A3 Research Institute

Global Knowledge Forum Project  –  An Overview

 

Introduction

Communications in modern society have reached their own tipping point towards collapse. The primary cause of this breakdown is the inability of human brains, refined by evolution for survival in a primitive natural environment, to deal with the complexity of a modern technological driven culture. Humans essentially still have Stone Age Brains. (This is discussed at length in the article Complexity and Stone Age Brains. )

In short, biological evolution moves very slowly. Progress, toward any new physical appearance or organ function, requires multiple steps. Many random mutations in body systems occur all the time. For any one of those mutations to take hold as a widespread change, it must provide the organism with a breeding advantage, while any other mutations that occur simultaneously don’t cause over weighing disadvantages. This advantage must continue to be spread throughout the population even through many competing mutations will also be occurring. The mutations, when they appear, are typically very small changes. The beak of a bird may be slightly longer or colored slightly different. There are no known jumps where any complex organ quickly appears.

So it is with human brains. A clear development of primate brains can be traced over about 55 million years. But even those have predecessors with most of the physiological structures tracing more than 200 million years. The “Stone Age” was only 20 thousand years ago. At the time of emergence of agriculture 6,000 years ago, modern human behavior was not much different from hunter gatherers. In fact, if we observe the behavior of humans only 200 years ago, most were still quite independent people living in very simple agrarian conditions. The point is, the conditions of modern life have not arisen because of any significant change in the brain structure of most humans from Stone Age times.

This means, the breakdown of communications is not related in any way to a change in the thinking “capability” of human brains. It is due to the cultural growth of human practices that, as understood and implemented using Stone Age thinking, are not conducive of achieving human harmony or survivability. To visualize this point, all that is needed is to look at the history of human societies. In his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies”, Joseph Tainter describes how this has happened 17 times already. Most of the conditions for collapse he identified currently exist – in excess!

What led to the Global Knowledge Forum program was discoveries made by Bruce Nappi that described the underlying social and human brain issues that society is stumbling over. These have now been published in his recent book, Collapse 2020 V1: Fall of the First Global Civilization. The discoveries explain how bad approaches to how internet communications are structured simply amplify huge destructive drives in Stone Age human thinking. These drives interfere with the effective communications that are needed for society, broadly, to construct complex solutions to restrain both the technology and population explosions.

What the Global Knowledge Forum program is attempting to do is create a new communications approach that manages these harmful human psychology drives.

 

The communication breakdown – a summary

In the 1980s, personal computers began to be commonly accepted.These became public information sharing tools when commercial firms adapted the military ARPANET for public use. To make using computer based communications equipment acceptable to “humans”, even to those with advanced academic skills, most applications were designed to mimic pre-computer information formats, i.e. traditional printed media. Then, and continuing to the present, transmitted information is formatted to appear like traditional “communications”: individual to individual verbal or written discussions, speaker to audience presentations, traditional postal mail, money payment statement forms, product catalogs, or television programs. The major problem with all of these approaches is the use of “stream of consciousness” information transfer.

For example, one person sends information to a second person by “email” or “imessage”. The person receiving the information thinks about the information and then, based on availability, sends a reply. While such messages may now be sent across the planet in an instant, what limits the rate that the information is processed is the ability of the humans on each end to create, read, and process the information. One person, of course, can also send information to many people at the same time. This is often called a “post and comment format. With an application like Twitter, the message could go out to hundreds of thousands of people in a second. But what happens if all of those recipients then try to reply to the message?

Most people take these formats for granted. They think they are the only way it can be done. So, the “status quo” continues. The grand promise of the internet to involve all people in the decision processes of society has failed. The result is, most information sent over the internet is never processed. It winds up in the “internet landfill”.

Let’s look one step further with this example. Let’s say a group of people in a town are discussing a problem with their school system. At some point, an issue is raised for resolution. A coordinator sends a message to 200 people. How long can they expect it will take to get answers from all of these people? The answer is not related to the speed of the internet. It’s mostly determined by the complexity of people’s lives. Some people will be on vacation, some will be sick, some will be burdened by family or legal problems, most will have to do research on the issue. So the expectation for an all-inclusive reply is easily: many days.

What happens then, if the coordinator doesn’t provide sufficient time for replies and sends a second question out before the first is answered? The result is the coordinator being bombarded by “out of sync” replies. Some might be requests for more information; some disagree with the wording of the first questions; some think other issues should have been included, etc. The information exchange quickly falls apart.

This example only touches on 3 variables of the problem. A more complete analysis is provided in the document “Justification for Structured Dialog”. For this summary, here are 11 specific reasons that “stream of consciousness” post and comment discussions of complex topics fail:

1. Many subtopics and details need to be included and addressed.
2. The subtopics and details often interrelate in complex, overlapping ways.
3. It takes a lot of time to review all the details.
4. Understanding the details requires involved thinking.
5. Understanding and interpreting the details requires specialized backgrounds.
6. Verifying the accuracy of details often requires references to external sources.
7. Recognizing novel interrelationships among many details requires creative skills.
8. Judging the logical interrelationships of details requires philosophical skills.
9. Recognizing hidden questions or mistakes requires critical thinking skills.
10. Organizing the flow of discussion information requires system skills.
11. Organizing the process of discussion requires management skills.

Notice, this list doesn’t even start to get into personality and style issues.

 

The Structured Discussion Process

The “Structured Discussion” process deals with all of these issues by combining the following new elements:

1. A novel forum discussion format. Its initial appearance looks like a conventional forum. Members participate in topics that interest them. They post questions and reply to other posts. But here are some radical changes:

• The forum is only open to “invited” members who have experience related to the topic. To bring in wider audiences, special “outreach” methods will be used, such as polls.
• The actual “discussion” includes requirements to focus on specific questions, and provide answers that are supported by specific and reliable references.
• The discussion process is directed by a topic leader.
• The process uses an associated “tracking” forum. The tracking forum is editable only by coordinators and facilitators. The purpose of the tracking forum is to “guide” the discussion toward a specific goals that will be recognized as a true “discovery” in social process when it is reached.

 

2. A knowledge map. This is a temporary knowledge repository which can be accessed quickly for reference in parallel with forum discussion. This isn’t, however, a simple data warehouse. It includes the following special features:

• The knowledge map captures not only reference documents, but also short significant statements made during the discussions.
• The “map” is organized as an outline. It is not a simple alphabetical list. The outline is structured to follow the “logic” of each search process.
• The outline also captures “meta data” related to the process. This includes data like: when and where in the timeline of the discussion did a data item occur; what is the logical foundation; what is the controversy blocking a solution.

 

3. An annotated reference index. This is a conveniently available bibliography of reference material related to the information on the MAP. Each of the references is accompanied by an annotation that tells where in the referenced text issues related to the discussion occurs.

 

 

USING THIS STRUCTURE CREATES A PARADIGM SHIFTING FRAMEWORK FOR CONDUCTING SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL DISCUSSIONS.

 

Another Example

Here is a short example of how such a process might be expected to occur for a currently active problem: world sustainability.

1. The following topic is posted to the forum: How should world society make decisions to achieve social sustainability?
2. A topic leader is found with broad experience in both modern technologies and social culture. A decision is made to expand leadership to multiple people because no one person can have sufficient depth as well as over arching experience.
3. A standard forum “tracking” structure is set up.
4. A world-wide announcement is made seeking experts to join the discussion.
5. The experts begin by assembling the reference material foundation for the discussion. This task alone is a mamouth operation. It is finally achieved by the combined effort of over 100 world leading universities under a major international grant.
6. A relatively short discussion period occurs after which a decision is made to apply a number of socio-economic models to determine what factors have the most significant influence on sustainability.
7. Preliminary model analyses are made using the world collected database and presented publically for comment.
8. Widespread interest grows for each country to run these models themselves using their own circumstances as criteria.
9. The forum participants help guide the world effort.
10. The results show that most countries actually find similar criteria needed for sustainability.
11. This brings a new consensus to international diplomacy leading to applying joint solutions.