Neighbors-Choice-Kort-Podcast.mp3

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Neighbors-Choice-Kort-Podcast.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

David Gornoski:
From the heart of central Florida, you are listening to the most electrifying show in media, "A Neighbor's Choice." I'm your host, your neighbor, David Gornoski, happy to be with you once again, here across central Florida, where the problems we have, they're not that hard to solve, we have to learn to roll up our sleeves and think for ourselves. Thinking critically is what's in danger here in this society, though we are so caught up with "groupthink," with "herd mentality," where we want to go along to get along and be complicit in the participation of bad behavior. And that happens on left and right. But in order to think through that, we've got to be able to think for ourselves, we've got to be able to have conversations with people who are not afraid to get to the basics of where we are, which is understanding our roots and the problems we have developed by improper thinking, by improper behavior, and then learning how to process that, untangle that and look to solutions. And so to do that with me is a very intelligent and brilliant individual, someone who is a mind, who's excited about helping people understand learning and education, how to help equip folks with how to properly learn and digest new ideas. He's an engineer who went to MIT, Dr. Barry Kort. How are you doing?

Barry Kort:
Good afternoon. I'm doing fine, David. How are you?

David Gornoski:
I'm doing well. And it's great to talk to you.

David Gornoski:
Glad you could join us. You used to work in engineering. Right now you are retired. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Barry Kort:
Well, I grew up in Nebraska, attended the University of Nebraska, where I studied electrical engineering. And when I graduated, I was hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories, a research and development arm of the old Bell System, before the government broke up the Bell System. And Bell Labs sent me back to graduate school at Stanford University, where I earned a Master's and PhD in engineering and systems theory and operations research and sort of interdisciplinary. And I spent the first 20 years of my career doing network planning at AT&T Bell Labs and stayed on basically until shortly after the government broke up the Bell System. And then I sort of reinvented myself, came up to Boston from New Jersey.

Barry Kort:
I worked briefly at a federally funded research and development center called MiTRE. And then I went to a company called Bolt, Beranek and Newman — BBN. And those of you who are familiar with the history of the Internet may know that BBN was the original developer of the precursor of the Internet that was then called the ARPANET. And BBN became a major developer of Internet technology. And one of the early applications, even before it went completely public, was how can we use the Internet for education, especially to reach out to middle school and high school aged children.

Barry Kort:
And there was a group at BBN funded by the National Science Foundation to develop educational applications involving computers and the Internet and particular applications involving subjects in the so-called STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I worked on that for about 10 years. After the Internet was commercial in the mid 90s, things kind of changed there.

Barry Kort:
And so about that time, I had been working on another research project related to the role of emotions in learning, and that developed into a project at MIT, at the MIT Media Lab. There was a group that was doing something called Affective Computing, that is computing that involved calculations involving emotions. And we got another NSF grant there to develop projects that were based on my research on the role of emotions and learning. And that lasted, again, about eight to 10 years until the NSF funding eventually ran out. And that's about the time I retired, around 2010. I also had spent 25 years over that same period as a Saturday afternoon volunteer at the Boston Museum of Science. And again, it was in areas in the museum, in Children's Discovery Center and Cahners Computer Place. So areas the museum where my background and in science and technology and science education could could play a role. So that's a quick summary, something like a 40-year career.

David Gornoski:
Well, you've got a lot of different disciplinary fields that you've delved into in your work, but all of it is based around the idea of what you call system thinkers.

David Gornoski:
Right. System thinking. And what does that look like?

David Gornoski:
Because right now we live in a society where we're all about rules and we got to have rules to fix other rules and regulations to fix other regulations.

David Gornoski:
And it just never seems to end. Meanwhile, the country kind of tears itself apart about who's going to get power to make new rules. And we get these election rituals every year. And it's a winner takes all system where whoever wins gets to set the tone for, you know, the agenda. And it's rule after rule, regulation after regulation. And it never seems to provide some kind of peace and order and harmony that everybody seems to be craving for.

Barry Kort:
Yes, there was a there was a very interesting development in applied mathematics, that really began in the middle of the 20th century, although the roots of it date back to around 1900. There was a well-known French mathematician named Poincaré. All right, Poincaré — well known to mathematicians, his name may not be familiar to the general public, but he did some very interesting work that led eventually to the development of what's now called Chaos Theory. But his work kind of remained obscure until the middle of middle of the 20th century, when an MIT researcher who was working on some climate models was doing some math and he was using the very first available computers to do the calculations according to his model. And he was getting strange results that he couldn't understand. And, to make a long story short, he ended up discovering or rediscovering or fleshing out what his what is now known as Chaos Theory.

Barry Kort:
And Chaos Theory was one of those subjects that even mathematicians up until that time had gotten very little research into. Probably the most famous example of chaos theory would be in fractals, fractal patterns and the famous Mandelbrot Set, and the so-called Butterfly Curve. Those were sort of the key terms that somebody might look up to learn about Chaos Theory. But what astonished me when I looked into Chaos Theory was that in Chaos Theory mathematics, you try to make chaos on purpose. So usually people don't want chaos is just totally random and seemingly useless. The mathematicians are a strange lot. And they looked into how do you make chaos intentionally? Now that we sort of know how to do it?

Barry Kort:
And it turned out that it's actually very simple to make chaotic systems.

Barry Kort:
Einstein, if you remember back in the days when he and and Niels Bohr were arguing between Einstein's theories and Quantum Mechanics, Einstein made a famous comment to Bohr. He says, I just don't think God plays dice. Quantum Mechanics says a lot of randomness in it. And Einstein didn't like this randomness. He says God doesn't play dice. But what we learned from Chaos Theory is that deterministic mathematical formulas of the kind that Einstein was always looking for could generate chaotic outcomes where things were essentially random.

Barry Kort:
So in the 1920s, when when Einstein said that, he didn't have any awareness of Chaos Theory. And if you look at how do you make chaos on purpose, it turns out the easiest way to make chaos is with rules. If you look at the way that you would write a rule down as a mathematical function, a rule is usually written in English as if some antecedent conditions, then some consequent or else some alternative — if then or else. And so it's like a switch. If the if clause is is met, you have one outcome. And then on the other side of the line, you jump to a different outcome. So the Crime and Punishment model was if your behavior is lawful, you're fine. If your behavior is criminal and you're judged on the criminal side, then suddenly you get punished.

Barry Kort:
And so they pay off the award or payoff has a discrete jump from your blessed or you're cursed. Or you're rewarded or you're punished. And a nonlinear function that's so non-linear as to be discontinuous turns out to be the easiest way to generate chaotic dynamics. What you need in general is something called non-linearity. But a discontinuous function is highly nonlinear because it's not even continuous. So if you go all the way back to the invention of the rule of law, go all the way back to Hammurabi of Mesopotamia some 4000 years ago, when humans were inventing the rule of law, you had behaviors that were to the left side of of the lawful curve. They were lawful and you were not convicted and you were off scot free. And if you are to the right side of the judging point, you are punished. And then the Code of Hammurabi, which is only about two hundred and eighty some laws, but half the time the punishment was the death penalty. And so people who are living under the early versions of the rule of law, around 4000 years ago, we're very much aware that a lot of the violence in the culture was state-sponsored violence under the color of law because the punishment that the law was meting out was very often death.

Barry Kort:
And about the oldest record of this awareness you can find is in the very first chapter, maybe the second chapter of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible. In Genesis 2:17 you find a warning. And the warning is about to Adam and Eve, the sort of the first humans in that allegory is don't think about good and evil, because as soon as you start thinking about good and evil, you're going to start dying. And the way that you interpret that is that good and evil gives you an axis, which then gives you lawful and unlawful — a divide in that good-evil axis that down some central dividing line and you define one side is OK, lawful, good, and the other side is not OK, unlawful, evil. And then you impose a reward/punishment model which is discontinuous, a reward or punishment. And that's exactly how we introduced so much state-sponsored violence into the culture by the invention of the rule of law.

David Gornoski:
Interesting. We'll continue this with Dr. Barry Kort, who's the engineer, visiting teacher at MIT, in the past. We'll have more about his insights in just a moment. Live on "A Neighbor's Choice."

Barry Kort:
Welcome back to "A Neighbor's Choice." I'm speaking with an MIT engineer, Dr. Barry Kort, who is a fascinating person to learn about how to educate people, how to do — we're going to get into some of those things as it relates to individual performance.

David Gornoski:
But right now, we're exploring how systems thinking compares to rules thinking. We're gonna get into this. So these are high concepts that we're going to try to break these things down for everyone to learn something from it. And one of the things that's helpful with education is repetition. So, Dr. Kort, I want to go back to what you were saying. Basically, when we have a rules based society, it creates chaos. Can you explain that again?

Barry Kort:
Sure. So let's go back to one of the core axiomatic beliefs of Western Civilization that's encapsulated in the catch phrase, "Law and Order." People to this very day say, well, I believe in law and order. But axiomatically you find out that rule based systems do not generate order. Well, sometimes they do, but they can just as easily generate chaos. And so the axiomatic belief in law and order is a false belief.

Barry Kort:
And one of the important things that we try to do in the modern era is, especially in science, is overthrow erroneous beliefs and supplant them with a more accurate, more insightful set of understandings.

Barry Kort:
So.

Barry Kort:
We'll see how to take this from here. It's clear that we live in a dysfunctional society. And if you look around and you say, you know, art are governmental systems are dysfunctional. We have dysfunctional families. We have dysfunctional organizations. And a very good question to ask somebody to get them to think about it, because the word dysfunctional is sort of one of those words that gets thrown around a lot. And I like to ask the question. Let's say that you have a dysfunctional system. What's missing? What's missing from a dysfunctional system?

David Gornoski:
Functions?

Barry Kort:
Yes. And then I ask the next question as well. What's a function? What subject would you go to class to learn about what's the function?

David Gornoski:
Math.

Barry Kort:
Exactly. And we have a population which is not very well educated in math. They might think of a function as an event where you have wine and cheese and socialize with people. But to a mathematician, a function is a very powerful idea, that is perhaps not very well taught. So the solution to this dilemma — if rule based systems don't work, what would work? What would you want to put in place of a rule to create a high-functioning, well-behaved, well regulated, orderly system? And the answer is, you rip out the rules and replace them by functions. And that's an easy thing to say and kind of a hard thing to understand, because most people would say, well, then what exactly do you mean by a function and how does that work?

David Gornoski:
Yeah, they would say, well, what does that mean? You still got to have rules, we got to have law and order, right? You're going to have — you can't let people kill people. That's the most function — that's the most basic rule that people think about. You can't kill. Right?

Barry Kort:
And yet the very first rule that was put into place had, as its consequence, to kill people.

Barry Kort:
There's some kind of irony there that the punishment for many infractions, not just murder. The punishment for lots of infractions was literally state would murder you, would execute you. So you have this kind of irony to the first law you think about is don't murder, and then what does the state do? They use the death penalty. And that creates sort of this — you know if you were a Martian looking down on planet Earth, you go, "Excuse me? Well, where's the logic of that?" So what you want to do is you want to replace discontinuous rules — if then or else — by very smooth, gracefully evolving functions that gradually ramp up from blessing to punishment in a gradual, continuous manner. And in particular, if you think about the word graceful or grace, that corresponds to a concept in mathematics, that's called gradient. So let's say you, that you come to a wall, you're walking along a flat surface and come to a vertical wall and you go, "How do I get up there?" Well, you might build a ramp, and a ramp has a gradient. They can be steep. You can have something as steep as a ladder or something. very, very gradual. And something like a child's slide, and child slide is sort of an S shape. And that's a very graceful gradient from the top to the bottom. And compare a child's slide to a drop off a cliff. And you can see that a gradient, a slide with the gradient, can be defined by a very nice, smooth function, kind of an S shaped function. And that's the kind of thing that you need to introduce in lieu of these falling off a cliff rules that abruptly shift from the bottom to the top — the cliff model.

David Gornoski:
Right. So is it fair to say that's the way rules create chaos? Is there binary in that? Yes. And that's OK.

Barry Kort:
Yeah, exactly. I think they have a judging line and they they jump abruptly and dramatically from one side to the other. So your listeners probably remember, maybe still watch the old NBC series, Law and Order. And after Law and Order went off NBC for about 10 years, it went into syndicated reruns on the TNT cable channel, and probably still is in reruns. And those of you whoever tuned in as the TNT cable channel may remember their advertising slogan. Their advertising slogan is, "We Know Drama."

Barry Kort:
And of course, what you get is not law and order, but law and drama. And drama is a special case of chaos because in a drama, you have no idea what's going to happen — it's totally unpredictable. If you could predict the outcome of the drama, you wouldn't watch it, it would be boring. So what you get is not law and order. You get law and drama.

David Gornoski:
Interesting, and that's what we're seeing right now in the headlines, if anything, it's drama not law and order.

Barry Kort:
Exactly.

David Gornoski:
So when we create these rules, they always, in their foundation, sow the seeds of their own destruction, by the way, we try to introduce them into society.

Barry Kort:
Exactly.

David Gornoski:
And that's fascinating.

So to move beyond that rule of law paradigm, you have to move up in stages to evolve beyond mere rules.

Barry Kort:
So the next thing after rules... You need to take a break again? I hear music.

David Gornoski:
Yeah. Let's take a break. We're going to be back with Dr. Barry Kort, who's an MIT systems engineer. Fascinating things I always learn from him. We'll be back in a second, live.

David Gornoski:
"A Neighbor's Choice" returns. We're live and we're unpacking the chaos that's built into our overly regulated, rules-driven society and how it's not the only solution, we can actually look to a new paradigm. Learning from the wisdom of the past and learning from what we can do in the future using science. And what do you know? Maybe math. Could math help us create a wiser, kinder society with more empathy built into the way we deal with problems? That's what we're gonna find out now with Dr. Barry Kort, who's an engineer, systems thinker, who's done a lot in the world of helping people learn and educate high concepts and bring them down into a way that everyone can understand from different walks of of of life.

David Gornoski:
So Dr. Kort, I want to return to where you were going with this, because we can see that the regulations that we create in our society, they're always creating these rituals of chaos. I mean, I was just thinking about the lockdowns where they said, everybody stay in the house. No one's gathering. And then, you know, with the the killing of George Floyd, there becomes everybody's out in the street. And some people are saying, well, wait a second, I thought the rules were you would be shamed if you were found outside congregating, you know, elbow to elbow. But then the media says well no, this is a special case because this is a grave awful injustice. And then some people say, well, why can't I go to church? They say, well, there's a funeral of this George Floyd who died and was killed in this awful situation. And now there's a funeral where all these people are packed in with celebrities and politicians to talk, to have the service and other people can't have funerals. So that's, I guess, an example. We can see a real world how when we have these rules, it always creates chaos and envy and kind of — well, it's OK here, but not OK here and OK there. But if you do this or do that, and it's very confusing, you know.

Barry Kort:
So let's work our way up a hierarchy of things beyond mere rules. If you think of an ordinary children's game, like a children's board game, games come with a heap of rules and the rules tell you what you can and cannot do in the game. But it doesn't tell you which moves you should do at any one juncture in the game. So from a heap of rules, that's the stuff of children's games and also games played by scheming adults because they're they're choosing which rule to invoke at any given juncture for their own benefit and for the disadvantage of, say, some adversary. So what what comes beyond rules? Well, here we are in the days of the Internet. And one of the things that the Internet introduced to the general public is the concept of a protocol. You may have heard of things like Internet Protocol. This is a jargon that's used a lot in the Internet. And you also know that diplomats use protocols. So what is the suite of protocols? It's something beyond a heap of rules. A suite of protocols would be a carefully crafted sequence of agile rules with feedback and alternate branching. So a heap of rules doesn't tell you in what order to do legal moves.

Barry Kort:
Protocols create some kind of a dance, some kind of an alternating sequence where the intelligence, the wisdom, is in the sequence. The heap of rules doesn't give you the sequence in which to apply them. So protocols add one more thing. It says use the legal moves, but use them in an intelligent, wise, insightful sequence to achieve an outcome. And it's a conversation. So when you make a connection on the Internet, the machines on opposite ends negotiate, using a set of protocols, how to set up a working connection that works optimally every time. So that's the next stage — protocols. But that's only step two out of five I'm going to talk about. So what comes after protocols? What comes after protocols is what we mentioned before — functions. And you want a library of functions. These are continuously variable responses employing the mathematical tools of the calculus. For example, gradients, as I said before, and optimization. So when you introduce functions, you have much more power to produce outcomes which are graceful. So that's that's part three of the steps — heap of rules, suite of protocols, library of functions. What comes after a library of functions?

Barry Kort:
After that we have what I would call a collection of models. Models are collections of functions instantiating a system model. So if you look at any kind of model in science or economic models or climate models, whatever you like. How are models constructed? They're constructed out of libraries of functions. And they can be computed, and you can solve them for optimal practices. So when you when you have a collection of models of interconnected systems in our operating systems, then you have something very powerful. This is where you start to get into systems thinking. You have collections of models which are collections of functions, instantiating the system model. And that gives you what we call an ecology of systems. In an ecology of systems, you have the application of cybernetic concepts — these are advanced 20th century concepts in systems thinking — to the overall architecture and functioning of complex systems comprised of multiple interacting subsystems and components. And that's the kind of discipline that people like me would spend their career doing, you know, building collections of models out of functions and then analyzing the ecology of systems to get everything in balance.

David Gornoski:
So we're still operating at that step one of rules, right or not, on the steps. All right.

Barry Kort:
Right. Most people, if you say, what's a rule? They know what a rule is. That's children's games. That's middle school stuff. And then you say, well, then talk to me about protocols. Talk to me about functions. Talk to me about models. Talk to me about systems. Most people will kind of shrug and say, well, I know I've heard those words, but I don't really know what they are, where they're used. But consider, for example, something as simple as a recipe in the kitchen for making some dish. You have a bunch of steps. But the recipe tells you the sequence in which to execute the steps and some measurements that you do to tell when a step is finished. So that's more like a protocol. A recipe is more like a protocol, not just a collection of things that you can do, but a sequence of things. And then if you're trying to figure out, well, what makes the recipe work, well, then you've got to learn and look into the chemistry, kitchen chemistry, and you get into into the functions that explain how chemical systems behave. So you work your way up.

Barry Kort:
And boy, I tell you, it's quite it's quite a walk to go from a heap of rules to a suite of protocols, to a library of functions, to a collection of models and then an ecology of systems.

David Gornoski:
Yeah, it's funny, you mentioned middle school games because we've got a comment from a listener during your show saying that she was thinking of the chaos she had when she was a school teacher. And she said how nice it would have been to forget about all those dress code hassles that the teachers had to enforce, you know. Exactly.

Barry Kort:
And enforcement is this policing function, and the policing function is where we're going awry these days. So the police are using this very primitive, this 4000 year old methodology. And they're enforcing the rules. And then you're getting all this drama and conflict and violence.

David Gornoski:
So how do you start to get to that state? Do we have to work our way through all the things or can we go straight to the best and get the systems thinking?

Barry Kort:
So, if you're willing to call in subject matter experts — this is what we call a technocracy. So, for example, NASA — National Aeronautics Space Station — is a technocracy and everybody in NASA is schooled in rocket science, which is advanced calculus and orbital dynamics. And Congress can say, "Figure out a way, NASA, to get us to the moon or get us into orbit and get us to Mars."

Barry Kort:
But Congress doesn't tell you how to do it. They simply say pull together the people who know how to do this stuff — that's a technocracy. The National Weather Service is a technocracy. The Federal Reserve is a technocracy. So one thing to do is simply find people who have the right knowledge, the right technology, the right knowhow and delegate the whole thing to them. Or you're going to have the whole population work their way up to at least be able to judge who are the competent technocrats, who know what they're doing and are ethical and are not going to be corrupt and pull fast one and cheat the system.

David Gornoski:
So are you suggesting that we've either got to get all of the human species, at least in our society, to go through all the processes of rules, to protocols, to functions, to models, all the way to systems level thinking, or we're going to have to find leaders and role models in our society who can guide us with systems thinking in my two good choices.

David Gornoski:
Is that right?

Barry Kort:
Right. It's like art appreciation. You can appreciate music, you can appreciate art, without being a musician, without being a composer, without being an artist. But you recognize talent. And the same is true in technology. You can recognize people who know what they're doing and give them the freedom to develop ideas and solutions. But you've got to be able to assess their capability.

David Gornoski:
Who is a well known systems thinker that we could look from looked to as a model to learn from?

Barry Kort:
Well, the late Gregory Bateson is probably the best known of the pioneers of systems thinking. But if you want to go into politics, I think the two best systems thinkers at the federal level were Barack Obama, who was a fabulous systems thinker, and Bernie Sanders, who was also a system of thinker. To some extent, Elizabeth Warren is a systems thinker. Think of most politicians are not systems thinkers, but a few of them are. You can't get very far, generally in politics, if you're a systems thinker because you're you're sort of out there in left field, you're in a class by yourself. And you don't have a common language to explain your thinking to your peers in politics in general.

David Gornoski:
But, of course, all those politicians you mentioned still use rules, meaning they would punish you if you didn't pay the tax or the fine or if you didn't know, you know, people still went to the prison if they did a drug.

David Gornoski:
So there were still rules under those things. So how do you actually get past the chaos of a rules-based society, if we're really going to do it right?

So you have to go back to how statutes are created. So when politicians create statutes, they create them in a language like English, and they're constrained by the power of the English language. And the English language is actually a very weak system for expressing advanced concepts. You can say if then or else, that's easy to say in English, but if you want to put in a mathematical function as the way things respond, it's very hard to do that in statutory language because how often would you read a statute book and find a mathematical function in there, the way if you open up a science book, you would find mathematical functions defining scientific models. So it's a completely different language. And we have to learn the language of functions and be able to introduce functions into our regulatory mechanism. So, for example, you say you have a cruise control on your car.

Barry Kort:
Now, you might say naively, well, if you're going too slow just step on the gas, and if you're going too fast just step on the brake. But that's binary. And your cruise control, if it simply floored it when you're going to slow and jammed on the brakes when you're going too fast, nobody would ever buy that cruise control. So how does a cruise control really work? Well, it has a very graceful function. The amount of gas that it gives is proportional to how much your speed deviates from your desired speed. So if you're a little bit slow, it gives a little more gas. If you're a little bit fast, it gives a little less gas. And that proportionality has to be modeled by a very carefully crafted function. And people who design elevators and cruise controls and automatic gain controls on their Hi-Fi, all of those are designed with very carefully crafted, continuously differentiable functions that optimally provide the regulation you want. And so people who know how to do this, they go into technology jobs, because in technology, there's nothing that says you can't use functions. If you have to use functions, almost every case where you're building a very well regulated technology system. Imagine trying to introduce that into human regulation where we have 4000 years of the rule of law. It's a huge paradigm shift.

David Gornoski:
Yeah, and it's interesting to think about what we can do to create more examples that we can learn from, that we can kind of help distill how we can solve problems without relying on the chaos of regulations for every little thing about our life. Let's continue with engineer Dr. Barry Kort. We'll be back in just a moment. More to come on "A Neighbor's Choice."

David Gornoski:
Welcome back to "A Neighbors Choice." We're talking about the chaos of our current regulated system and what we can do to think differently beyond that. And Dr. Kort, you've talked to me before about how Jesus is a systems thinker. Can you explain a little bit how maybe we can learn something from his approach to conflict and dispute that might help shed some light into our current chaotic rules based system?

Barry Kort:
Sure. Jesus, by the way, was a fabulous systems thinker. Now the term systems thinking didn't exist in the vocabulary until basically the middle of the 20th century. But if you go back to look at historical people who were doing systems thinking, even though it wasn't called that, they were the early theologians — Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tsu, Confucius — they were fabulous systems thinkers — Hillel. They were actually doing systems thinking long before that kind of a nomenclature began. Now, I didn't appreciate that until about 20 years ago.

Barry Kort:
There was a group called Plowshares — Prince of Peace Plowshares — which was an anti-war group that was lobbying against the development of the huge military, all the money that was going into into warships and warfare and nuclear weapons and all. And they were holding a retreat one time up in Maine, and a friend of mine suggested I attend it. And we were talking about violence in the culture in this workshop. And I said I'm very much aware of violence in the culture, but as a systems thinker, I have no idea how to think about the dynamics of violence, how it propagates, how it circulates. I'm just completely perplexed by this phenomenon of violence. I don't think about it. And a chap in that group said, oh, there's this new book out by a theologian named Gil Bailey. And he talks about a new model for thinking about violence in the culture. The book is called Violence Unveiled — Humanity at the Crossroads. So when I got home, I dug it out together with a friend and we found out that this book was about the theoretical work of a Stanford University professor of literature named René Girard. And René Girard had been studying the classical literature. His field was literary criticism, secular literary criticism. And by the way, he was an atheist. But when he studied all this literature, he pulled out a very insightful model of the dynamics of conflict, because a lot of literature thrives on conflict — conflict and drama. That's sort of the core of a drama and stories. He pulled out a very concise model from his study of this huge corpus of literature. And when I read this book and learned about Girard's model it knocked my socks off because I said, holy schmoley, here is a systems theoretic model of the dynamics of violence in the culture. This is what I never had. This is why I couldn't think about violence and what to do about it, and ... I don't know how much time we have ...

David Gornoski:
But just about five minutes, we have four or five minutes.

Barry Kort:
OK. So Girards's model starts with the concept of desire. People have desires. That's pretty obvious. And one of things that happens is, if somebody expresses a desire for something that they claim is of value, it's not uncommon for other people say, hey, I want that, too. And so Girard called that mimetic or copycat desire. Two or more people now expressing desire for the same objective. And so now they compete for this desirable outcome, this desirable objective. And he called that competition mimetic rivalry, because whoever has got the best strategy, the people who have the worst strategy will imitate or copy the best strategy. And so they get ensnared in this rivalry and this business of being ensnared in this competition, Girard called that being ensnared by a very interesting word. He called it skandalon which is a Greek word from the New Testament. And the word really means a baited trap. And by the way, our words scandal and slander derive from this Greek word skandalon. So what happens is this conflict tend to escalate and eventually the guardians of society say, hey, we've got to tamp this down, this is getting out of control, so the referees basically set boundaries.

Barry Kort:
They set hard boundaries. They say if you keep your conflict inside these boundaries we'll leave you alone. But don't go over these lines. And, of course, eventually somebody goes over the line. And then the referee blows the whistle, points the finger at whoever went one toke over the line and they get a scapegoated, they get blamed for the whole nonsense. And so you have this experience of alienation and scapegoating, which comes about because the referees set hard boundaries for how much you can have this rivalry going. And then the punishment comes in. And Girard calls that authorized, sanctioned, and sacred violence. And that's the five stages of Girard's model. And it repeats cyclically forever. And that's the model that lets you think about the cycle of violence. And then you say, well, how do I run this model backwards so it doesn't escalate. So to de-escalate, if you solve the model for best practices with de-escalation, you get the teachings of Moses, Buddha and Jesus, among others.

David Gornoski:
Right.

Barry Kort:
They were basically solving the model for ethical best practices and running the model in reverse to de-escalate.

David Gornoski:
Yeah, and I love some of the things that you've told me in the past, like when Jesus says do not resist evil with violence but turn the other cheek. These are ways to dismantle the power of the attempt to bully or harm someone by allowing it to kind of fall on its own weight. Right?

Barry Kort:
Right. Yeah. See, Machiavelli had just the opposite theory. He says that if you're the playground supervisor, if the kids are throwing rocks, Machiavelli would say, if any you kids throw rocks, I'm going to pick up this 2x4 and clobber you with it. So that's the punishment. Moses said, hey, kids, if you're gonna throw rocks, if you get hit by a rock, don't throw back a bigger rock, throw back a smaller rock. And then, if the next kid throws back a smaller rock, the cycle will attenuate and decay. It will decay slowly, but it will decay until basically you're throwing back dust. Buddha comes along and says, let's decay this thing really fast. Throw back zero or as close to zero as possible. Jesus comes along and says, let's flip the sign back. If anybody throws a rock, don't throw back anything. Give them a hug.

David Gornoski:
Yeah.

Barry Kort:
So the whole idea is to understand the dynamics and get the echoing to decay as fast as possible and even and flip it into healing. I And Machiavelli says no, when I'm in charge, I'm going to respond to your violence with even bigger violence. And so you get this escalating cycle of violence, which is a Machiavellian concept, which is really idiotic. It doesn't make any sense mathematically.

David Gornoski:
Dr. Barry Kort has been a pleasure listening to you and learning your lessons today as an MIT engineer, you've got a lot of great insights, a lot of great wisdom. Thank you for joining us.

Barry Kort:
Well, thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.

David Gornoski:
Always a pleasure. "A Neighbour's Choice" is all about learning, how we can grow together. And it's been a pleasure to be able to listen to an MIT engineer himself and not just not just an ordinary engineer, someone who's able to really help bridge the gap between mathematical concepts and give us some insight into how we can come up with peaceful solutions to our conflict and that we can learn from folks like Jesus in history to model our way of getting along with one another so that maybe we can set a contagion of kindness rather than conflict.

David Gornoski:
I'm David Gornoski. Godspeed.

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