depending on the size of team and your relationships with its leaders, you’ll want to mix and match—but the controls structure itself is universally applicable. Some of the most common controls that I’ve seen and used: Metrics26 align on outcomes while leaving flexibility around how the outcomes are achieved. Visions27 ensure that you agree on long-term direction while preserving short-term flexibility. Strategies28 confirm you have a shared understanding of the current constraints and how to address them. Organization design allows you to coordinate the evolution of a wider organization within the context of sub-organizations. Head count and transfers are the ultimate form of prioritization, and a good forum for validating how organizational priorities align across individual teams. Roadmaps align on problem selection and solution validation. Performance reviews coordinate culture and recognition. Etc. There are an infinite number of other possibilities, many of which are specific to your company’s particular meetings and forums. Start with this list, but don’t stick to it!

Coordination troubles, like other kinds of destructive friction, are often orphan problems that everyone knows about, but no one feels accountable for fixing.

The Cancer Center suffered from two hallmarks of organizations that are plagued with coordination snafus. First, powerful people ignore, dismiss, denigrate, and even undermine people and groups they need to mesh their work with. Oncologists saw themselves as being at the top of the pecking order at the center and the work of other specialists as secondary, trivial, or downright useless. They dismissed side effects, including fatigue, diarrhea, and cramps, caused by chemotherapy that they prescribed as “normal” and left it to patients to find specialists to treat such problems. Second, powerful people devote little attention to solutions for coordination problems. Executives, consultants, and physicians who launched the center gave lip service to collaboration across silos. Yet they focused on building strong teams and departments in areas such as brain tumors, breast cancer, and skin cancer—and ignored how to help the units work together.

knew, in abstract, that Autumn, Charlie, and Boney selling a prescription drug to privileged Carlton kids was part of a bigger problem. But seeing it in real time is a whole other thing, especially since part of my job is coordinating activities for kids who live at the shelter. There’s no way I’ll go

David versus Goliath Asymmetry lies at the heart of network-based competition. The larger or smaller network will be at different stages of the Cold Start framework and, as such, will gravitate toward a different set of levers. The giant is often fighting gravitational pull as its network grows and saturates the market. To combat these negative forces, it must add new use cases, introduce the product to new audiences, all while making sure it’s generating a profit. The upstart, on the other hand, is trying to solve the Cold Start Problem, and often starts with a niche. A new startup has the luxury of placing less emphasis on profitability and might instead focus on top-line growth, subsidizing the market to grow its network. When they encounter each other in the market, it becomes natural that their competitive moves reflect their different goals and resources. Startups have fewer resources—capital, employees, distribution—but have important advantages in the context of building new networks: speed and a lack of sacred cows. A new startup looking to compete against Zoom might try a more specific use case, like events, and if that doesn’t work, they can quickly pivot and try something else, like corporate education classes. Startups like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and many other products have similar stories, and went through an incubation phase as the product was refined and an initial network was built. Trying and failing many times is part of the startup journey—it only takes the discovery of one atomic network to get into the market. With that, a startup is often able to start the next leg of the journey, often with more investment and resources to support them. Contrast that to a larger company, which has obvious advantages in resources, manpower, and existing product lines. But there are real disadvantages, too: it’s much harder to solve the Cold Start Problem with a slower pace of execution, risk aversion, and a “strategy tax” that requires new products to align to the existing business. Something seems to happen when companies grow to tens of thousands of employees—they inevitably create rigorous processes for everything, including planning cycles, performance reviews, and so on. This helps teams focus, but it also creates a harder environment for entrepreneurial risk-taking. I saw this firsthand at Uber, whose entrepreneurial culture shifted in its later years toward profitability and coordinating the efforts of tens of thousands. This made it much harder to start new initiatives—for better and worse. When David and Goliath meet in the market—and often it’s one Goliath and many investor-funded Davids at once—the resulting moves and countermoves are fascinating. Now that I have laid down some of the theoretical foundation for how competition fits into Cold Start Theory, let me describe and unpack some of the most powerful moves in the network-versus-network playbook.

Studies have shown that multitasking degrades the performance of completing even simple tasks, such as sorting geometric shapes.3 The serious impact of this phenomenon was shown by Harvard researchers Dr. Steven Wheelwright and Dr. Kim Clark. They wrote about the problem of spreading engineers’ attention over too many projects simultaneously. As the number of projects went up, the time spent on productive tasks (e.g., problem-solving, interpreting data) went down by more than half, from 70% or more of their time to about 30%. The increased nonproductive activities included status meetings (communicating and coordinating across teams), switching costs (time required to reestablish context from one project to another), and so forth.

Everything that’s happening is coordinated by someone behind the scenes with one goal: to completely ruin scientific research.

Have you adequately partitioned (modularized) the big problems on which you are working into smaller, more tractable pieces? Here’s a test: every time you want to develop or try something new, can it be done quickly, or do you spend so much time trying to schedule discussions and solicit cooperation and approvals, that nothing ever actually gets done? If you answered the latter, you have something that needs to be broken into smaller pieces so you’re not crushed by the burden of coordination costs.

These scrums provide opportunities for problems to surface and for a team member who’s overloaded to get help from another team member. Software teams benefit from meeting every day because their batches (user stories) are small enough to require daily coordination.

By changing the strength of synaptic connections, animals learn.1 Learning confers a huge evolutionary advantage, because the animal can adapt to a range of circumstances. Learning also speeds up the rate of evolution itself. Initially, neurons were organized into nerve nets, which are distributed throughout the organism and serve to coordinate activities such as eating and digestion or the timed contraction of muscle cells across a wide area. The graceful propulsion of jellyfish is the result of a nerve net. Jellyfish have no brains at all.

Active space is not only a space of movement made up from thousand of steps in all directions but it has a system of coordinates, which is used as a basis for all the space determinations. It is of capital importance that whoever deals with the problem of space is convinced of this fact. Any normal human carries with him a frame of reference formed of three planes of the three semi-circular canals.

After all, when one asks if a person is being rational, we aren’t asking very much: really, just whether they are capable of making basic logical connections. The matter rarely comes up unless one suspects someone might actually be crazy or perhaps so blinded by passion that their arguments make no sense. Consider, in contrast, what’s entailed when one asks if someone is being "reasonable." The standard here is much higher. Reasonableness implies a much more sophisticated ability to achieve a balance between different perspectives, values, and imperatives, non of which, usually, could possibly be reduced to mathematical formulae. It means coming up with a compromise between positions that are, according to formal logic, incommensurable, just as there’s no formal way, when deciding what to cook for dinner, to measure the contrasting advantages of ease of preparation, healthiness, and taste. But of course we make such decisions all the time. Most of life--particularly life with others--consists of making reasonable compromises that could never be reduced to mathematical models. Another way to put this is that political theorists tend to assume actors who are operating on the intellectual level of an eight-year-old. Developmental psychologists have observed that children begin to make logical arguments not to solve problems, but when coming up with reasons for what they already wan to think. Anyone who deals with small children on a regular basis will immediately recognize that this is true. The ability to compare and coordinate contrasting perspectives on the other hand comes later and is the very essence of mature intelligence. It’s also precisely what those used to the power of command rarely have to do. (p. 200-201)

a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates, i.e., it literally “teaches us how to desire.” To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is rather, how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me.

51. Do you have a really hard time tolerating frustration? 52. Are you restless without “action” in your life? 53. Do you have a hard time reading a book all the way through? 54. Do you regularly break rules or minor laws rather than put up with the frustration of obeying them? 55. Are you beset by irrational worries? 56. Do you frequently make letter or number reversals? 57. Have you been the driver and at fault in more than four car accidents? 58. Do you handle money erratically? 59. Are you a gung-ho, go-for-it sort of person? 60. Do you find that structure and routine are both rare in your life and soothing when you find them? 61. Have you been divorced more than once? 62. Do you struggle to maintain self-esteem? 63. Do you have poor hand-eye coordination? 64. As a kid, were you a bit of a klutz at sports? 65. Have you changed jobs a lot? 66. Are you a maverick? 67. Are memos virtually impossible for you to read or write? 68. Do you find it almost impossible to keep an updated address book, phone book, or Rolodex? 69. Are you the life of the party one day and hangdog the next? 70. Given an unexpected chunk of free time, do you often find that you don’t use it well or get depressed during it? 71. Are you more creative or imaginative than most people? 72. Is paying attention or staying tuned in a chronic problem for you? 73. Do you work best in short spurts? 74. Do you let the bank balance your checkbook? 75. Are you usually eager to try something new?

To peel back the layers of a candidate’s character, I suggest some additional steps: • Ask for permission to contact those who worked under the candidate in their prior two jobs. This would include assistant pastors, administrative assistants, ministry coordinators, and more. These individuals, if allowed to speak confidentially, would give significantly more accurate information about the candidate’s character. • Make sure to reach out to women at the candidate’s prior church, either a volunteer leader or female staff. In my experience, search committees almost never talk to women but only men—and only men handpicked by the candidate. That is a broken system. Women often have a radically different perspective on their church than the men do. • Ask for permission to speak to the elders of the candidate’s prior church, and not just the ones the candidate handpicks. Their evaluation of the pastor after his departure (confidentially, of course) would be enlightening.

1. The clear and quantitative physical differences among people in size, strength, speed, agility, coordination, and other physical attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited. 2. The clear and quantitative intellectual differences among people in memory, problem solving ability, cognitive speed, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, and other mental attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited.

one of FerroKin’s most important solutions to the cost problem is to have no physical office, instead relying on wireless phones and home internet connections to coordinate an intensive round of pre-clinical investigations and regulatory filings. “We wanted to do this from our homes,” he says, because putting a premium on being in the same physical location every day and attending endless meetings unnecessarily constrains whom you can hire and what work skills you pay for in an employee. Sensitive medical information can be secured digitally even as it is shared among distributed team members and the outsourced labs and clinics that are performing the work. As a result, digital reduces the barriers to focusing on the job at hand.

Here at the new frontier of urban policy the chairman and his committee were in harmony: PCJD staff members were not timid bureaucrats but lively, self-styled “guerrillas.” Bobby matched their social science credentials with his zeal. Together they developed contrarian, almost radical, views. Two, as it turned out, were crucial: first, that insufficient opportunity was the root cause of poverty; and second, that the problem required “community action”—a vague notion but clearly something other than bureaucratic, top-down, federal largess. “We felt that you could spend $30 million in one city and not have any impact whatsoever,” Hackett explained later. The committee held that government must not impose solutions but empower the poor to develop their own. The PCJD financed and coordinated a dozen local initiatives on an experimental basis in cities like Cleveland, New Haven, and New York. The programs provided comprehensive services (education, employment, and job training) that encouraged self-sufficiency.

Kennedy’s influence was cut short by the assassination, but he weighed in with a memo to LBJ. The problem, Kennedy explained on January 16, was that “most federal programs are directed at only a single aspect of the problem. They are sometimes competitive and frequently aimed at only a temporary solution or provide for only a minimum level of subsistence. These programs are always planned for the poor—not with the poor.” Kennedy’s solution was a new cabinet-level committee to coordinate comprehensive, local programs that “[involve] the cooperation of the poor” Kennedy listed six cities where local “coordinating mechanisms” were strong enough that pilot programs might be operational by fall. “In my judgment,” he added prophetically, “the anti-poverty program could actually retard the solution of these problems, unless we use the basic approach outlined above.” If there was such a thing as a “classical” vision of community action, Kennedy’s memo was its epitaph. On February 1, while Kennedy was in East Asia, Johnson appointed Sargent Shriver to head the war on poverty. It was an important signal that the president would be running the program his way, not Bobby’s. It was also a canny personal slap at RFK—who, according to Ted Sorensen, had “seriously consider[ed] heading” the antipoverty effort. Viewed in this light, Johnson’s choice of Shriver was particularly shrewd. Not only was Shriver hardworking and dynamic—a great salesman—but he was a Kennedy in-law, married to Bobby’s sister Eunice. In Kennedy family photos Shriver stood barrel-chested and beaming, a member of the inner circle, every bit as vigorous, handsome, Catholic, and aristocratic as the rest. By placing Shriver at the helm of the war on poverty, Johnson demonstrated his fealty to the dead president. But LBJ and Bobby both understood that Shriver was very much his own man. After the assassination Shriver signaled his independence from the Kennedys by slipping the new president a note card delineating “What Bobby Thinks.” In 1964, Shriver’s status as a quasi-Kennedy made him Bobby’s rival for the vice presidency, but even before then their relationship was hardly fraternal. Within the Kennedy family Shriver was gently mocked. His liberalism on civil rights earned him the monikers “Boy Scout,” “house Communist,” and “too-liberal in-law.” Bobby’s unease was returned in kind. “Believe me,” RFK’s Senate aide Adam Walinsky observed, “Sarge was no close pal brother-in-law and he wasn’t giving Robert Kennedy any extra breaks.” If Shriver’s loyalty was divided, it was split between Johnson and himself, not Johnson and Kennedy.

Accountability With Friends   In many areas of life there's a battle between doing the thing that will work very effectively to solve a specific problem in the short term versus doing that which will take longer to become effective but will solve many problems in the long term. For example, building up willpower is extremely slow, but once you have a high capacity for it, you can do a lot of difficult things outside your routine. If you have low or normal willpower, you will rely exclusively on habits to get a lot done.   Similarly, it's a good practice to build up the ability to be accountable entirely to yourself, but if you're unable to do that, or for habits that are very long term or very difficult, you can ask a friend to help you be accountable.   A good friend of mine, Leo Babauta, who is a master of habits and is excellent at being accountable to himself, asked me to help him stay accountable for his diet because he was trying to eat a perfect diet for a full six months. That's a very difficult challenge, but having someone to stay accountable to makes it slightly easier.   Earlier this year I wanted to completely eliminate all non-work web browsing for three months, so I asked a friend to hold me accountable. It worked, and I'm not sure I would have been able to do it without him.   When asking a friend to hold you accountable, make it concrete and easy for him. It must be concrete, because you don't want to impose on him to constantly evaluate your progress. Either Leo ate sugar or he didn't. Either I visited a web site or I didn't. You must also report your progress at regular intervals. Leo created a shared spreadsheet where I could see whether he ate properly each day.   Last, there must be consequences for failure. The primary purpose of having consequences is that they make the agreement official and definite. People remember bets, but forget offhand claims. My friend bet me $50 I couldn't stay off the web sites for three months. Without the bet, I doubt he would have kept track of it if he had just said, “I don't think you can do it”. Since your friend is doing you a favor, be willing to make a one-sided bet where he has no downside.   Reserve accountability for only the most difficult and important of your habits. It increases compliance, but at the cost of coordinating (albeit minimally) with someone else. It's also a missed opportunity to build the habit of self-reliance, so use it only when there's serious concern that you may not stick with the habit without it.   Habitualizing

This points to another problem the Japanese had: coordination of their immediate fleet defense was difficult. Unlike the Americans, they had no radar and therefore relied on visual contact for the identification of intruders. Second, their radio equipment was poor and often ignored by the pilots[5]. Third, the fighter pilots, while highly skilled, were imbued with bushido, the Japanese martial tradition that emphasised individual aggression rather than teamwork. None

The three-body problem illustrates how easy it is to run into computational irreducibility. It is a problem that borders on the trivial, yet it seems that it cannot be solved analytically. There is no apparent shortcut, no mathematical equation that can tell you the trajectory.5 In general, if you want to know where the planets will end up at some time down the road, you have to ride along with them as they trace their paths, either in practice or in simulation. If we want to know whether the planets crash, whether one of them will fly off into space, whether they will be periodic or chaotic, we have to follow them over the course of their travels. We can’t plug coordinates or a time period into a formula and crank out the answer.

The success of the scaling-up process depends upon the fact that the conceptual integrity of each piece has been radically improved—that the number of minds determining the design has been divided by seven. So it is possible to put 200 people on a problem and face the problem of coordinating only 20 minds, those of the surgeons. For that coordination problem, however, separate techniques must be used, and these are discussed in succeeding chapters. Let it suffice here to say that the entire system also must have conceptual integrity, and that requires a system architect to design it all, from the top down. To make that job manageable, a sharp distinction must be made between architecture and implementation, and the system architect must confine himself scrupulously to architecture.

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.

If there are n workers on a project, there are (n2–n)/2 interfaces across which there may be communication, and there are potentially almost 2n teams within which coordination must occur. The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of communication and coordination necessary; hence organization is a radical attack on the communication problems treated above. The means by which communication is obviated are division of labor and specialization of function. The tree-like structure of organizations reflects the diminishing need for detailed communication when division and specialization of labor are applied.

In 1992, a forty-six-year-old woman whom I’ll call Hannah underwent a neurological examination at a hospital in Vienna, Austria. The neurologist, Georg Goldenberg, began by asking Hannah to describe his own face. It was an odd question, but Hannah complied. The doctor had short hair and was clean shaven, she said; he wasn’t wearing glasses, and he looked like he had a bit of a tan. Goldenberg next asked Hannah about an object in front of her. It was a notebook, she answered, like the kind schoolchildren use, with a brown cover and some writing in Latin script that she couldn’t quite make out. And where exactly was the book located, the doctor asked her. He was holding it up in his left hand, Hannah replied, at just about eye level. The trouble was this: Goldenberg’s face was concealed behind a screen, the object in front of his patient was a comb, and before asking about its location, he’d hidden it beneath the table in front of him. Hannah was blind. One month earlier, she had suffered a stroke that destroyed virtually her entire visual cortex and left her all but unable to move, owing to loss of muscle coordination and chronic, epilepsy-like contractions, especially on the left side of her body. All that was bad enough. But Hannah was also left with a rarer and stranger problem: she didn’t know that she was blind.

Times of rapid change and increasing complexity require a shift from optimization towards innovation. Forcing workers to blindly execute the upfront plans and sequential processes of the “waterfall model” turns out not to be the one best way. But we do it anyway. Taylor’s obsession with time, order, and efficiency has been absorbed into the fabric of our culture. We share his faith in reductionism. We divide projects into phases into tasks. We separate people into teams into roles. We split work into steps and silos. Then things fall through the cracks. Figure 1-6. The Waterfall Model. It’s not that waterfall is wrong. In many contexts, it’s a useful model. The problem is that, all too often, we apply it without realizing it’s not the only way. Again, it helps to know history. In the 1950s, Toyota figured out how to avoid the pitfalls of Taylorism by embracing what’s now called Lean. In design, all relevant specialists were involved at the outset, so conflicts about resources and priorities were resolved early on. And in production, managers learned that by making small batches and giving every worker the ability to stop the line, they could identify, fix, and prevent errors more quickly and effectively. [40] Rather than serving as cogs in the machine, workers were expected to solve problems by using “the five why’s” to systematically trace every error to its root cause. Similarly, suppliers were expected to coordinate the flow of parts and information within the just-in-time supply system of kanban.

Chain code Labs to be able to Host an additional Run regarding Its Month-Long Bitcoin Html coding Class Chain code Labs, the newest York-based improvement company and also a major factor to Bitcoin Core, will be organizing an extra edition involving its Bitcoin residency put in the first weeks of 2018. The program expects to help designers overcome the particular steep understanding curve connected with becoming a protocol-level contributor for you to projects just like Bitcoin Key. In doing, therefore , Chaincode Amenities hopes to aid expand Bitcoin’s development neighborhood. “Last 12 months was the 1st run, ” Chaincode System developer David Newbery advised Bitcoin Journal. “We have today taken the favorable stuff from this and attempted to make it a lot more focused along with useful for occupants this year. ” The Residency Program Chain code Labs, inside collaboration together with Matt Corallo - who also worked from Blockstream this past year but became a member of Chaincode Facility since: organized typically the residency plan for the first time throughout September in addition to October connected with 2016. Another edition begins on The month of January 29, 2018, and will previous until Feb. 23. Newbery himself has been one of the guests of this initial residency software. He was afterward hired simply by Chaincode Amenities and has given that been the most prolific contributing factors to the Bitcoin Core job. Now, he or she is coordinating the next of a couple of legs in the new course. “Chaincode System exists to boost Bitcoin, ” said Newbery. “We do that by simply contributing to Bitcoin Core, yet each of people has a lot with the freedom to accomplish what we consider is important. As well as the main function of this residency program is always to try to improve the designer community. ” Specifically, classes will cover standard protocol design, adversarial thinking, risk models plus security things to consider, as well as deal with some of Bitcoin’s biggest problems, like climbing, fungibility and also privacy. Guests will mostly discover by doing and might even commence contributing to often the Bitcoin-Central project through the residency. Through the program will have them assisted from the entire Chaincode Labs crew - Alex Morcos, Suhas Daftuar, Shiny Corallo, Ruben Newbery along with Russ Yanofsky. There are often guest loudspeakers.

It's hard to beat signaling equilibria - because they're 'multi-factor markets' - which are special cases of coordination problems that create 'inferior Nash equilibria' - which are so stuck in place that market controllers can seek rent on the value generated by captive participants.

Rather than telling everyone what we needed to do, I would ask questions about how they thought we should approach a problem. Rather than being the central hub coordinating maintenance between two divisions, I told the division chiefs to talk to each other directly

The central problem is that models developed by Llinas and others conceive of consciousness as an all-or-nothing condition. They fail to describe how the physical brain can accommodate the ebb and flow of a continuously variable conscious state. I favor an alternative. For more than a decade, scientists have known that the activity of tens of millions of neurons can synchronize for a few hundred milliseconds, then disband in less than a second. These “assemblies” of coordinating cells can vary continuously in just the right space and timescales for the here-and-now experience of consciousness. Wide-ranging networks of neurons assemble, disassemble and reassemble in coalitions that are unique to each moment. My model is that consciousness varies in degree from one moment to the next and that the number of neurons active within an assembly correlates with the degree of consciousness present at any given time.

His cause in the mid-1980s was solving the systemic problems in DOD that he believed to be responsible for the catastrophic handling of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983. The hearings he called for, and parallel ones in the House, revealed a riot of military disorganization that rivaled that of the Crimean War: an unclear chain of command; almost nonexistent communications between the military services; vague rules of engagement; and poor coordination, even in the timely evacuation of the wounded. Goldwater and Nichols, both veterans with a deep understanding of the military, took the lead on investigating these debacles.

The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.

For the benefit of kids, "chart art" pulls them away from electronic screens, both big and small. They can enjoy pencils and colors in their hands, while they create pictures that evolve on paper. "Griddles" will get their thought process going, along with problem solving, and discovery - not to mention hand-eye coordination and motor development. It's also a learning tool for numbers and letters on the printed page

The relation of an organization to the external environment is, however, only one source of institutional experience. There is also an internal social world to be considered. An {8} organization is a group of living human beings. The formal or official design for living never completely accounts for what the participants do. It is always supplemented by what is called the “informal structure,” which arises as the individual brings into play his own personality, his special problems and interests. Formal relations co-ordinate roles or specialized activities, not persons.

Language both required additional cognitive capacities and made new ones possible, and these changes took space and connections to achieve. The space problem was solved, as we saw earlier, by moving some things around in existing cortical space, and also by adding more space. But the connection problem was only partially solved. The part that was solved, connectivity within cortical processing networks, made the enhanced cognitive capacities of the hominid brain possible. But the part that hasn't been fully solved is connectivity between cognitive systems and other parts of the mental trilogy-emotional and motivational systems. This is why a brilliant mathematician or artist, or a successful entrepreneur, can like anyone else fall victim to sexual seduction, road rage, or jealousy, or be a child abuser or rapist, or can have a crippling depression or anxiety. Our brain has not evolved to the point where the new systems that make complex thinking possible can easily control the old systems that give rise to our base needs and motives, and emotional reactions. This doesn't mean that we're simply victims of our brains and should just give in to our urges. It means that downward causation is sometimes hard work. Doing the right thing doesn't always flow naturally from knowing what the right thing to do is. In the end, then, the self is maintained by systems that function both explicitly and implicitly. Through explicit systems, we try to willfully dictate who we are, and how we will behave. But we are only partially effective in doing so, since we have imperfect conscious access to emotional systems, which play such a crucial role in coordinating learning by other systems. In spite of their importance, though, emotion systems are not always active and have only episodic influence on what other brain systems learn and store. Furthermore, because there are multiple independent emotion systems, the episodic influence of any one system is itself but a component of the total impact of emotions on self-development.

Senator Warren questions SEC chair on broker reforms 525 words By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator Elizabeth Warren said Friday that the Labor Department should press ahead with brokerage industry reforms, and not be deterred by the Securities and Exchange Commission's plans to adopt its own separate rules.    President Barack Obama, with frequent Wall Street critic Warren at his side, last month called on the Labor Department to quickly move forward to tighten brokerage standards on retirement advice, lending new momentum to a long-running effort to implement reforms aimed at reducing conflicts of interest and "hidden fees." But that effort could be complicated by a parallel track of reforms by the SEC, whose Chair Mary Jo White on Tuesday said she supported moving ahead with a similar effort to hold retail brokers to a higher "fiduciary" standard. "I want to see the Department of Labor go forward now," Warren told Reuters in an interview Friday. "There is no reason to wait for the SEC. There is no question that the Department of Labor has the authority to act to ensure that retirement advisers are serving the best interest of their clients." Warren said that while she has no concerns with the SEC moving forward to write its own rules, she fears its involvement may give Wall Street a hook to try to delay or water down a separate ongoing Labor Department effort to craft tough new rules governing how brokers dole out retirement advice. She also raised questions about White's decision to unveil her position at a conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade group representing the interests of securities brokerage firms. Not only is the SEC the lead regulator for brokers, but unlike the Labor Department, it is also bound by law to preserve brokers' commission-based compensation in any new fiduciary rule.     "I was surprised that (Chair) White announced the rule at a conference hosted by an industry trade group that spent several years and millions of dollars lobbying members of Congress to block real action to fix the problem," Warren said. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who frequently challenges market regulators as too cozy with industry, stopped short of directly criticizing White. The SEC and SIFMA both declined to comment on Warren's comments. SIFMA has strongly opposed the Labor Department's efforts, fearing its rule will contain draconian measures that would cut broker profits, and in turn, force brokers to pull back from offering accounts and advice to American retirees. It has long advocated for the SEC to take the lead on a rule that would create a new uniform standard of care for brokers and advisers. The SEC has said it has been coordinating with the Labor Department on the rule-writing effort, but on Tuesday White also acknowledged that the two can still act independently of one another because they operate under different laws. The industry and reform advocates have been waiting now for years to see whether the SEC would move to tighten standards.     Warren expressed some skepticism on Friday about whether the SEC will ever in fact actually adopt a rule, saying that for years the agency has talked about taking action, but has not delivered. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Christian Plumb)

Although routines and standards are clearly related, they are not identical. As Kindleberger (1983) pointed out, standards are public goods; they reflect interpersonally shared knowledge. We might even say that a standard is a certain kind of “public” routine that helps to coordinate private (individual or intraorganizational) routines. But routines are not only about coordination. As we saw, routines embody potentially useful—we might even say productive—knowledge. In the terminology of Ryle (1949), they reflect “knowledge how.” In some cases, such useful knowledge can be knowledge about how to transact, the possession of which thus reduces transaction costs. My internalized knowledge that I always ought to keep to the right (not the left) as another car approaches might be an example, at least if we construe the interaction between oncoming drivers metaphorically as a transaction. But the skillful exercise of a particular technique for suturing an incision would also be a routine, and not one obviously involving the reduction of transaction costs. Useful knowledge applied to problems of transacting is a special case of a more general phenomenon. As Winter (1988) has suggested, one needs to have economic capabilities (an effective repertoire of routines) in order to be able to transact as well as to be able to produce.6 Like standards, routines can be both enabling and constraining. The possession of an effective repertoire of routines would be crucial to the successful production of product A; but possessing that repertoire might also inhibit a transition to the production of product B. Routines are generally as hard to unlearn as to learn, which may give the advantage in situations of radical innovation to those who have never learned the routines in the first place.7 This is no doubt what Schumpeter (1934) had in mind when he wrote that “new combinations are, as a rule, embodied, as it were, in new firms which generally do not arise out of the old ones but start producing beside them;... in general it is not the

As a central distributor of goods, the welfare state necessitates high levels of taxation, and it must institute extensive programmes of economic regulation in order to ensure that sufficient tax revenue is generated. Excessive taxation, consequently, always occurs where the political system inadequately manages its ‘opening and restriction’ towards the economy, and where it assumes co-ordinating power in influencing the economic conditions in which citizens live. High-level taxation, however, inevitably leads to economic problems – to problems registered in the medium of money, but caused by the medium of power. These problems might, for instance, take the form of possible underproduction, flight of capital, loss of investment potential, or increasing prices, imbalances in the relation of supply and demand in the private economy, difficulties in the circulation of capital, worsening international competitiveness of firms, or excessive regulation of available capital by central banks. All such tendencies, in Luhmann’s view, characterize societies which are drifting away from the ideal condition of realized plural differentiation towards a more authoritarian (less differentiated) mode of political economy.

Another problem is that Paxos uses a symmetric peer-to-peer approach at its core (though it eventually suggests a weak form of leadership as a performance optimization). This makes sense in a simplified world where only one decision will be made, but few practical systems use this approach. If a series of decisions must be made, it is simpler and faster to first elect a leader, then have the leader coordinate the decisions.

First, liberals discover social and economic problems. Not a difficult task: the human race has always had such problems and will continue to, short of the Garden of Eden. Liberals, however, usually need scores of millions in foundation grants and taxpayer-financed commissions to come up with the startling revelations of disease, poverty, ignorance, homelessness, et al. Having identified “problems” to the accompaniment of much coordinated fanfare, the liberals proceed to invoke “solutions,” to be supplied, of course, by the federal government, which we all know and love as the Great Problem-Solving Machine.

... in so far as conformity to a co-ordination norm ensures the achievement of some co-ordination equilibrium, which for everyone involved in the corresponding co-ordination problem belongs of necessity to the group of preferred outcomes, it is rational for everyone to conform to it. Are we to conclude from this, however, that the social choice to which the co-ordination norm is instrumental is itself rational? My answer to this question is that although it is rational to conform to a prevailing co-ordination norm, the social choice resulting from it is not necessarily rational. [...] it may not be optimal, for some or for all involved. It can in principle be changed into a better one, only this involves an explicit process which is not always feasible. [...] The changing of an existing convention in favour of a 'better', more rational one, has to be explicit. It can be achieved through an explicit agreement of all concerned, or through a regulation (decree) issued and properly promulgated by some appropriately endowed authority. Where communication, or promulgation, is impossible, it is difficult to see how an existing convention (which is a co-ordination norm) might be changed. It is of some interest to note that whereas an 'act of convening' is not necessary for a convention to form, it might be necessary for an existing convention to be exchanged for an alternative one.

Research done on handovers, which is one coordinative device to avert the fragmentation of problem-solving (Patterson, Roth, Woods, Chow, and Gomez, 2004) has identified some of the potential costs of failing to be told, forgetting or misunderstanding information communicated. These costs, for the incoming crew, include: having an incomplete model of the system’s state; being unaware of significant data or events; being unprepared to deal with impacts from previous events; failing to anticipate future events; lacking knowledge that is necessary to perform tasks safely; dropping or reworking activities that are in progress or that the team has agreed to do; creating an unwarranted shift in goals, decisions, priorities or plans. Such

We could add privilege theory to Žižek’s long list of fake left ist “radicals” who bombard the existing system. As with “ Médecins sans frontières , Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns,” privilege theory runs the risk of falling prey to what Žižek names “interpassivity”: the risk of “doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, Politically Correct, etc. activity fi ts the formula of ‘Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!’ ” The problem with privilege theory—especially as vulgarized in liberal universities—is that it ends up becoming “an empty gesture which obliges no one to do anything definite.” White liberal multiculturalists put on display their “progressive” leanings by calling for inclusivity and tolerance, parading their own self-critique—in a pleasure-ridden act of virtue signaling—as a model for others to follow. Whiteness or white privilege is treated as a reified thing that could be singled out and denounced, and not as “a set of power relations,” as Charles W. Mills insightfully puts it. Privilege-checking does not necessarily translate into campus radicalism. It remains utopian and impotent when it fails to confront capitalism itself: “The true utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the only way to be truly ‘realistic’ is to think what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.” The advocates of privilege theory are today’s “true utopians.” They muzzle ideology critique, believing that gradualist reform is the key to social transformation. But privilege theory’s antiracist insights are diluted, never really touching the reality of domination and exploitation, never “demanding ‘impossible’ changes of the system itself.

Addressing racism as a problem of intolerance misfires. It is not about the coexistence of different racial identities. Racism is a constitutive problem of the system. This is why an antiracist movement must be anticapitalist, if the goal of the struggle is not to exact minimal concession from the system in term of recognition and reward, but actually to change the coordinates of one’s social existence. And conversely, an anticapitalist movement that brackets race/racism from an analysis will fail in its project, precisely by failing to mobilize the indignant rage of racialized bodies against the racist system. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, every sanctioned identity politics is a sign of a failed revolution.