Why churches are stupid

Because of my interest in corporisations -the notion that human corporate entities have a spiritual identity of their own- I'm reading from time to time, research and ideas about the way that corporations etc work. One of the things I'm reflecting on is the issue of intelligence. I seem to recall research showing, for example, that beehives collectively have the problem-solving intelligence of a human child. By analogy, it seems to me that human corporisations will have intelligence.

So it's interesting to see this Edge article: Collective Intelligence | Conversation | Edge, where this is precisely the point at issue. One of the intriguing things it says is this:

The most intelligent person is not the one who's best at doing any specific task, but it's the one who's best at picking up new things quickly. That's essentially the definition we used for defining intelligence at the level of groups as well.

If that's right in probably indicates churches to be pretty unintelligent given that they don't seem to learn very quickly. If that is right, then some of the other things in the article would be useful to consider (assuming we think it would be a good thing if churches as corporate entities were intelligent). The findings of the research indicate three things would need to characterise in-church interactions:

The first was the average social perceptiveness of the group members.... When you have a group with a bunch of people like that, the group as a whole is more intelligent.

The second factor we found was the evenness of conversational turn taking. In other words, groups where one person dominated the conversation were, on average, less intelligent than groups where the speaking was more evenly distributed among the different group members.

Finally,...t the collective intelligence of the group was significantly correlated with the percentage of women in the group. More women were correlated with a more intelligent group.

Explains a lot, doesn't it? Of Course much of this comes down also to the way power and hierarchy work in the organisation. If you think about those factors, they tend to die back in groups where there are 'strong leaders' operating a hierarchical top-down culture. 

Mitt Romney: don't be surprised

Dear Mr Romney,
If you were ever to read this I'd hope you'd get an inkling of why it is that in a recent poll it would seem that your candidacy for the USA's presidency was seen in most countries to be a bad thing. You see, what we see of GOP politics is frankly scary to the rest of the planet. And the reason for that is partly to be gleaned form USA's domestic political trends.

I recently read this, a report of your explanation to your supporters for your non-election:

Obama, Romney argued, had been "very generous" to blacks, Hispanics and young voters. He cited as motivating factors to young voters the administration's plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and the extension of health coverage for students on their parents' insurance plans well into their 20s. Free contraception coverage under Obama's healthcare plan, he added, gave an extra incentive to college-aged women to back the president.

You see, there's a kind of blindness in this: if I may put it this way: it's a case of pot calling kettle black. It seems disingenuous to complain that another candidate has made life better for certain groups when your own professed policies are to make life better for another constellation of interest groups. The more so when those you seek to enrich already have so much that they can throw large amounts of money at your campaign in hopes of continued support of their own particular 'welfare' projects (corporate bail-outs and protectionism).

If you don't get it that you should be aiming to govern for the many and not just the few, then you are pretty much bound to fail. If you don't care about the majority and you let it be seen that this is so, then don't be surprised if most of them decide not to vote for their own impoverishment in favour of enriching your friends. The only real suprise about the result from the point of view of the rest of the world, is that is was so close. The real puzzler for most of us is how so many USAmericans have become so persuaded to vote against their own interests.

And while we're on the subject: is there any real evidence that trickle-down economics actually works?
I think you'll find there isn't any credible evidence.

Mitt Romney blames election loss on 'gifts' Obama gave to minority groups | World news | guardian.co.uk:

Why the government should act to close corporate tax loopholes

The title of the article says a lot: John Lewis chief calls on government to tax multinational companies properly:
The John Lewis Partnership boss, Andy Street said that there is an unfair advantage exercised by TNC's who are 'domiciled' abroad -often in tax havens and certainly for the purposes of aggressive tax avoidance. They have an unfair advantage over British-based rivals because of the foreign companies have low tax bills meaning that they can spend more on investment in research and development and begin to steal a march.

So if we want there to be British based employment, manufacturers etc, it would be because we'd like for our wealth not to be constantly being expatriated to tax havens and the global 'few'. If we allow this expatriation to continue, it is to consent in our own impoverishment. If we let it continue,  we're allowing corporate asset stripping of the nation.

The business case is the other side of this observation. If we value SMEs, we need to plot against the unfair advantage the combination of tax rules and existing wealth delivers to  the TNC's.  In principle it's the same as anti-monopoly legislation and policies: countering the accumulation of economic power because it tends towards rentier behaviour and the exploitation of others.

Don't just avoid @StarbucksUK due to its tax avoidance

.@UKUncut Don't just avoid @StarbucksUK due to its tax a... on Twitpic:

Corporisations' Umwelten

I've long been aware of Nagel's philosophical question about what it's like to be a bat (or any other creature). I'd only dimly been aware of this:

 Jakob J. von Uexkull (1864-1944) introduced the important concept of umwelt, often translated into English as “environment,” but more correctly seen as the perceptual world as perceived by the animal, to be distinguished from the umgebung, which refers to the “real,” objective environment. Von Uexküll famously discussed the umwelt of a tick, whose feeding behavior effectively involves of only three sensory inputs: (1) the odor of butyric acid, produced by mammals; (2) the temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, the body temperature of said mammals; and (3) the presence of hair or fur, whereupon the tick proceeds to burrow into its prey.

This relates to my question about communicating with corporisations in order to speak the word of the Lord to them. To do that we need to know what channels of communication are open to us and how much of what kind of information we can convey through those channels. To work this out with corporisations, we need to determine their umwelt, their perceived environment. The complication is, of course, that we humans are part of their perceptual and information processing apparatus. So we have the challenge of learning to unknow some things in order to know them to some degree from the point of view of the corporisation.

I'm most often thinking about this issue in relation to the corporisation that is my university. So, what is the umwelt here? This question is somewhat different to how communications go on within the corporisation: the analogy on which I base that is recognising that the hormones, neural processing and chemical signals within a body are not the same (although linked) as the matter of sensing the 'outside' world.

So? Guesses and hypotheses to be tested:
Umwelt is

• people (mainly students?): 
• money (fees, grants earnings); 
• other corporisations (government agencies, partner institutions, competitors); 
• human culture(s), 
• buildings and other artefacts.

Possible 'senses'

data entry (eg of student enrolments, resource acquisitions); 

financial flows (bank accounts) both income and outgoings (could some outgoings function a bit like the emission of ultrasound squeaks by bats -the feedback holds extra info?); 

staff (sensing culture? cf cilia in cochlea?).

Vulture Visions - The Conversation - The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Difficult-to-read? Better engagement

We're normally dead-set on finding presentational methods to make things easier to understand and access. And for important information that is clearly important and a good idea: safety info, for example, really needs to be apprehended easily and often quickly too.

However, here is research that indicates that if you want to increase people's engagement with arguments and to offset confirmation bias on their part, then making the material difficult to read is likely to help:

... use difficult-to-read materials to disrupt what researchers call the "confirmation bias," the tendency to selectively see only arguments that support what you already believe ... "Not only are people considering more the opposing point of view but they're also being more skeptical of their own because they're more critically engaging both sides of the argument,"

I think that this could be the basis for a learning strategy: to try and help us to appreciate different points of view, if we can get the material in digital format and change the font to something we find harder to read, we are likely to be helping ourselves to take in the argument more fairly and to give due weight to the strengths of someone else's argument.

Article to get summary and on-click: Difficult-to-read font reduces political polarity, study finds

Beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory?

If my understanding is not fundamentally off (and I recognise it could be) this, Researchers look beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory | e! Science News could give comfort to the idea of the holographic universe:

The remaining option is to accept that influences must be infinitely fast -- or that there exists some process that has an equivalent effect when viewed in our spacetime. The current test couldn't distinguish. Either way, it would mean that the Universe is fundamentally nonlocal, in the sense that every bit of the Universe can be connected to any other bit anywhere, instantly. That such connections are possible defies our everyday intuition and represents another extreme solution, but arguably preferable to faster-than-light communication.

Though there may be other reasons not to like the holographic universe idea -but I'm not up on that.