To solve the political and social problems that a world of 7 billion people faces, we need to be able to communicate with the precision of an engineering blueprint! We can’t do this with long sequences of words with ambiguous meaning as we do today. We need a new language that has all the advantages of an engineering blueprint using the smartphone technology we have created.
Words have served us very well for the last 40 thousand years or so, but we may have reached the limits of their usefulness for many of the things we must do. Words are great for poetry because of the rich spectrum of connotations and breadth of meaning of each word. It allows the reader to find their own colour in every phrase. But this vagueness is also what makes words so unsuitable for serious political debate. We have no language for debating political policy. Sound bites and Twitter feeds are wholly inadequate. Detailed word based descriptions are too long and tedious for people to read/listen and they are never unambiguous. To make matters worse, politicians have learned to use the poetic features of words to sway opinions rather than serious, objective debate.
Engineering communications
The engineering community has long abandoned words in favour of a blueprint language. As a result, they are able to build a 160 story skyscraper which does not fall over. Imagine building this skyscraper with text based specifications only. Yet our political structures that we must design, build, approve and maintain are as, if not more complex, but we try to do it with word based political jargon. We need a blueprint like language, not poetic words to design, describe and debate political policy.
It may not be a coincident that engineering progress in the last 100 years has been phenomenal. We have gone from Kitty Hawk to supersonic airliners in a hundred years. Political progress has been marginal and after recent political events, maybe even negative. Engineers uses a blueprint language, politics use a word based language.
Words are obsolete
Words are a “horse and buggy” technology when we live in a world of high speed computers, smart phones and universal connectedness. We have the technology to create a blueprint like language for political debate so we can build robust political structures that do not fall over. We just need to get out of the word based comfort zone and put our mind to it.
We have impressive technology that allows us to communicate and share words and pictures with everyone at all times. One would think this collaboration technology would show a big spike in collaborative success but it has not, we are just emulating what we do with words
When we needed to go faster, further and at will, we did not emulate horses legs with mechanical legs, we made a conceptual step shift to wheels and smooth roadways and to fixed wings with propulsion, not flapping wings. We need to make a conceptual shift from words to a yet to evolve blueprint like language.
Blueprint for abstract concepts
It might be argued that engineering deals with spatial objects which are much more amenable to drawing based blueprints. However, many abstract concepts that we use in political debate are based on spatial metaphors. We use the spatial metaphor to make them easier to understand, why not also use the blueprint for those spatial metaphor to represent these concepts?
We assume that abstract concepts like “fairness” and “power” are vague and fuzzy and can only be described with words, but abstract concepts can be stated precisely and have a lot of underlying structure which can be shown as a drawing. Mathematics is a very abstract concept, but mathematicians have created a very precise language to represent abstract ideas. Music is represented very precisely. Lawyers have created “legalese” to make words more precise than everyday use. It can be done for politics, we just need to get out of the “word” rut.
This blueprint language cannot be designed by a person, a committee or a corporation. It will need to evolve by a large number of people trying it, rejecting what does not work, building upon successes and building consensus on a standard lexicon. Early adopters will probably be our young generation who already funnels much of their communication through their smart phone using the appeal of visual images in snap-chat, emojis and u-tube. Give them some tools, and they will discover and embrace a more meaningful and efficient language. Politicians will of course resist.
Attributes of blueprint speak (BPS)
This new political blueprint will of course not resemble an engineering blueprint in any way but we want it to have the same advantages as an engineering blueprint does.
Advantages of a blueprint:
It is unambiguous and clearly specifies the subject of discussion. If you give a blueprint to 10 different people, they will all construct the same object. Give a word based political policy to 10 people and you would get 10, possibly very different interpretations.
A blueprint has a high level “floor plan” which gives a broad overview and the reader can then navigate to their area of interest. With words, the speaker has too much power to lead the reader on a path that often is meant to influence, rather than inform.
A blueprint has many layers of detail. The reader can drill down to the level of detail required without being distracted by detail irrelevant to their current purpose.
The levels of detail tend to be organized around areas of expertise and specialization like plumbing, electrical or ventilation. This makes the blueprint an ideal hub for bringing together the contribution of different specialists. It is a tool for collaboration.
A blueprint has a large visual component making it easier to comprehend than a string of words.
Our minds and words
Our minds do not work in words. If you read this paper, and someone asks you a day later what it said, you will not use my words, you will paraphrase with your own words. Your mind stored it in some non-word form and then translated it back to words to communicate it. Your mind stored it in what I will call conceptual objects, These are subconscious and we don’t know what they are but if we can discover what they are, and represent them in a rich, expressive format in our smart phones, we can share them with others and avoid the inefficiencies and the errors of translating to and from words. The inter-related conceptual objects of a particular political issue would be the conceptual map of that issue. It would be produced by debate, collaboration and consensus. It would represent all positions that could be taken on the issue, and their pros and cons.
Our mind has evolved over millions of years, word are about 50 thousand years old and have not yet been fully integrated with our minds. Many futurists predict that computers will soon understand words like we do. I hope this does not happen. I don’t want to argue with my smart phone about what a particular group of words means. Better we should invent a blueprint like language more attuned to our mind and which computers can also understand without ambiguity.
In this blog, I will propose some conceptual objects and how we might represent them in our smart phone. There are several ways we could use to try to uncover our subconscious conceptual objects. We will need a variety of computer tools to represent and work with these objects.
Political debate is focused on ideology, principles and positions that people can take on an issue. An ideology is a very generic concept that we toss about lightly in political discussions but to use it in a particular case or instantiation, we need to supply a lot more details than the words themselves can convey. The conceptual object needs to have room for all the details and the various positions that users can take.
How the mind works
It is useful to examine how our mind works. The basic mind we have inherited from our animal ancestors has evolved over millions of years and is largely an unconscious “instant answer” mind. The brain gets input from the body’s sensors and from past experience and gives us an intuitive instant answer. We don’t know how that answer is produced, but it’s an answer that has guaranteed our survival and made us the dominant species on earth. Words are a very recent addition, maybe 50 thousand year or so. Words have given us the capacity for conscious thought and reasoning to over-ride our instant answer solutions but it takes a lot of effort and it is so much easier to defer to our dominant instant answer brain.
Our first response to any situation is always the intuitive instant answer. Unfortunately, this has a lot of built in baggage which is much less relevant today than when the mind evolved in our ancestors. For example, strong tribalism in the past gave us a survival advantage. Support your tribe and distrust any stranger from outside the tribe. Today cooperation and inclusiveness give us a better advantage and tribalism has become the root cause of many of the worlds social problems. Recent US policy shows the damage that this baggage can create. Racism and anti-immigrant stance are caused by the tribalism baggage in our instant answer brain.
Another baggage of our instant answer brain is “self interest”. It is obvious how this was critical to our evolution and survival for millions of years. However today, with 7 billion people on the planet, and the technology to wipe out our species, “the common good” must replace “self interest”.
Words are used by politicians in the form of sound bites and Twitter feeds to deliberately trigger an instant answer response. We need to override that response with rationalization and reasoning but that is difficult with words which are our only mechanism for conscious thought. It is like doing arithmetic with Roman numerals, which can be done, but the Arabic number system is so much more suitable and easy to use. Reasoning involves finding all options and evaluating them rationally. A blueprint like language would be much better suited for reasoning.
A reasoning renascence
Our instant answer mind is inherited from our animal ancestors who probably don’t have any mechanism for conscious thinking. Humans have an additional capability to reason. To reason we need to represent the world we are reasoning about as a mental model, a vision or a dream. We can then consciously play with this mental image by asking questions, doing “what if” and all the other operations we call reasoning.
The blueprint of a skyscraper is a mental vision of what we would like to construct but the mind can’t manage that amount of detail so we store the detail in the computer as a blueprint. The computer could be our smart phone which makes the vision shareable with all.
Our democracy has established a legal and judicial system that infuses reasoning in the decision making process. Unfortunately our election system is still largely driven by politicians triggering instant answer responses with all their baggage. This populism is overpowering a reasoned response like it did in Brexit and the US election. BPS would facilitate reasoning at all levels of our social, political system, it would foster a reasoning renascence. Imagine if all voters had had a clear conceptual map of the Brexit issue before the vote.
Our silicone brain
We have evolved a very impressive silicone supplemental brain but we get limited benefit from it because our biological and silicone brains cannot communicate easily. Each brain has complementary strengths but we can’t harness them if the brains can’t communicate. Futurists predict that when computers understand words, this problem will go away. This cannot happen because a group of words do not have an undisputed fixed meaning. The meaning of a set of words to a human is based on their individual history with those words, their connotation and their instant answer reaction to the words. How will a computer interpret those words? Will it be based on the computer’s history with those words? We now have 7 billion people arguing and confused about what a set of words means, if every human has a computer, we will have 14 billion agents just as confused about the meaning of a set of words. If we develop this blueprint like language, both we and computers will not be confused about the meaning. Instead of computers learning our language, we need to evolve a new language that works for both of us.
Objects
Our mind deals with a very complex world of infinite details by classifying things, both physical and abstract, into objects which we can quickly identify. We then deal with the generic properties of the object instead of processing the individual details of the item. Every tree in the world is different, but we can usually deal with this complexity by just dealing with the object “tree”, ignoring all the details.
In political debate, it is more complex. Take the abstract object we label as “welfare”. This has a completely different meaning for a Democrat than for a Republican. In a blueprint language, we would need to add a lot more detail if it were a subject of a debate. We would have to add:
Who the welfare recipients would be?
How much they would get?
Who would pay?
What is the expected “common good”?
What are the rules for qualifying?
What are the rules for exiting?
How can you detect cheaters?
When engineers first began to embrace computers to manage their blueprints, their first solution was to convert any drawing to a series of line segments. If the segments were small enough and there were enough of them, you could represent absolutely any drawing, no matter how complex. But the computer did not add much value, it could store and retrieve the drawing, expand it or make it smaller but not much else. They soon realized that if they represented the objects in the drawing like valves and pipes and their location, the computer could add a lot of value. It could check that a valve and it’s attached pipe was compatible, it was easy to replace a valve to make design improvements, it could creat a material list, and much more.
Using words to define a political policy is like the line segment drawing, we can store and retrieve the words, share them on social media, print them small or large, and do a search on words, not meaning. Great flexibility but limited value.
If we determine what the conceptual objects of the policy are and represent them, then we can search for meaning, cross reference objects, do validity checks, replace objects and still share for collaboration. The key of course will be to come up with a workable set of conceptual objects. There are a number of approaches to do this which I will discuss later.
Conceptual objects
Our minds are made of neural networks which are very good for storing and recognizing patterns. When we encounter an instant of unfairness, we store the pattern of the condition which produced those feelings. Every time thereafter that we encounter the same feeling, we recall and strengthen that pattern until it becomes a conceptual object that we can invoke when dealing with unfairness, a very key concept in politics and social interaction.
The concept differs in each of us based on our experience. If we want to share it with others, we must translate it into words because we do not have neural connections between our brains.
Many of the words we use, not surprisingly, are key concepts that we deal with in political and other discussions. Fairness is one of these words. We all know what it means but it is a very generic concept and if we want to be specific, we need a lot of add on words to make it specific to a particular instantiation. This is tedious for the speaker and the reader so we often just use the generic term and let it reader fill in the blanks. The words used only tell half the story, the other half is added by the reader. If we could represent the conceptual object “fairness”, in our smart phone with all the details needed for a particular instantiation, we could share it without the fuzzy translation to and from words.
My simple, one man analysis of the concept of fairness has these components:
There are always two or more entities being compared in terms of fairness.
Unless we specify the entities in detail, the concept remains vague.
There is a currency on which we make the comparison, it is often dollars but can be opportunity, property, personal treatment, stated or implied rules, behaviour of authorities, etc. This leads to a scale of the currency of fairness, where each entity has a position.
There are always a number of positions we can take on how to mitigate the unfairness. In political discussions, the only reason we discuss it is to mitigate it.
Each position can have PRO and CON arguments to support reasoning about them.
To represent any concept, we need a number of other concepts. Here are a few suggestions which might allow us to bootstrap the process.
Entity – an entity can be a person, a group, an institution, a thing or even another concept. But we must specify it in detail so there is not confusion about what it refers to. If we are looking at the fairness of CEO compensation, which CEOs are included, only CEOs that make over a million? Only American CEOs? Only CEOs of Fortune 500 companies? The entity will be a component of most conceptual objects.
A scale – whenever we want to rank anything, we need a scale, a line where the top is higher, the bottom is lower. We can then indicate where things fall on this scale. For CEO compensation, this scale would be a dollar scale and we could plot the entities based on their annual remuneration. The scale could also be very abstract and points on the scale would be relative, not numeric.
Position – a position is a stance you can take on any political policy. You would be convinced that it is better than all other positions, if it required a vote you would vote for it, if you were an executive, you would work to implement it. The list of positions must be very complete. Everybody involved in the discussion must be able to find a position that represents their point of view. Positions might just be an unordered list, an ordered list or an option space. I will give an example of that in the discussion on abortion.
PRO and CON – Each position could have a list of pro and con arguments which discuss the merits and detriments of the position. This would assist participants in making up their minds. PRO and CON represents our reasoning about the subject, it counters our intuitive instant answer response. It allows us to make a decision based on all evidence.
A fact – Facts are used very widely and loosely in political debate, often to prove the speaker’s point. Facts are often questionable, have a questionable source and don’t necessarily show cause and effect as the speaker implies. We have a good system of jurying scientific and medical papers to ensure objectivity. We should do the same with political facts. Once juried, listeners could rely on them. Jurying would be done by experts, not populism.
A blueprint uses a spatial representation where possible for easier understanding but the spacial picture can’t give everything we need to know. On a floor plan, the location and size of Windows can be shown but there also needs to be a spec table to list all the details. Our objects will also need a spec table. For a fact, we could also list:
The source of the fact
The jurors and any dissension they had
The limitations, accuracy, and where it does not apply
Temporal, how recent is it, how long will it last
Conclusions that could be drawn from the fact
The spec table is like a form that must be filled, without which the object is incomplete. This form of communication will be much more labour intensive than words, where all the details can be conveniently ignored. Engineering blueprints are also very labour intensive but that is the only way to ensure that skyscrapers don’t fall overage 747 jetliners don’t fall out of the sky. I believe our political structures are also important enough to warrant the extra work.
Conceptual objects can form the basis for collaboration. If all stakeholders add their points of view, then the resulting object would be complete, and not represent only the biases of the speaker as words often do.
A blueprint like language for politics based on an engineering mindset, might also move us toward using some of the other engineering methods that are responsible for the phenomenal progress in that field. Among these are:
Base decisions on science as much as possible. Populism has no role in engineering. Science can come from special studies or experiments, statistics of past cases, rational analysis of current and past cases or simulation models.
Define “good” and find ways to measure it.
Segment complexity, everything cannot be monolithic. Then grow and certify experts in the different segments.
Define “best practices” to reuse what has been proven to work so you never have to start with a clean sheet. Every country in the world has a health care delivery system but has anyone ever documented best practises for healthcare delivery?
In Summary
A blueprint. Is a vision or dream of something we would like to build. It is not real, it only exists on paper so to speak. But we can manipulate it, get consensus,do “what if”, ensure all the parts fit together and and share it with all stake-holders, all at a low cost compared to working with the finished product. A blueprint like language would allow us to do that with political concepts and structures. We have the technology to do this using smart phone technology. We just need the motivation and the critical mass to do it. It may be easy to dismiss this as the naive dreaming of a techno-nerd, but the world political situation is deteriorating rapidly. A new approach must be tried. Let’s not get caught in the “Flapping wing” syndrome by building our new technology around words.
This Blog is an attempt to generate support for this idea.I will expand my thoughts in future blog posts and welcome participation from others.
Wally Reimer
blueprint.speak@gmail.com
Blueprintspeak 