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The mechanics of feedback
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Published: July 29, 2009
Updated: 07/29/2009 05:48 pm
If you read this and e-mail me at hst2nd@aol.com to say whether you liked, hated or are still pondering the column, that's valuable and appreciated feedback...critical feedback.
But the first part of this column is about technical systems of feedback, in particular the nature of two different kinds of feedback, positive and negative.
"Positive feedback" is the mechanism whereby a process tends to make more of itself, for better or for worse. Economists hoping to rescue us from the present crunch economy look for indicators such as employment and spending increases that might indicate a recovery is in process. If we are spending more, the folks we're paying will be able to buy more goods and labor. Manufacturers and employees do the same, creating a positive feedback system, reinforcing cash flow.
"Negative feedback" is like the governor on your lawn mower engine. It wants to reach and hold a constant state. Hit a patch of tough grass and the governor opens the throttle to try and speed up the engine. A thin patch of grass lets a spring throttle the engine back.
"Positive feedback" is amoral. It can be good when it helps us begin to spend our way of a deep recession but it can be very bad when it changes the climate, as most scientists believe it is now doing. Per received wisdom, long-buried carbon released when fossil fuels are burned produces carbon dioxide (CO2), which ignores incoming visible and ultraviolet sunlight but reflects infrared heat back down to earth's surface...the notorious "greenhouse" effect.
A dark surface lets CO2–reflected heat melt more snow earlier and further south, letting more germs digest more vegetation. Germs pass gas, methane (CH4)—a much stronger reflector of earth's heat, so yet more snow melts and more germs release more methane. Atmospheric heat spirals up.
This is no serious threat to life on earth; just to human life. There are millions of less advanced but more adaptable critters waiting in the wings, chomping at the bit (and at dead vegetation)—eager to occupy the ecological niches we'll create if we vacate our lease on Eden.
Just as positive feedback can be awful, negative feedback can be wonderful. Any green trees we overlook and leave standing will strive to gobble up the excess CO2 we create when burning their mummified ancestors as coal and oil. By gobbling CO2, trees get bigger and can gobble yet more CO2—a self-limiting mechanism if not overwhelmed by man's excesses.
In the last century James Lovelock, a precision instrument designer, framed "the Gaia Hypothesis," a beautiful theory that the infinite variety of species on Planet Earth have evolved together over billions of years to cooperate, keeping nature at the Goldilocks point: not too hot; not to cold; not too acid; not too sweet; not too much oxygen; not too little; but just right.
Lovelock's theory has by turns been lauded and lampooned in the scientific establishment. The last I heard it was, if not exactly "received wisdom," at least no longer stamped "return to sender."
So much for the technical variety; now let's talk about critical feedback. My favorite critical feedback wizard is the philosopher John David Garcia (1936-2001). He made this profound observation, which was quoted recently in the respected science journal, Nature: "... any system that has the ability to constrain feedback to itself will do so and will continually degenerate for want of feedback."
As one whose pre-retirement life was spent in the corporate world, I can only say "amen" to Garcia.
With a few prosperous exceptions like Google and Apple, corporations tend to construct layers of bureaucracy "between the top floor and the shop floor" that starve senior management of sharply focused, unfiltered, real-time feedback. The bigger the enterprise, the more effective and stifling the filtration.
We see around us today smaller, more entrepreneurial businesses that are growing at the expense of collapsed giants like Wachovia, Chrysler or Lehman Brothers. Such vibrant businesses are reminiscent of furry, adaptive little mammals scurrying among the feet of the towering but doomed dinosaurs.
Triggered by the recession, Garcia's law has cut in. Corporate giants proved not "too big to fail"—but their chiefs were too big to listen and too small to insist that vertical lines of feedback always be kept open.
As more and more print publications—essential conduits in the feedback system that keeps the American system viable—shrink and fade, it's interesting to ponder "what might have been" if the framers of the First Amendment had had access to John David Garcia's insight.
If they had crafted a feedback system for journalism as effective as the periodic electoral process has been for continually truing-up government, the Internet might have proved a powerful nutrient, rather than a deadly competitor, for print journalism.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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