—Voltaire
I was at Thinking.net and was reading Waking the "Mindfield" How Systemic Thinking Helps Avoid Common Fallacies in Thinking and Action by Daniel Aronson. It occured to me that there might be ways a person could tell if they were in a self-reinforcing schema pattern as described above. Yes, systems thinking teaches you lots of schemas and how to compose them into metasystems and metametasystems and ...
That is the way - but what about people who don't have that background?
Are their decisions and their effect in the world and on society and history simply to be tolerated? If fewer people had only a linear dynamic schema would we have started doing something about global warming sooner? Very smart people can make the mistakes outlined in the article. They don't usually make them at work, but they have some "natural" schema they use for real life. There are probably even some systems scientists out there that use false attribution in their personal lives.
Anyway, here's a stab at some things someone could do to check if they were in a self-reinforcing schema.
1st way - If you have only one schema type it's probably self-reinforcing. Add another,an eastern way, a physics way, an aesthetic way, there are plenty out there.
2nd way - Think about how a schema progresses. If it's healthy, it will become more complex as time goes by and will include more and more types of information.
By complex I mean something like Kolmogorov complexity,some measure for size of the smallest program that could generate all the information your schema recognizes for some phenomenon.
For information, I'm using the Bateson definition: "differences that make a difference" (within your schema).
A self-reinforcing schema will not continue to progress in complexity over time and will not include new kinds of information. It can get more information and get more complicated but it doesn't get new kinds of information because it isn't complex enough (I'm sort of invoking the law of requisite variety here...).
So, how much has your schema really changed since school, college, career, marriage, home, family, ...? Are you listening to any new kinds of music, reading any new kinds of books, incorporating any kind of new philosophy?
3rd way - Add schema that blocks self-reinforcing schemas.
What does this schema look like?
It takes the current schema, looks at the input patterns and then compares those to example environments. By a combination of inspection and inference, the dual of the predominent schema can be formulated (at least loosely). This schema can then be tested by the main schema. If the conclusions from the dual are roughly the same as the master schema, you're probably ok. If not, there might be a problem. Now based on the inputs for each, check to see which schema includes more kinds of information. The human test is, spend some time looking at everything you usually don't look at, if the world starts making more sense as a result, then your schema might be self-reinforcing.
Here's a link to some other cool material on this "systems stuff"
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