https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=B6IwitIgXno
you you you Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. I’m very excited to be here with Carla Gouin who’s been on here before and Carla works for the UK government and she’s been trying to integrate cutting-edge cognitive science and to her work she acts as Your name keeps changing about I won’t say the official name, but basically She’s kind of a liaison a hub try to bridge between many different departments in the UK Civil Service and So she’s working with both individual and distributed cognition in the trenches in something affecting a lot of lives And trying to bring the best kind of science to bear on that very important problem Carla Do you think that’s at least a good introduction to you and your work? That is a nice a lovely summary I really like that and and yes the new the name is a bit of a mouthful We’re now when I did the previous podcast with you It was behavioral science and now it is human-centered design science To try and distinguish it from the kind of a nudge approach because we’re so different that that was leading to confusion But we’re still very much Have a behavioral science cognitive science anchor. So what we’re trying to break right, right? Yeah, and so You’ve been wrestling we were talking just before camera with you know trying to get What people are bringing to various problem-solvings very attempts at? Communication at first you were framing this around a very traditional notion of assumptions Which are sort of typically understood as underlying propositions That people are committed to perhaps without awareness or at least full awareness of the implications and You’re now considering that perhaps you need to move to something like Mental models now that term has a lot of different meanings within cognitive science So we could explore those meanings, but perhaps first Set the context a little bit more. Tell us a little bit more about How that came about and why do you want to explore this itself? Sure So I think the first time I used that term in a sort of public environment was when I get to the Conference back in the spring and and I did a panel with Max Borders Jim Rutt and Jordan Hall talking about visions of governance And one of the things that was sort of a Emerging insight that I had from my eight years of working to help the department to make better decisions And thinking about the barriers to making better decisions Was that we seem to run up to a point where we’re not really sure what we’re doing The first time I used that term in a sort of public environment was when I got to the conference back in the spring and And I did a panel with Jim Rutt and Jordan Hall talking about visions of governance And one of the things that I did was I started to think about the barriers to making better decisions And was that we seem to run up against mental models that aren’t the most useful or perhaps accurate Representations of reality on which policy making and process design decisions are based So when and the sort of things that come to mind there are Organic beings rather than organic people bringing their full selves and Solving problems that then you don’t need to solve again. So The whole way that we think about the individuals in the organization felt quite mechanistic. We’ve also got Economic theory has filled quite a lot of the the need for a mental model about policy making itself And and that has got us a long way It’s got us doing cost benefit analysis and doing some things a lot more for an empirical rigor Than might have been done before however, there are limitations to those models, which of course has been a lot of the the Thumps behind the whole behavioral science movement has been that model of humans isn’t very good And so my team was out to say can we improve the decisions that department makes based on assumptions about people that aren’t true? and we started in that how do you how do you unpack the How do you work out when a decision has assumptions like people buried in it How do you surface that test it and maybe replace it with another one? But what I think is underneath the assumption those propositional things is something more Participatory or at least perspectival that is about the way the world works. That is That is mechanistic in in metaphor that is Economic or Taylorist management in theory and is very ahistorical So doesn’t the way that the way that we talk in the organization doesn’t Tend to reference the past or really the future It’s kind of what’s what’s wrong with the machine now the machine of the world and what can we do to fix it? And what levers can we pull and all that sort of language? so my team has been thinking how do we name this thing that seems to be Enabling this huge number of humans to cooperate and produce these policies but In a way that allows us to look at those things and Upgrade it so that it leads to better Organizational outcomes so that leads a whole bunch of questions about is mental model the right term And are there things that you can that you can put down and put back on like it like a lens or a perspective? Or is it something that once you’ve seen something can’t unsee it And we’ve been having rows in the team very productive rows about whether If we tell talk about mental models, are we breaking our own rules? Which is we want policymakers to think about people without the fundamental attribution error So we want them to be thinking about the external factors But if we’re saying that mental models are the block are we encouraging an individualistic approach? And is a mental model an individual thing or is it a social thing that exists? Through the brain. So these are the things I thought I there’s one person. I want to talk to about this and it’s john Wow Let’s first of all, let me just Say again how impressed I am with you uh the the The acumen and astuteness of your theoretical reflection on this and you know I’m praising you because i’m confident there are many civil servants who are not Attempting to do this kind of reflective work on the nature individual and distributed cognition That is going into situations of collective problem solving Collective action problems communication. So first of all, just wow praise keep it keep going encouragement, you know, oh, yes So let’s let’s start very carefully And you made a distinction and you may even made it in terms of levels and I think that’s a useful thing to talk about uh, i’ll start out by different things the term mental model might mean in cognitive science because There are different uses of the term and then we can Play with how how close Which one of these is closer or do we need to innovate on all of them to get what you’re trying to put your finger on? first of all my It’s sort of more than intuition. It’s a bit of there’s some inference involved. So it’s more like a conjecture I do think that you’re right that you’re trying to point to something Perspectival and participatory it seems to have elements both of people’s My sight into each other’s mind but also into a shared world view Like when you mentioned the mechanistic worldview and individualistic worldview And so there’s aspects so one meaning of Mental models is the classic the formulation in the 1980s by philip johns of lyrid He wrote the book literally entitled mental models and he was trying to give a theory of Reasoning that was an alternative to syllogistic propositional reasoning and he said what people were doing often when they’re reasoning I hesitate here because one of the problems with this is it never was totally formally clear what a mental model was for philip johns lyrid one of my Colleagues at the time Christopher green wrote in his thesis his phd thesis a quite sustained critique of this so the best thing is to put it is that Philip johnson lyrid says we do something like a diagram which is a mixture of a picture and propositional labels to try and create a model of a situation And now what we do is we sort of manipulate the model we run the model instead of doing syllogistic reasoning We sort of turn that diagram into like a film a movie and we run it right and that is how we unpack um what the consequences of some of our beliefs are now that’s the standard meaning that now the problem With that that we might be able to fix by connecting it to some other things. It’s like they said is it is It’s it’s the notion of picture and the notion of diagram are famously vague Uh vichai made this argument a long time ago by show you a picture Of a person on the side of a hill are they walking up the hill? Are they standing on the hill? Are they walking backwards down the hill? Is that a picture of the fact that now john likes to go on hills and he didn’t like to go on hills before Is that a way of showing you that the english countryside may be more hilly than you realize? Like the number of things that it can be and you like then and then if you try and capture a diagram you have the fact Well that no sentence can say everything that it’s conveying and you get all this stuff going on So that’s problematic I think there’s something to your notion that what’s going on here is something Imaginal and i’ll remind you of the distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. This is another way of talking about modeling And this is corban’s distinction between the imaginary whereas i form something like an internal mental picture Which is kind of like what john saler is talking about Um, so I can picture a sailboat or I can picture somebody on a hillside, etc Versus the imaginal where i’m not really picturing anything. I’m adopting the perspective Uh the salience landscape the perspectival knowing so it’s a classic example our children at play The child picks up a stick and ties a blanket and says i’m zoro. They’re not picturing zoro They’re trying to take on the perspectival Knowing and the participatory know the identity what it’s like. What’s it like to assume the identity? Of zoro and what kind of arena opens up with that identity and what kinds of salience landscaping and that might allow them to Actually cultivate skills of comic. So do you see the difference between the first sense? Okay, so there’s that sort of diagrammatic sense and then there’s the imaginal sense And then there’s a third sense which is very prevalent right now, which comes out of the predictive processing framework and and i’ve been working with mark miller brett anderson and other people and we’ve integrated the relevance realization in the Predictive processing framework so we did that in a paper at the end of last year And that that is basically saying well what you’re and this comes also out of Some of jeffrey hinton’s primary insights behind deep learning etc the wake sleep algorithm And what it says is what I do What in fact what you’re always doing is you’re trying to build what’s called a generative model And the idea here is what you’re trying to do is sort of A model isn’t necessarily a picture or a set of propositions It’s a way in which you are anticipating Expecting the world you’re predicting in that sense not necessarily like citing a proposition, but you’re anticipating and expecting and sort of Sensory motor preparation for the world, right? And so you’re trying to get in that sense very different sense. You’re trying to model the causal structure of A world and often what you’re doing is you’re generating a model Ahead of time in order to try and recognize the model you can do really cool things I was at a talk I was at a thing last night I give a talk and then mark give a talk and you can play basically nonsensical sounds to somebody And then you can say a sentence to them and then when they you play the exact same thing again They’ll hear the sentence and the nonsense sound because as soon as I say a sentence you’ve built this Predictive model and then you go looking in the white noise for anything that confirms the model So we have these three things and they’re not necessarily Antagonistic, but they’re not the same either. There’s that sort of inner diagram and you sort of run it, right? Then there’s the imaginal thing. We’re not really Forming an inner thing. You’re taking on the perspective and the identity and then the third one is you’re trying to anticipate and expect How the world will unfold and you’re largely and this is where it overlaps with the second way Largely in the imaginal sense imagining how the world’s going to unfold but in that a vaginal sense And so those are three senses the last two Line up very well with perspective and participatory the second the first one not at least not explicitly So so those are the three that are sort of on offer when people talk about metal metal models And of course, there’s all kinds of combinations and variations. So let’s just call those i’m not saying this is exhaustive But those are sort of the three You know prominent paradigmatic readings for metal model, which one which one sort of feels closest to what you are trying to get at? So I can definitely see elements of all three so so the the only if i’ve correctly understood what they mean, but they the diagram one feels like that helps identify Which parts of an almost infinitely complex landscape are worth paying attention to they create this salience landscape I don’t know if i’m using that correctly Yes, you are very correctly. So that that feels like some of what is going on is that we work in an extraordinarily Complex and complicated policy-making environment and you’ve got to have some way of chunking things up so that you can have sensible conversations And I mean it’s framing right? It’s chunking. Yeah, that’s it. So I think that’s part of what it does The the imagine the imaginal one, um has that I guess that sense of Value sort of in it as well and it’s a personal consequence. So what am I empowered to do if i’m sorrow? Yeah, what what am I what am I threatened by? What do I what do I get? Rewarded for so it’s got it’s got that kind of it’s got the yes the values attached to the beliefs and the salience Um, and what was the what was the third one again? The generative model where you’re not really what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to anticipate and expect Oh, yeah, the real powerful interactions with the world. Oh, so this is where because um, policy and and and presence in civil service is essentially changing the world then in order to simulate what A change would look like or even to simulate what somebody in the hierarchy might respond to your suggested change You need to have the the this is where it’s quite In some respects different from academia is it’s all about those sorts of consequences Not that there are consequences academia, but this is this is our bread and butter is change And so an idea of what we all agree Are the things that can change and what they might lead to or even just the ability to bring somebody in out of university And you say right. Can you take a look at this really complex social problem? They need some kind of framework to be to be knowing what sorts of things are so they so the civil service is very good Uh, quick socializing people into this model very fast so they can be useful very quickly But within the constraints of those models, at least that’s the thing. That’s what i’m going on. So I can see elements of all of them That’s great. And I yeah, it’s clear to me. You have understood each one very well. So that’s not an issue. There’s no clarification required And of course, like I said, it’s not necessarily the case that these three are antagonistic So it could be that you’re trying to put your finger and which is like you which is off to the case Each each theory um actually Uh, each theory actually Captures a different dimension of the of a very complex cognitive phenomenon So perhaps what you might want to reflect on is that each one of these is a dimension of what you’re talking about Okay, so you’ve got you’ve got the sort of inner diagram You’ve got the imaginal and then you’ve got a way in which you’re trying to set up an agent arena relationship through anticipation and right And so I think that’s helpful then there’s now two broader notions that are theories of models per se but sort of what models are doing And we could bring that in so one is one of my students Corey Lewis and his phd did some excellent work in the philosophy of science contrasting theories and sorry laws and models And then theories have to do with in relations and he made a very good distinction And he made a very good distinction I think is very out and it wasn’t just my opinion because he is his defense was successful and he He’s now a popular scientist and his old right excellent one, by the way Um, very proud of so many of my students very proud of wonderful um, and so He has a notion that what laws and science do is they rule out They say these are things you can’t bring in to consideration And what a model does is it rules it it says these are the things you must Bring in as you try to explain so the idea is when you’re explaining you’re framing And what you’re doing is you’re ruling out And ruling in and the theory rules out And people can get a matched in theory of sorry the laws like that was a mistake I made a mistake I apologize the theory is about negotiating between both The laws rule out and that might be something like sort of The rules you’re not allowed to break or something like that Though they rule out but the models rule in and they say this is what you must include So they involve decisions about as you were saying what’s salient relevant and also what is mandatory to bring into any explanation? Of course that that could be negotiable. Yeah, because people might be assuming not propositional But prospectively in a participatory manner they might be assuming What is mandatory in edie exclamation? Now that plugs into another thing about models and you heard me saying models right there’s a relationship between models and laws in our theories And then there’s a there but so there’s that relationship but models in so far as they are ruling in what is mandatory They are often acting as emissaries i’ll steal what are ian’s terms Emissaries for a worldview. Yeah Right. So the worldview is i with a worldview is a so a worldview is at the meta meaning level A world that is basically a model of how the world is right and How you know the world and it models you for the world and it models the world for you So it’s meta meeting it makes possible that agent arena relationship that makes all other meaningful affordances and interactions And perspectives and arguments possible for us, right? That’s what and so and you invoked what there’s a mechanist the world is a machine and it’s a historical machine Time is not time doesn’t need to be brought in. It’s not part. It’s not what we have to rule in with our model. So So what you can also ask is now you’ve got these three dimensions of what a model is uh And and and I think you’re absolutely right to plug it into the perspective of a participant You can then ask the question. What is the model ruling it? and it’s and and then Deeper but derived from that the deeper is how is it acting as an emissary for a worldview? And what does that worldview? Yeah, i’m really drawn to the worldview thing because i’m wondering if that is actually I mean are these nested concepts are they yeah. Yeah, because it feels like some of these things are Big and shared by large numbers of people and then some of them are sort of digested down into the The version of that that we use in a particular policy area or something like that Uh, yes, yeah, i’m feeling i’m feeling torn equally torn now between thinking it’s the worldview level and it’s the model level um, right So the way the way of putting them together, uh, that’s what I was invoking with the emissary Is the worldview is basically a meta model. It’s not a model It gives you sort of the the way in which you create any models Right and then the model takes from the worldview and and creates a specific thing that has Ruled in what from the worldview should be applied to this specific situation So it’s a way of specifying the worldview for a particular problem Yes That is really really interesting, um, so you you might you might have a a mechanistic cultural worldview and then that translates into for example seeing a my portion of the government as a set of repeatable deliverables that Ideally don’t change over time and generate the same output every time which may or may not be appropriate for delivering effective policy Right Yeah, and then here and so your intuition also we don’t want to lose that this is this is just we’re working out a more detailed um Analysis of how framing yeah relevance realization Anticipation of the world is unfolding. Yeah, and that that’s what’s going on. So You have to remember that what’s often happening in these is that? um I’ll call them. It’s not this it’s not quite decisions but that like framings like there’s decisions about What is relevant and decisions about what is real? Why because relevance and real? Interpenetrate they’re often confused and conflated together because this seems so relevant to this worldview. It must be real Right. And so the other thing that you’re looking at when people are doing this, right is you’re saying well, you know This mechanistic worldview makes these features for example makes a historical features foregrounds limit backgrounds the historical features and that’s Real to you because that’s how you’re making sense But the thing in right can we can we do a figured round reversal and what then what happens and we Like and then there’s ways in which you can get insight at that sort of meta modeling or even at the modeling level just by saying Maybe we’re conflating or confusing what’s relevant and what’s real here Yeah Flying from one into the other without question and the and the thing that you need to remind people is truth Not just propositional but all the reels right the for real truth and relevance are at a point of processing They correct each other relevance. Make sure we don’t we don’t go after intractable trivial Irrelevant truths and truth means we don’t get we don’t project relevance models. They’re actually not picking up on what is Relevantly real So what if something is um The the thing that has become Less useful about the model is that it is no longer Picking up the i the aspects of it that are most relevant. Does that mean it’s not real or just that it’s not relevant So I would say that I mean it’s it’s not these are not sort of easy yes no because you If there was no purchase on reality then Typically that would be that the model is obviously false Although there are people that get involved with all kinds of rabbit hole conspiracy theories and things like that but generally Yeah, it would be more like saying To what degree are we focusing on patterns? That are merely correlated with our problem Within our Patterns that are actually we have good reason and evidence to believe are causal Right causally relevant to our pattern. It’s that’s a way you can sort of Sort of specify Make the question more precise and more probative. It’s like, okay. I see I don’t deny that you’re seeing that pattern All right, is that pattern like can you tell me what do we have good reason to believe that that’s actually the causal pattern that is at work there Yeah That feels I remember very early on in developing the the actual bones for this team Um, I remember having been struck one day walking down the river and saying it’s about causality That’s the bit that’s for me was was was the missing piece was we can we can do we’re really good at measurement extrapolation hypothesis testing um, but that focus on causality was um More second not absent but but but background it Um, and and that’s one of the things that i’ve tried to drag out um put more into the foreground Excellent so one more thing on this which is and this goes back to the world view because world views have uh, like intrusive ruling in it as to what kind of causes count and mechanistic worldview says that the only kind of causation is Is uh is efficient causation what I sometimes call population One thing bumps into another like really it’s a billiard ball model of causation We can call that horizontal because like that’s like how on a table that one billiard ball knocks the next And that’s the model of causation that has been made prevalent Right, but like was made prevalent to the new tonio world view but More and more people and you know, we’ll thanks meneth and myself or a lot of other people are now talking about vertical causation which is How does a higher order thing emerge from a lower order thing? And how does a higher order thing constrain? a lower order thing and of course at least a urero is doing uh her you know her two books dynamics in action and Context changes everything right and also wolf gaming smith and this is this is more about Uh, not causation as abomination, but how does the structural functional or organization emerge bottom up and emanate top down? And you have to ask those Vertical causal questions, not just the horizontal questions And so one of the things that a mechanistic world view tends to miss is the vertical causation, which is often The relevant causal factor that needs to be considered. Oh gosh. I love that. I’m trying to think what that would if Can constrain go both ways? So could you have um, so for example We’re making policies and one of their sort of units of assets is that the person on the street responding to that They actually have a bunch of constraints either built into their lives or into who they are that Actually constraints what we can do in terms of policy, but it’s not always obvious Um, yes, would that would that work? Yes, that that works. It’s fine And and and so you have to talk about sort of also two types of constraints, right? Talk about selective and enabling constraints. So Enabling constraints or what are the conditions that? Enable a process to run Create all the variation and the viability selective constraints are what are the things that Limit all the facts. So reduce the options for a system so it doesn’t fly off the rails and then so yeah You can definitely look for Constraints in both directions and then you can also look for different kinds of constraints. That’s really helpful so one of the things that i’m that It feels like we’re getting a language here that is helpful for talking about some of the problem and I remember originally thinking that People reach for the term group think but it’s not the right I mean, we know it’s got a highly specific term But and I’m that we couldn’t come up with another one. So maybe this set of ideas around mental models is the best way of describing the process that is going on when you have people making very coordinated decisions based on a very limited set of assumptions, which will in some cases Be really efficient and effective at delivery outcomes But in other cases, especially when things are changing and those models happen is going to lead to increasingly ineffective decisions being made and if that’s the case, i’m wondering what the what are the processes by which organizations maintain those models Even when the limitations of them keep not we keep keep actually in in practice Um stoppering our our goals because these are very i’m just sort of thinking there’s a book called the blunders of our government which documents the kinds of Administrative failures that have happened regardless of the political layer Um since at least the 1980s and it’s the same kind of thing So that’s really part of my mission is to try and like what what what is that what’s that shared understanding of what has gone wrong before? um and and and One of the things that’s interesting about having done my job for eight years is is how incredibly tough Those things are and to the even extent that I tend not to hire people into my team who have been in the civil service because they because it’s so powerful now is it that we’ve selected people who respond to that and people who don’t respond to that kind of um Buying instrumental model leave or they don’t come in the first place or is it that there’s some really powerful factors that hold it so that The people the constraints aren’t even being made by the people at the top they’re being made by this thing that comes through right, right, right, right Um, so I don’t know. I mean My work has been on the other side of that question. So and this is work Done with my good friend and colleague co-author dan shappey and we published it for zonies So we’ve been tight. We’ve been looking about how we agency not the agency High right and not the agency just adding us together, but how we form a thing called we agency Which is basically the collective intelligence of distributed cognition so Like and this notion goes back to our petrions and the fact that no one person navigates a ship It’s a full bunch of people and a whole bunch of equipment and they form a dynamical system that self-organizes And that’s a we agent what we were studying is we were studying how the nasa scientists on the earth moved the rovers around on mars to do the science and how they were constantly having to adjust and about how they create shared narratives and shared mental models and how they keep a How they try to get this balance between a stable structure and the ability to adapt and make the structure flow And what was interesting what they’re looking for in people that join the team They’re looking for people that could do this imaginal Perspectival participatory thing which is they can become the rover on mars They can they could be the rover and be on mars in an imaginal way And they do all these really interesting things with their photos in order to get people Who could be the rover and see like a rover on mars You might want to take a look at those three papers because it it really lays out the language of we agency talks about uh, the you know the the the use of Shared narrative and imaginal techniques and participatory identification techniques And how they try to balance between? a stable structure and an evolving structure now, uh There’s obvious differences between what nasa’s doing and you’re doing but So we were we were trying to study the opposite in some ways your question Why don’t why don’t people change and we were trying to say well, how do people keep it changing and adapting in a very weird difficult situation because It’s not joystick control because of the time lag, right? And all they’ll get it were flat black and white pictures And they’re trying to use this to figure out how to move the rover around and how to do the field work And so there’s three papers there um that uh the published papers, uh one in Frontiers one in phenomenology of the college of sciences and one at a journal called presence About all of that you can see you’ll this we also talk about perspective on participatory knowing It was interesting because the scientists get to this They’re they’re literally rocket scientists and the engineers they get to this point where they They’ll do things like this. They’ll say you know I was working in the garden and you know, I my right hand kept getting stuck and then I’d gone to the lab And spirit funny early enough, that’s the name of one of the rovers and spirits right wheel kept getting stuck You know, I don’t believe it magic but ha ha ha or anything like that, but there’s always these weird connections And and then more than like and they get they form this almost sympathetic magic No, please note anybody people just listening i’m using scarecrow single right because the participatory and the perspectival are so So privileged and prioritized because you have to get that before you can then develop the procedural skills Before you could so you can do the field work and then only once you could do the field work Can you actually generate the propositional theory? I really like And i’m just it’s just led me to think is there a So I I definitely hire people who are extremely good at perspective taking is one of our criteria good That’s what i’m after i’m after for the principal thinking but i’m just just kind of thinking what’s sort of anchoring some of these models in the in the government and I wonder if it is Um i’m just making this up but a Uh a sense of what our ministers need so are we channeling are we are they the robot? Are we trying to think what the world looks like to them? But yes, but that’s that doesn’t change very quickly. Yeah, keep going. That’s good. Keep going. That’s excellent. Yeah, I I think Because ultimately what we’re trying to do is to make decisions. Well Decisions in the government have to be made at the by the ministers We don’t make anything other than operational decisions But in order to make that work you kind of need to take lots of decisions in order to create the options But then they’re efficient. So even though I think I mean i’ve talked to lots of ministers in the both in my previous civil service career and then since i’ve been doing this that um They often perhaps more of a diverse range of things that they would accept That in order for us to can coherently deliver a service we are actually potentially wedded to a sense of what ministers want Yes. Yes could be holding this together I think that’s brilliant. I think that’s brilliant So if I let me make sure I understand you you say that like now basically by analogy Obviously what the scientists were doing with the rovers the civil servants are doing with the minister and and they’re and they’re maybe even forming What the mead called the generalized other it might not be a model of a specific minister But what any minister might want and then that is might be actually limiting the their ability their ability to Yes, yes Oh, and that’s interesting because that because what the scientists do is they do they they have it they have sort of rituals of identification They’ll actually they’ll they’ll talk about the robot as if it’s them like their body We keep to move our arm I need to move my arm like this and they’re talking about the robot or they’ll actually they’ll actually turn themselves into the robot like one scientist This is a rock and she’s on a wheelchair I need to do this and she’s wheeling around in the chair. These are the cameras and she’s doing this They do this loop where they anthropomorphize the robot and they technomorphize themselves. That’s for tessie’s firms and it How are people identifying? With the minister or how are they identifying with this generalized? Version of the minister is probably also something that’s at work here and trying to get out that model. That’s really interesting. So What you’re saying, I think this is very powerful You’re saying not only are people modeling The situation they’re modeling they’re not modeling it just for themselves. They’re modeling it Right because they’re trying to mock they’re doing they’re doing mutual modeling neutral modeling is the idea that um Well So if you and I are going to work efficiently we have to communicate a lot so we don’t act at price purposes But if we communicate a lot we’re wasting a lot of time and a lot of effort and not solving problems So that becomes inefficient. So the way to get around that is you form a model of me and I form a model of you We work independently, but we consult the model and that’s how we work independently, but also in a coordinated fashion So they’re mutually modeling the minister, right? And then they’re modeling that right they’re modeling the situation in terms of how the minister would see it Oh that that yeah, I think that’s very very plausible. And so the the question would ask is what what practices do they have for not? for not Concentrating on modeling the problem but correcting their modeling of the minister So we have a well-established process of taking into account ministers preferences So because we have reshuffled so every so often we get a change of ministers Sometimes it can be depending on what’s happening in politics and multiple times a year So you have to have a system that allows Policymaking to keep working whilst having changes of personnel at the top all within a single party in charge and so that sense of a generalized other makes sense because while we We we do have conversations with the new minister about do you like charts? Do you like numbers? Do you want us to do you want to get into the detail? Do you not want to get into the detail so we have we know how to have those conversations and how to build trust with a minister But I wonder if we’re really creating the space for that level of question and also whether that would be sustainable given that the moment that you’d adjusted for the new Minister, there’s been another one Yeah, that’s interesting So maybe there’s an intermediary thing not trying to pick up on everything We’re trying to pick up on something other than the preferences for example, try to get clearer about how the minister might model What’s their worldview? What’s their meta model and how what what right and and how that Right, so not just their preferences because it’s much more like what what’s their worldview? How would they what kind how would they model problems etc things like Well, there’s an interesting question I absolutely agree the preferences don’t get you all the way there um We have a we have a strange dual role of both Acting on and delivering what what the ministers decide and advising on what to do so you’re in a position of The ministers probably be quite cross if we didn’t feed back Actually, this is the way things are working in this area of extraordinarily complex pensions Regulational something there is no reason that they that they already had a a strong worldview about so Even if you had a way of eliciting their worldview What is and can you how do you work out whether they? Would value A challenge to that worldview and that is that’s a very That’s a difficult conversation to have but it feels really important and it would benefit both sides enormously Yes. Yes Yes, so as soon as we’re hitting something that’s difficult But powerful we’re probably getting close to what needs to be done. Yeah, that’s usually that’s usually Um a good a good side. Yeah. Yeah, and this this is also this feels like we’ve hit on a mechanism That is powerful enough to have held These models in place which I have been slightly perplexed by how Tough they are even in the face of overwhelming Um, it’s my thing as far as i’m concerned overwhelming evidence that if we thought about it in a different way That we get different outcomes and even it’s built into the sort of diversity Narrative that we know we all come from the same background We all think the same thing we need people who think differently in order that we get better outcomes But if actually you’re not really anchored to the outcomes you’re anchored to a sense of the I was going to use breaks turn justifiability, but it’s it’s it’s that plus something else. It’s about that sense Yes, are you actually doing your job of serving the government of the day if you don’t correctly intuit their Um their worldview and what’s going to be acceptable to them and my my my past as as a policy maker was Because because i’m me and i’m autistic and I do things my own way was that I would offer them something different um But that I could feel the kind of tension that would be involved to the rest of the system in In attempting to have that conversation Yeah, yeah and so I think we’re also getting to the edge of where my Expertises could be made relevant to you because now you are in the things that are very specific to the situation Yeah, right I suppose one of the one of the things that I would love to That that um somebody my team came up with and we were talking about doing this podcast um is Are we talking about something that’s objective or subjective or is this? Transjectivity and this is transjectivity whenever problems are neither objective nor subjective. They are prototypical Transjective entities so the problem isn’t in the world Right, but the world doesn’t have problems organics have some problems with the world Right and the problem isn’t just in our subjectivity we like now there are some problems that are just Right internal to us, but when we’re talking about what we prototypically mean by a problem We mean something that has to do with whether or not we’re properly fitted to the world such that we’re framing our problems Um framing the world. Sorry, let me do it. Let me do it more carefully. They were properly fitted to the world. So we’re Framing the world in such a way that we can bring our relevant skills to bear to solve the problem So we can achieve the goal that we want to achieve. So the yes, I think problems problems are prototypical Transjective entities. That’s why relevance and anticipation which are meta problems Our relevance realization and anticipation are meta problems Problem solving are also and totally Transjective entities so you’ve got anticipation affordance relevance realization anything that’s involving those You already call Transjectivity Okay, that’s really helpful clarification. And then um another question that we came up with was um Should we be looking to try and this may be that that previous? Conversations up till now makes this less relevant but Um, should we be looking to help people to not get sucked into mental models? Um for worldviews or is it that we need to design an upgraded one? Get the ministers to test it with them and see if they would endorse it I mean, I don’t even know if this could be done but at least if we could set it as a proposition and might be able to and because I I think my team that Their instinct is well don’t replace the model get people to step back from model. I thought I don’t know that people can do that Um, unless they’ve got a very unusual brain and a very unusual set of incentives, which is my team And whether in fact what we need is to say right? We’ve got these old Taylorist and um ideas about internal organization. We’ve got the ideas economic ideas about the external world and we need to provide some new frameworks, um design a new mental model, I don’t know how you do that, but um Um that that because what you need there is you need a new a new approach to thinking about systems inside and outside Which i’m not i’m not sure that there are any any lead candidates for that, but I don’t know if you can train people To not be sucked in by the models I’m not even sure it’d be a good idea because how then do you get coordination? And if you have people going off on one then a bureaucracy responds understandably by saying no No, no, we need to coordinate we need to coordinate We’ve had this discussion with the ministers and the ministers say that well this therefore if you don’t do that We need to stop it, which is an entirely understandable thing that an organization probably needs to do so How do you maintain that it be the diversity of perspectives and the constant? Attachment of that tooth context to the problems and people’s different or different bits of the elephant whilst also Doing that collectively Like this is the idea of how do you make this? How do you make an organization a proper? Distributed intelligence that is also capable of sensing and responding collectively And not just not just executing a sort of pre-ordained plan of what it means to manage Yeah, so first of all, I don’t think you were saying this but I think it’s important to make it a twist it Having world views having models and having methyl models mutual models. That’s not optional Those are not optional as you just start to take them away. You’re just hitting combinatorial exposure So so that that that’s not optional um one of the things that and you know, and I’m wrestling with this problem too with the burbecki foundation and how we’re trying to build You know a wisdom cultivation platform and network communities into communities. We’re doing all of this And what we’re trying to move towards is Can you get people to make one more higher order commitment? Which is Everybody acknowledge that their worldview needs to be an evolving worldview rather than a static worldview and that in addition to Using the worldview they are committed not to abolishing it but to working to constantly introduce some variant Re-evolve it which means let’s run some variations And let’s kill most of them off by our selective criteria Allow some of them to survive and build them into our model and so in addition to using the model we practice Evolving the model and get everybody Evolving the worldview right we get everybody committed to and to evolving it by periodically running variation and selection on it I love that. I think that that’s very similar to the conversation. I had my team member right before this was saying it probably needs to be Understanding that it needs to grow and change so I love that. I think that’s bang on and and I wonder I’m just I’m leaping here to some of the practices that we found useful in in my team for um Well making progress is Constantly doing the perspectival bit So we have all of these tools for getting people to imagine the different ways of looking at things And so on my whiteboard now, I have a list of all my favorite tools. So if somebody comes to me with a complex problem My My job is to figure out which combinations of tools are the most useful for this So maybe doing the perspectival bit allows you to start to loosen up that participatory stuff. Yes. Yes. Yes, definitely So I’m sort of developing an argument and I guess ultimately a hypothesis or even a theory that The nexus of transformation is the perspectival participatory interface That’s exactly where it transfer me turn at first Yes Yeah, that feels absolutely right then and the the propositional bit feels like it’s needed in order to do that collectively Oh, yes. Yes We have to deal with language because the only language gives us the share ability the problem people Make is they confuse the necessity of language for share ability with the necessity of language for the transformation Right, right, right, right. It’s like and they confuse necessity and sufficiency, right there. Well, it’s necessary So maybe that’s all we need it’s like no no no, it’s necessary to make it shareable But the shareable isn’t the same thing as evolving the worldview right? I reckon things like that. Yes. Yes Yes So I I Think it’s really good that the the Reiki foundation is gonna throw itself behind Saying that this is a practical set of things that will enhance choice making and decision making And we and we very much are trying to With virtue and virtuosity Try and build out connections to the organizational world whether it’s business or government or or or you know or Communitarian like Yeah, we very much want to Wrap up the more wise project or all all of the dimensions that make a culture run a powerful way That’s amazing. Well, what a what an intent and Yeah, this is a really really helpful framing I can see it joining up a bunch of things that the practice is that the the recommendations we make to people which is like Move from specialist language to common language allows you to do that piece But yeah, it’s not You’ve got to have some domain specificity, but maybe you need to do that through participatory exercises Yes, because I mean it was inevitable that with specialist language you can’t properly connect things together anyway Yeah, so you’ve got a problem if you’ve got to have specialization, but you’ve also got to have a common sort of narrative or a way of Way of translating that across complex loads and loads of different domains and Maybe people are having a different relationship with what language and propositions are enough for rather than thinking it is the work I wonder what chat GPT will do to this because that’s going to change the way that we that we relate to the positional manipulation So I have an online video essay about the LLMs But large language models and then you can take a look at it I talk about the scientific import the philosophical import and the spiritual import of these machines and capacity for enhancing propositional tyranny of this machine is significant and then My publisher approached me and said he wanted to turn it he wanted to step it down Hopefully not dumb it down to make it a much more excessive generally accessible for the public at large And so we we have a book out. Well, the book is coming out In serial fashion in part one It was already released in August part one is going to be part two is going to be released in October called mentoring the machine That it’s like 999 on Amazon if you want to start picking that up to get some take on How we should perhaps think about a relationship to these machines and what they can and cannot do and what important thresholds We’re facing where we could make decision points about how we want to go down this path I’ve watched the video essay and I and some of my team have already pre-ordered the book So we will definitely be taking But it feels like having some reflection on how Outsourcing some of the propositional work to machines does that create a jumping-off point for us to think about the other elements of Decision-making that we have that we that we can then actually focus on It could and so there’s a three-part video series that Jordan Hall and I did recently on governance in this and Jordan has the proposal That you know not not how they are now, but with the we get we get sort of non-disputable Non-controversial AGI we can upload a lot of the work that we’re not actually particularly good at our biological constraints Which would be right some of the stuff you talked about and then that what we could do is we would free us up To invest a lot more in these non propositional practices and transformations that we are actually surprisingly well evolved for because they are much closer to our core Adaptivity and and then we could bring in new styles of governance With that shift and so if you I don’t have you’ve seen it But you could take a look at those videos too because we tried to develop that argument now of course that arguments developed at a very Abstract level because we’re trying to talk about all forms of governance, but that would be also Where we explored that proposal you just made at Lake and I think it’s a very good proposal Like it could go very bad. We could just right there’s a lots of ways of which this could go bad But one way it could go well is it can free us up for being what does Jordan say mediocre meat machines? to being really really powerful persons who exercise Perspectival transformation and alter their identity In with transformative experience and a participatory fashion. I will I’ve watched that maybe four or five times now Wow, I found especially the first the first one and we could do our old session on this and About moving from dealing with radical uncertainty I’ve been doing some work with the folks over in Britain who have been thinking about radical uncertainty and how It’s not compatible with the traditional approaches of economics and it means we need to think differently Yeah, so there’s a lot of people coming at this from from different places that I’m trying to that I’m trying to to connect and and The idea that you can’t be an expert in a particular Domain because the idea of putting a boundary around it is part of the problem And and and I think that what my team by accident or design I don’t know is doing is is working out what it means to make good choices in Policymakers are up to a point my guys are general-purpose choice makers, but interesting and I know we have time to talk about it, but We have found that you act It’s helpful to have people work on the same area for a long time because there’s something about the domain specificity Yes This country to my head between we do need to domain specificity, but we don’t need We don’t need professional specialization in that way or at least we need that to change because it’s not the application of another process that is a that that Way is the machine way of doing things but at the same time you still need to recognize that you can’t have all the knowledge in in one human head and there’s probably not even gonna be captured all in the In in the AGI so you need to work out how you link humans together to keep a ability to zoom in and zoom out effectively while making those choices Excellent excellent. So just came back from Bergerac where was working with Sort of practitioners guides and what we call the scar what scholars these are people are both scholars Or in some ways and but they’re also creating communities of practice around the collective thing The collective intelligence of distributed cognition and what what what and that the proposal that was sort of That I made and we’re sort of working on is it doing something like what the brain does with the brain? breaks processing up into all these individual models but using mutual modeling and with their Specialization and then but and then you end up something like the default mode network and they come back together They all make sure that they they can Talk in common and correct each other’s models and what you do is you have practices Right where while you’re doing is working on creating the we space between people where you’re not tacking any problem you like let’s Put the problem-solving aside and let’s make sure we got a really good we space between us We create that shared language right that shared agency that shared Perspective taking ability and then and then people go off right and they do their particular Specializations and what you do is with the brain of you you you do a part of processing between them and you’re constantly oscillating between specialized processing and coming together to make sure that your mutual models take the The maintenance of mutual models is itself a problem that needs to be constantly solved Repeatedly so that you can then go out and do your specific problem solving right? Okay, we’re not solving the problems We’re making sure that we are all We’re all mutually what we correct each other’s models of each other and that’s all we’re doing here We don’t try and solve any problems We just get that and then we take that back to our special problem solving and then we we and then we do that and then We could do once we’re running that process Then we can meet in the in-between space where we’re trying to do coordination about our problem-solving I would love to hear more about that because I’m struggling to imagine how you build that That shared agency without a purpose without a specific problem to and I mean that’s everything that I do is always anchored around Problems thing and this will be this would be the hardest for you to bring it But like it so if you take a look at some of the practices we do like dialectic and the deal logos that are just I would just release one recently with with which was with on Ken Lally’s channel climbing Mount Sophia with myself Ryan Barton Ken Lowry and Christopher master Pietro and you can see what that looks like And you don’t tackle a problem you tackle a virtue that because we’re and that gets people to reconnect at this higher order level of what is our shared normativity and how am I in right relationship or not and then They that gets addressed because if you don’t share the normativity and people aren’t in right relationship with it then all of the other stuff you try to do is gonna just screw up well and you get people to say the problem we’re solving is the problem of do we have the shared normativity and do we all feel that we are Existentially committed to it and in right relationship with it and that’s what we’re built. That’s what you build in the we space You don’t so it’s not like you’re not doing that thing But it’s you’re working at this level of the level of virtue of normativity. What right like what do we think? You know not that’s speed in the world of sentence How do we realize compassion? How do we realize justice? How do we realize courage and one of these things that helps people to do is to also get them to step back and reflect on What virtues do I think are relevant to any problem? We’re trying to solve and I would put it to you Carla that if vote if government is not doing this Government should shut down because if government is not asking the question What are the virtues? What are the relevant virtues that should be brought to bear on this problem? And they have to am I in deep right relationship with those virtues then you should not be a government. You should not be in power Well, I this is a really I think that there is something that would we could attach to this even in even in Britain where we Had to have a written Constitution Which by the way, I was really interested in Jordan Paul was saying that gives you a special ability to respond to this change I like okay, that’s that’s interesting. I think the British government versus others And but we do have four values that have been I think these have been in law for only about 15 years But they’ve been in the Civil Service Code I think since Victorian times I think for over a hundred years and that is and I will forget all of them but objectivity honesty Integrity and impartiality so we are contractually obliged and then sound like virtues I think they all I think some of the Crunchy stuff around there is what do we mean by objective? Zach well, no, I think I would put it to you that if you get people in the room doing dialectic and the deal logos you’ll find this punchiness around each and every one of those and part of part of what goes into people’s modeling is they think they know what honesty it is until they do these practices and what inevitably happens out of all of this is people will say I didn’t realize what honesty is now I do and they have a They have a relationship of reverence again to the virtue rather than having an automaticity about it. I I desperately want to know how to go about running those exercises That this feels like a concrete thing that you could do to start to refresh and dislodge some of these assumptions well, I mean We’re gonna do a workshop in October over a weekend Circling into dollar be elected be elected and certainly need to die below those In which you could take the workshop and you can take the whole program And you can watch some of the videos and you could learn how to do it. That’s how you do it Fantastic, that’s going on my to-do list Okay Yeah, you just you can reach out to the verbecky foundation work reach out to Christopher master Pietro You can just Google circling into dia logos workshop weekend. You’ll get the next one coming out in October And you know, I did it You know if you if you would you want a couple of your team members? Let us know we can probably give you I can guarantee giving you a discounted rate Doing the workshops things like that Wonderful. Wonderful. I’m just I’m definitely gonna act on that and this has given me so much Useful steps forward instead of chasing around concepts in my head Well, thank you I mean like I said I find you exemplary and I think the fact that you constantly willing to be in this, you know genuine Back and forth discussion and and it gets into the elogous because we we are merging things together right between us With the cognitive science, I think I think that’s admirable and I think it’s been really necessary and important Well, thank you. And it’s definitely not just me at loads of this stuff is coming from my team So it is a collective enterprise, but it is Requires a certain level of resilience that I think we also need the practices for Yeah, yes. Yes So Carla I always like to give my guests the last word It doesn’t have to be could be but it doesn’t have to be summative or cumulative or provocative or inspirational But any last word you would like to leave our listeners with I should have remembered you were gonna ask this because you asked this last time What is an important thing I Guess it’s thinking that both people in who aren’t in government bar familiar with these practices as well as people who have come to this because they are interested in government and to Appreciate the Almost infinite complexity of the problems involved and yeah, and that’s why that’s why this is this is so hard It’s not just because we’re doing this wrong or that wrong or we’re out of date or it’s because what we’re trying to do Is there’s inherent trade-offs in it of? managing something this level of dynamism with this level of accountability to the wider populace with this level of Ambiguity and change at every step and is I don’t think the media always explained why real complicated and complex this is to do and I think if everybody could kind of pitch in the way that we’re the You and your team have then we would we’d have a better functioning world. I Agree, and thank you for saying that I agree that often There is a rather simplistic narrative brought to bear in reporting on About the the behavior of the civil service. That’s that’s a case in Canada as well. It’s probably a universal thing Yeah, yeah, I think so Thank you very much. Barlin great talking to you. Thank you so much