Explorations

Our story so far: Gautama, the World-Honored One, Sage of the Shakya clan, drop out, has devoted years to understanding the source of frustration, unsatisfactoriness, suffering, dukkha; one morning, upon seeing the Morning Star, he saw through suffering to the source of suffering, realized that suffering is something that comes about through our own thoughts, our own clinging to things that because of their very nature are transitory, and thus woke up to the true nature of things, and became the Buddha, “the one who woke up.”

So, now what?

Gautama had solved the problem; he had gone beyond clinging, gone beyond attachment, had liberated himself from the Wheel of Causes and Effects — all technical terms for laughing at himself as he saw that he, along with every other human on the planet, had been making himself miserable and that he could have, at any moment, stopped. So he got up from his place under the ficus tree that would forever after be called the Bodhi Tree, Shri Maha Bodhi, and wandered off to look for breakfast.

No one really noticed. He was just another wandering holy man, cleaner and better fed than most perhaps. He didn’t need to be noticed, although anyone who saw him or met him was struck by how gentle he seemed, by how he was everyone’s equal, by how children and animals trusted him. He went on like this for weeks, until one man, perhaps a little more observant than most, saw the calm and poise in his face and thought it … not quite human.

He stopped Buddha on the road and asked, “Are you a God?”

Buddha smiled at the question, and said “No, not a God.”

“Are you an Angel, a Deva? A Rakasha, a demon?”

“No, neither an angel nor a demon.”

“Are you a saint then? A holy man?”

“No, I’m not a saint.”

“But you are clearly not a man like other men.”

“No, I am not.”

“What are you then?”

Buddha said, “I am awake.”

In due time, Buddha came to the Deer Park in Sarnath and met the other shramanas he had accompanied for the years of his time as an ascetic. When they saw him coming, the yelled at him, called him names, called him a quitter and an apostate … until they noticed it wasn’t bothering him, and in fact that he was so gentle with them that they realized they were angry — they, holy men, renunciates, devoted ones, had become angry — and out of embarrassment stopped. Then one of them shyly asked him “what has happened to you Siddhartha Gautama?”

“I woke up.”

Then they realized that here was one man who had achieved what they wanted to achieve, and they begged him to teach them how they too could become awake. So Buddha told them about the first three Great Truths, and seeing that merely hearing the Great Truths wasn’t enough, went on to describe a method by which they, too could awaken. This was the Fourth Great Truth: that there is a way to learn to wake up.

This method, Buddha’s original self-help program, was called the Noble Eightfold Path, because Buddha gave the shramanas who became his first followers eight basic steps for their own practice.

So these are the Four Great Truths: that ordinary life is unsatisfactory; that the unsatisfactory nature of life arises because we cling to things that are by their nature impermanent; that by ceasing to cling to impermanent things, life ceases to be unsatisfactory; and that there is a way, a program, called the Eightfold Path through which any human can wake up.

Back a good long while ago, I was closely involved with The Intelligence Community, which contrary to popular belief isn’t really named by opposites. It is, however, a massive multiple-agency bureaucracy with roots in all the individual services, the Justice Department, and the Executive branch of FDR and Harry Truman. (And yes, the actual administration is important; government organizations acquire structure and organization based on who start them. The Department of the Navy is still clearly influenced by the organization at the time of John Paul Jones.)

It’s a marvelous example of my ongoing focus of interest: Big Organizations That Act Like Idiots. We will have plenty of examples drawn from the open literature on the intelligence business.

One of the things that people outside the business don’t really understand is that intelligence agencies never tell you the answer. Instead, you have to take a hint from Tolkien:

“Go not to the CIA for counsel, for they will tell you both no and yes.”

The question might be “why”?

Certainly what I observed was this: the actual intelligence collection goes on, and it’s relatively objective. You have a radio intercept that tells you that the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Army is moving from A to B. All of these snippets are written down and transmitted back to the analysts, usually at CIA, where they are entered on 5×8 index cards. (Or the logical equivalent. When I got started with this business it really was literal 5×8 cards, but I understand they have more computerized methods now.)

But then, all these intercepts, along with reports from human spies, information culled from newspapers, dispatches from diplomatic posts, and so forth. These snippets are read and digested by analysts who are usually people with degrees in political science or history, along with some people with specific technical skills or other useful background, like military officers. The output of this process is that the analysts, every day or so, write a term paper on their area that goes to a senior analyst, who uses that information to summarize a higher level report. This goes up the hierarchy, being further summarized at area desks, in task forces and tiger teams, until it becomes input to various very senior intelligence people — like the Deputy Director for Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and now to the Director of National Intelligence. At each level, it’s summarized, reviewed, re-summarized, glossed, and rewritten until, without exception, it has two qualities:

• it says nothing that can be proven wrong;
• but it says exactly what is perceived to be what the boss wanted.

What’s more, when it’s presented to the Executive, it will then be shaded and summarized further by the presenter to more closely reflect what the presenter thinks is most advantageous. To that presenter.

I didn’t really understand this until, years later, I read a book by two guys who became my friends. This book is called Illuminatus!, originally published as the Illuminatus Trilogy in 1975. Shea and Wilson defined an illuminating notion called the SNAFU Principle, which they stated as “communication is only possible among equals.” The basic idea is simple: when two people do not perceive one another as equals, they will slant their communications — unconsciously and without any particular volition — to protect themselves in that disparate relationship.

So the analyst writes unconsciously to fit with the general assumptions, and the senior analyst favors things that confirm their own positions, and so on.

Wilson and Shea were both writers, and basically literary people; their summary is literate and verbal. But, being a computer scientist and at least somewhat literate in signal theory and information theory, it struck me that the SNAFU Principle wasn’t sufficiently precisely stated. It should be restated as followed:

“In any social hierarchy, the noise added to a communication between individuals in that hierarchy is directly proportional to the distance between them, and the factor of proportionality will be proportional to the perceived risk to them.”

This, finally, because to make things make sense. Let’s look at this restatement in some detail.

First, “In any social hierarchy….” The most important thing to observe is that to a first approximation there will be a social hierarchy established between any two people who are interacting. We very very rarely see another person as an exact equal, although we do sometimes find ourselves evaluating another as an effective equal. (So, for example, my friend Anil is a Professor of Biology; my area is Computer Science. Even though I know a fair bit of biology, and especially physiology, I defer to Anil on those topics, and vice versa.) Since we have been close friends for decades, we can maintain a relationship as equals and defer on to the other without friction on most topics. On the other hand, it’s very difficult — as any teenager will tell you — to speak fully and frankly to your parents or to a teacher.

Second, “… the noise added to a communication between individuals in that hierarchy is directly proportional to the distance between them….” “Noise” is the technical term, but it means more or less what you think it does: its what makes it more difficult to get the sense of some message. It’s literally the opposite of information; if you’re in a noisy bar trying to talk to a beautiful girl, the band that drowns you out is noise; on the other hand, if you later accompany the beautiful girl to a concert, and she insists on talking through the soloist’s performance, then what she is saying is noise.

So, this part really completes the original statement of the SNAFU Principle: complete communication is only possible among equals, because otherwise there is noise added that impedes communications. But there is a second observation to this that I added.

Consider if you are talking with someone to whom you feel significantly inferior in some hierarchy. In fact, consider if you work for GM as an assembly line worker, and in the presence of your boss, and her boss, and her boss’s boss, the President of GM asks you if everything is fine in your workplace. You might, depending on the union rules and such, say “No sir, we need more time off and higher pay.” You’re a lot less likely to say “No, sir, my boss is sleeping with her secretary and her boss is jealous, and it’s making life hard for us.” One answer is legitimate, and in a large corporation with a unionized workforce you’re unlikely to get a lot of repercussions. The other may be equally true, but it’s much riskier, and so it’s something you’re much less likely to say, even though in all likelihood it’s of more interest to the President of GM, and very probably presents a lot greater risk to the company.

What this means is simple:

• the more hierarchy there is, the less likely it is for someone high in the hierarchy to be getting good information from the bottom levels;
• the more risky it is to talk across levels, the worse the problem will be.

[Yes, it's updated. I don't know why I forgot that last line.]

Since this comes up as an issue every so often, I wanted to let everyone know what to expect about corrections and modifications. My policy will be to be as transparent as reasonably useful. So, if I make a substantial change above the level of rewording an infelicitous sentence or correcting a typo, I’ll call it out with some in-line mention, as I did for example in reference to David Gottlieb’s comments on tsuris.

On the other hand, if I catch some simple typo, or someone else catches one and points it out, I’ll just silently correct it, as likely as not. There’s no information value to knowing how poor a typist I am.

“In any social hierarchy, the noise added to a communication between individuals in that hierarchy is directly proportional to the distance between them, and the factor of proportionality will be proportional to the perceived risk to them.”

( Yes, I know I just put this in an article.  I want it accessible as a separate category.)

I’m getting close to my fortieth year in the IT business.

Frighteningly enough.

A lot of that time, I’ve spent as a consultant.  Being a consultant means three things: you’re always an outsider, which probably fits my personality anyway;  you see a lot of different companies; and you hardly ever go to a consulting client because they feel like they really have it together and under control — you have a lot of chances to see a lot of different companies in different difficulties.

A little over two of those years were spent working in the previous incarnation of Sun’s Startup Essentials program, and put me in the position of seeing probably 200 startup companies over the course of those two years. Something that really struck me as I did this, and as I’ve done other consulting, is that when you visit so many companies in more or less difficulty (all startup companies are in difficulty, by definition) you notice that not only are they doing things that make trouble for themselves — one might even say dumb things — but they tend to do the same dumb things.

You also get really really tired of seeing those same dumb things, over and over.   So, for years, I’ve been accumulating notes for a possible book, which I tentatively call Not Rocket Science: Why Companies and Other Big Organizations Act Like Idiots, and What Can Be Done?

A lot of this is an attempt to put in writing, and in a somewhat final form, the rants I’ve been ranting about business, going back to my time with my family’s business starting in the 60’s.  At this point I have many boxes of index cards and many outlines for the putative book, but I want to expose the idas to some further thought and criticism before I write it.  So I’ll be posting pieces under the “Business and Organization” category as they come along, based on these notes, and on what I see day to day.

Names will be changed, but only to protect the innocent.  The guilty can look out for themselves.

When Gautama left home and became a sramana, he had dedicated himself to the notion of finding the answer to dukkha: what could be done? Living at home had taught him that no matter how pleasant things might have been, the painful sense of “unsatisfactoriness” remained. Becoming a sramana and an ascetic had taught him that living without those things was still unsatisfactory, and smelly. So he gave that up as well, renounced being a renunciate, stopped striving to escape the demands of the physical world.

Plenty of hippies did the same thing in our times: I used to know Jerry Rubin when he was a stockbroker in Denver. Gautama ate, washed, cut his hair, made himself comfortable.

The traditions say that it was then his former companion sramanas became angry at him for giving up on his attempt at liberation; he answered them by saying “if a bowstring is to be useful, is can’t be too loose or too tight. If it’s too loose, it has no power; if it’s too tight it will break.”

His companions were wrong in any case: Gautama was nothing if not determined. Gautama was still determined to answer the question that caused him to leave home in the first place. There was nothing else, no more important aspect of life, so when he had recovered his strength, he went out into the forest near the city of Gaya, settled down under a ficus tree, made himself comfortable, and determined to enter meditation, find the answer he was looking for, or die in the attempt.

It’s hard to describe what Buddhist meditation is like at the best of times, and who can know what Gautama’s experience was? He wasn’t turning the question over and over in his mind; he was simply letting it rest, letting it occupy all the space between his ears, conscious of nothing in particular, conscious of everything. After some length of time — some traditions say three days, some traditions say forty — in the clear twilight before dawn in the forest outside Gaya, he saw the Morning Star, and in that instant…

Well, Something happened. It clicked. He saw through the puzzle of dukkha, saw that clinging to things that change was the source of dukkha, and realized that there was an answer to his puzzle.

If you stop clinging to things that change, there will be no dukkha.

“The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.”

         – George Bernard Shaw

People do what is rewarded.  What people are doing is what has been rewarded.

Of course, the First Great Truth wasn’t the source of Gautama’s realization; it was just the hint that got him started, the pebble in his shoe. He left home determined to find a way to solve the problem of suffering, for himself and for everyone around him.

In the -5 century[1], in India, there were plenty of people promising to teach liberation from ordinary cares, elevation to a higher plane of existence, and so forth. It was about this time that yoga in its various aspects was becoming codified; the traditions that became the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali were already old when the sutra was written in the -2 century. So he took up the spiritual practices that were the fad at the time: he became a shramana, “one who strives” (Pali: samana, which is the way you’ll see it in, for example, Hesse’s Siddhartha.) By deep mediation and spiritual practice, he learned to renounce most everything of normal life: bathing, sleeping while lying down, even eating normal food. The traditions I’ve grown up with say that he learned how to live on “a half a grain of rice a day”, which I’m sure was an exaggeration. Still, they say that it came to the point where you could see his backbone from in front.

Whenever I think about this story, it really strikes me how much Gautama was playing out the -5th century version of being a 60’s hippie: rejected his home and his values, out to change the world, he falls in with some radical spiritual leader and goes off to find all the answers. He gave up the most comfortable life his father, the King, could make for him, and he moved on to living on the barest bit of food, and that he got by begging for it.

From this he learned something too: if living as a pampered, spoiled rich kid sucked, then living on a half grain of rice a day really sucked.

He realized there was something wrong with the whole approach: he bathed, he ate, he got back his strength, and he started to think about the problem: when we was with his family, getting everything he wanted, he feared its loss — age, sickness, or even just finding out that there weren’t any more ripe mangos. When he renounced all that, he ended up smelly and itchy, starving and (undoubtedly) half out of his head from hunger. And this led to the second step in the great syllogism that woke him up: it wasn’t the good food or the bad food that made him unhappy, made itself unsatisfactory. It was his desire that was really unsatisfactory. He tried to cling to happiness, he tried to learn to push away unhappiness, and neither worked. But it wasn’t his family that made him unhappy, and it wasn’t not eating that made him unhappy: it was fear, hunger, cravings, desire.

This was the Second Great Truth: suffering, dukkha, doesn’t come from the events in themselves. Mangoes don’t make you unhappy. Dukkha comes from our cravings, our desires. We do it to ourselves.

1. I’m going to follow the lead of Alan Watts in some of his books, and adopt the trope of identifying past times in terms of the Common Era, but instead of using “C.E.” and “B.C.E.”, or “A.D.” and “B.C.”, using negative numbers for BCE. It seems more parsimonious to me, and I adapted immediately when I first read Watts using this convention, but I’ll listen to counterarguments if anyone finds it too distracting. [↩]

It is impossible to solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.