Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

― Albert Einstein

My wife and I take part in a discussion group twice a month at our church. We get an innocuous sounding word to focus upon and set about answering deep questions about it. Everyone gets a chance to speak without interruption and everyone else focuses on listening. It’s hard (I’m really bad at listening), and it’s rewarding. Last week the word was “play”. In talking about what the concept of play means to me first in the context of childhood then adulthood I had several epiphanies about the health and vitality of our current society and workplaces. Basically, the concept of play is under siege by forces that find it too frivolous to be supported. Societally we have destroyed play as a free wheeling unstructured activity for children, and crushed the freedom to play at work under the banner of accountability. We are poorer and more unhappy as a result and it is yet another manifestation of unremitting fear governing our behaviors.

We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.

― Charles E. Schaefer

The greatest realization in the dialog came when I took note of how I used to play at work and all the good that came from it. The times when I have been the most productive, creative and happy with work have all been associated with being allowed to play at work. By play I mean allowed to experiment, test, and create new ideas in an environment allowing for failure and risk (essentially by placing very few constraints and limitations on what I was doing). The key was the creation and commitment to very high level goals and the freedom to pursue these goals in a relatively free way. The key is the pursuit of the broad objectives using methods that are not strongly prescribed a priori.

Work and play is the same thing just with a different perspective.

― Debasish Mridha

When I was a child, I had immense freedom to play. I would ride bikes around the neighborhood and play at the creek. My parents had a general idea where I was, but not specifically. This level of independence and freedom is almost impossible to imagine today. Children have scheduled and scripted lives where parents know their precise location at almost any time. Instead of learning to manage their lives with a high degree of independence, we teach our children to always be in control. Most of what is being controlled is a set of highly improbable risks that should not warrant such a high degree of control. We are subverting so much of the positive influence that comes from independence to control exotic and tiny probabilities. Societally, the overall impact is counter-productive and hurts us far more than protects us. The treatment of our children is good training for their lives as adults.

The same basic dynamic is working in the adult world of work. We spend an immense amount of time and effort controlling a host of miniscule risks and dangers. The feeling for children and adults alike is that controlling potential bad outcomes is worth the effort. People say things like “if we can prevent just one needless death…” which sounds compelling, but is stupid and inane. Bad things happen all the time, bad things are supposed to happen and the amount of effort spent preventing them is immense. How many lives worth of effort are spent to prevent a single death? No one ever asks if the steps being taken actually have an overall balanced positive effect pro and con.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence

― Abraham Lincoln

A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer pats down Elliott Erwitt as he works his way through security at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2010. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

The TSA and airline screening is a good example. What is the cost in number of lives wasted going through their idiotic screening procedures to prevent problems. We also appear not to be able to control our reaction to bad things either. A terrorist act unleashes an avalanche of reaction that magnifies any harm the terrorists intends by orders of magnitude. Yet we continue to act the same without any realization that our fear is in fact the greatest weapon the terrorist possess. Terrorism is quite effective because the public is afraid and the societal response to terror will assist the aims of the terrorists. We have given up an incredible amount of resources, freedom and independence to protect ourselves from minuscule threats. There is a lot of evidence that we will continue to empower terrorists through our fearful responses.

Of course these trends are not solely limited to our response to terrorism. Terrorism simply amplifies the generic response of society. These trends in response occur in a variety of settings and drive short-term, low-risk behavior almost across the board. We typically encourage adults to focus on very short-term goals and take very few risks in working. The result is a loss of long-term goals and objectives in almost all settings in work. In addition the goals and objectives that do exist almost always entail little or no risk. The impact of the environment we have created is a systematic undermining of achievement, innovation and creativity in work. One way to capture this outcome is the recognition that play is not encouraged; it is actively discouraged.

We are being overwhelmed in the workplace, in the schoolroom and in every aspect of life with the concept of accountability. Accountability is one of those things that sounds uniformly good and no one can argue that it’s bad. Unfortunately I have come to the conclusion that the form of accountability we are subjecting our selves to is damaging and destructive. Accountability is used to control people and their activities. It is used to make sure people are doing what they are supposed to be doing. These days we are supposed to be doing what we are told to do. We are not supposed to be creative or innovative and do something that is unpredictable. Accountability is the box we are all being put in, which limits what we can do.

We end up working extremely hard across everything in society to make sure that bad things don’t ever happen. We put all sorts of measures in place to prevent bad things. We don’t seem to have the capacity to realize that bad things just happen and it’s a fact of life. We spend so much effort trying to manage all the risks that life is just passing us by. This manifests itself with the destructive belief that the government’s job is to protect all of us from bad things (like terrorism). We are willing to give up freedom, accomplishment and productivity to assure a slight increase in safety. Often the risks we are sacrificing so much to diminish are vanishingly small and trivial (like terrorism), yet we are making this trade over and over again. We are allowing ourselves to drown in a sea of safety measures against risks that are inconsequential. The aggregate cost of all of these risk control measures exceeds the value of almost any of the measures. It represents the true threat to our future.

In today’s world, we are in the box all the time whether as children, or as adults. Children’s playtime used to be unscripted and free more often than not. Today it is highly scripted and controlled. Uncontrolled children are viewed quite unfavorably by society as a whole. As adults the exact same thing is happening. Life and work is to be highly scripted and controlled. Anything off script or uncontrolled is considered to be dangerous and highly suspect. The desired result of this scripting and control is predictivity and reliability without risks and failure. The other impact is less happiness and less creativity, less innovation and generally worse outcomes.

Another thread to this thought process is the avoidance of passion in my work. Increasingly I find that expressing any passion or commitment at work is viewed negatively. Work is being driven to be dispassionate and free of deep of emotional connection. In the past when play was very deep part of my productive work life, I also felt great passion for what I did. That passion was tied to the entire way that I worked, and included commitments of quality and learning. More and more today such passion seems to bring nothing but condemnation and seems to be unwelcome. I don’t think that this is disconnected from the issue of play and its diminished role too.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Our most significant opportunities will be found in times of greatest difficulty.

― Thomas S. Monson

In economic policy it is well known that monopolies are bad. They are bad for everyone except the people who own and control those monopolies (who invest a lot in retaining their power!). They are drags on growth, innovation and progress. They are the essence of the too big to fail problem. In a very real sense the same thing is happening in science. We are being swallowed by monopolistic ideas. We are too invested in a variety of traditional solutions to problem (which solve traditional problems). Innovation, invention and progress are falling victim to this seemingly societal-wide trend.

We are seeing this in both computers and the codes running on the computers. The seductive nature of these quite capable behemoths is holding sway over a future that offers so much more than we are getting. The moment of epiphany came to me a while ago during some strategic planning for shock physics at work. Basically we have no strategy at all. We have 25 and 30-year-old legacy codes that we continue to develop because they are the only platforms viable within our fragmented funding picture today. The way we fund and manage the work in science is undermining progress and innovation as surely as the sun rides in the East every day.

Looking at our soon to be, if not already ancient codes based on ancient technology I asked how often did we build a new code in the old days? Sure as could be the answer was radically different than today’s world, we build new codes every five to seven years. FIVE TO SEVEN YEARS!!!! Today we are sheparding codes that are at least a quarter of a century old, and nothing new is in sight. We just continue to accrete capability on to these old codes horribly constrained by sets of decisions increasingly divorced from today’s reality, technology and problems. It is a recipe for failure, but not the good kind of failure, the kind of failure that crushes the future slowly and painlessly like the hardening of the arteries.

The deeper question is why we are functioning in this manner? I’d posit an initial answer as a tendency to be obsessively short-term focused in our goals. The stream of decisions leading to our current legacy codes is surely optimal in a per annum basis, just as it is surely suboptimal in the long run. The problem is that the long run has no constituency today. This stems from a rather fundamental societal lack of leadership and vision. We are too easily swayed by the arguments of optimal short-term thinking and unwilling to take risks or invest in the long run success. We see this spirit manifested in our political, business and scientific communities.

Perhaps no greater emblem of our addiction to shortsightedness exists than the crumbling infrastructure. The roads, bridges, electrical grids, airports, sewers, water systems, power plants,… that our core economy depend upon are in horrible shape and no will exists to support them. We can’t even conjure up the vision to create the infrastructure for the new century and leave it to privatized interests that will never deliver it. We are setting ourselves up to be permanently behind the rest of the World. We have no pride as a nation, no leadership and no vision of anything different. We just have short-term narcissistic self-interest embodied by the low tax, low service mentality. The same dynamic is happening at work.

When you do what you fear most, then you can do anything.

― Stephen Richards

We want short term, sure payoff, work without the sacrifice, risk and effort needed any long term vision or leadership. It is exactly what we are getting. We are creating a shell of our former greatness. In terms of codes and the opportunity they provide for modeling and simulation our reliance on legacy code is deeply damaging. In the days past we created new codes on a regular basis along with new modeling capability and philosophy. As a result our modeling approaches would step forward with each new code along with providing a vehicle for innovation in methods, algorithms and computer science. As a result we could try out new ideas for size without completely divesting from what came before. Without the new codes we are straightjacketed into old ideas and technology passes us by. The inability to replace our old codes resulting in legacy codes produces a massive cost in terms of lost opportunity.

How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.

― Paulo Coelho

The loss of opportunity is becoming increasingly unacceptable. We are producing a future that is shorn of possibilities that should be lying in front of us. Instead of vast possibilities energized by continual changes in our foundations, we have stale old codes, models, methods and algorithms that ill-serve our potential. The application of too big to fail to our codes is creating a slow-motion failure of epic proportions. The basis for the failure is the loss of innovation and a sense that we are creating the future. Instead we simply curate the past. Our best should be ahead of us and any leadership worth its salt would demand that we work steadfastly to seize greatness. In modeling and simulation the creation of new codes should be an energizing factor creating effective laboratories for innovation, invention and creativity providing new avenues for progress.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

― Stephen Jay Gould

This week I’m in Las Vegas an appropriately ironic place to see people making stupid gambles on the future. We are having the annual “Principal Investigator’s” meeting for the NNSA’s ASC program, itself a rather ironic name for an echo chamber, which is a more apt description. There is frightfully little investigation or intellectual engagement
in sight, it is more of a programmatic, project meeting with little or no discussion of intellectual depth, at least publicly. Private discussions among the technically oriented attendees are a bit more far reaching, but everyone seems to feel a deep sense of following a fate rather than making choices. The lack of holistic thought and vitality in high performance computing is becoming evident, but the machine focus is a juggernaut too powerful to slow down at this point.

If failure is not an option, then neither is success.

—Seth Godin

Societally, the concept of too big to fail applies to the banking and financial institutions that almost destroyed the World economy eight years ago. We demonstrated that they were both too big to fail and too big and too powerful to change thus remaining a ticking time bomb. It is only a matter of time before the same issues present in 2007 erupt again and wreck havoc on the World economy. All the evidence needed to energize real change is available, but there is simply too much money to be made, and greed is more powerful than common sense. I realized that our application codes and computers probably properly deserve to be thought of in exactly the same light, they are too big to fail too. This character is slowly and steadily poisoning the environment we live in and any discussion of different intellectual paths is simply forbidden.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

In high performance computing we live in immensely challenging times where deep intellectual engagement is necessary for success. The very nature of the programs seems to be anathema for the very free thought needed for success. The codes and computers are treated as being absolutes for success and immutable. We see decades of investment in codes and capabilities that must be sustained. The systems we have created are immense in terms of expense and size. The idea has taken hold that they must be preserved. This preservation is rather superficial rather than holistic and pervasive; the concept in analogous to playing the codes in amber. As such the intellectual content of the codes is remaining far too static and our intellectual ownership of the contents of the codes is slipping away. It is a dangerous and unsustainable future. Like the banks that should have been split into smaller more manageable chunks, the codes need to be removed from this concept of permanence.

As I said, the depth of intellectual ownership of these very codes is diminishing with each passing day. The essential aspects of these code’s utility and success in our application areas is based on deep knowledge and intense focus of talented individuals. The talent and skills leading to successful codes are difficult to develop and maintain; the skills must be developed by simultaneously pushing several envelopes: the applications, the models, methods to solve models, and computer science-programming. Today we really only focus on the computer science-programming and simply sort all the other details. Rather than continually reinvest in people and science, we are creating an environment where codes are curated. This state is actually a recipe for catastrophic failure rather than glorious success. The path forward should be adaptive, flexible and agile; instead the path is a lumbering goliath and viewed as a fait accompli.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

A code is not an investment and shouldn’t ever be viewed as such. A code is simply a computer executable version of independent thought and intellectual content. It is absolutely vital for all of the capability we have in code to be fully understood and known by humans. We need to have humans who understand the basis of models and how these models are solved. When we curate code this key connection is lost. We lose the fundamental nature of the model as our impression of nature, rather than its direct image. We use models as a way of explaining nature rather than a substitute for the natural World. This tie is being systematically undermined by the way we compute today and results in a potentially catastrophic loss of humility. Such loses of humility ultimately produce reactions that are unpleasant and damaging.

We are creating a program that will collide with reality leaving a broken and limping community in its wake. It has a demonstrated track record of not learning from past mistakes, producing a plan for moving ahead that is devoid of innovation and deep thought. Today’s path forward is solely predicated on the idea that we must have the fastest computer rather than the best computing. It is the epitome of bigger and more expensive is better, rather than faster, smarter and more agile. Perhaps more damaging is a perspective that the problems we face are already solved save the availability of more computer power. We will end up eviscerating the very communities of scientists that are the lifeblood of modeling and simulation. The program may be a massive mistake and no one is questioning any of it.

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

I believe that all of these efforts could vastly benefit from a mindset orthogonal to the prevailing approach. How would we solve the problems facing us today if we had less computing power? If we thought about how to productively solve our problems with less computational horsepower, we could do a far better job with whatever computers we actually have. I find the call for more computer power as a way of dodging deeper and more challenging problems with an effectively kneejerk response. More computing power is undeniably better, but it is almost always a highly suboptimal path to better solutions to problems.

The most effective way to get a better answer is provide a better model of reality to address the questions. If you believe that your model is correct and appropriate for the questions at hand, the method of solution has the most leverage for improving your performance. Many of these solution methods are based on fundamental algorithms, which can provide massive upgrades in performance. In each of these endeavors the use of deep applied mathematics expertise can provide tremendous benefits to the rigor and effectiveness of each aspect. Only when these options have been exhausted should the implementation and hardware be brought to bear as the primary path to improvement. In today’s high performance computing research the highest leverage paths to improved modeling and simulation are virtually ignored by our efforts. Of course part of the issue is the identification of the activity as high performance computing first, and modeling & simulation second. This ordering and priority should be reversed in keeping with their proper role for impacting the real World applications that should be motivating all of our efforts.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

― Michael Lewis

Left to right: Steve Carell plays Mark Baum and Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett in The Big Short from Paramount Pictures and Regency Enterprises

Over the Christmas holiday my family and I went to see “The Big Short” an excellent movie about the financial collapse in 2007-2008. It was almost impossible to come away from the movie without feeling a deep sense of rage over how things unfolded. The level of criminality, greed and distain for humanity that fueled the collapse has largely gone unpunished, and driven precious little change in the system that allowed things to unfold. The reality is that we are primed for the same thing to happen all over again with only the details changing. The issues that allowed this calamity are infesting society at large and corrosively aimed at almost every great institution we depend upon.

“Guys who can’t get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody’s,” as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.”

― Michael Lewis

One scene in “The Big Short” stands out as helping define the depth of the dysfunction in the system, the trip to Moody’s, the rating agency for the securities. The securities created by the banks were incredibly unstable and literally junk, yet the ratings agencies kept putting their top seal of approval on them, AAA. When pressed on the matter, the woman representing Moody’s said, “if we don’t give them the rating they want, the guy down the street will, we want the business.” The people watching the system for fraud were completely in bed with the crooks. The reality is that this practice and problem are everywhere. It is true where I’ve worked, it is obviously true in politics, and sports, and education, and… Our whole nation is living in the Golden Age of Bullshit. This serves no purpose but perpetuating the existing structures of power at the cost of progress, quality and ethical behavior.

Mark Baum: We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food. Even baseball…

– The Big Short

The issue exposed in the Big Short is permiating society. The basic problem is that no one can be responsible bcause being responsible will just get you replaced by a more corrupt or corruptible irresponsible person. The sorts of peer reviews that we see at work are the same thing. Everything is graded on a curve, and a bad failing grade is never allowed. Failure isn’t allowed, if it comes up the messenger is “shot” (usually by being dismissed from the peer review). We never confront any problems until they blow up in our faces. This tendency basically allows progress to grind to a proverbial halt. Failures are the fuel for progress and when you disallow failure, you disallow progress.

The signs of this form of corruption are everywhere. We cannot have a decent or deep conversation about anything controversial. Climate change is a great example of the sort of bullshit responses that hamper us today. If everyone is an expert then no one is an expert. If people don’t like the information they get, they find someone else who gives them a different answer. As a result science in our society is in decline. Actual science is being hurt, and science’s role in society is similarly degrading. Look at the whole anti-vaxxer movement, which has absolutely no basis, but lots of proponents. We get ideas where any risk at all is unacceptable and we allow progress to grind to a complete halt. Failure, problems and the identification of things that need to be improved creates the basis of valuable work. We have structurally destroyed mechanisms for doing this by our addiction to praise and inability to identify and confront problems while they are small.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

― Clive James

I run in a lot circles where large scale decisions are made and money is distributed. A culture of empty-headed management has crept into how things are done. People managing scientific programs are much more interested in milestones and Gantt charts than whether the work is any good. They seem to have conflated the practice of project management with quality. As a result we end up managing the wrong things and syphoning off the key elements in useful progressive research.

The ability to make progress and innovate has very little to do with anything project management provides. Progress often comes from applying new thinking to old problems. One of the key things to do is identify and take on unsolved problems, another name for failures. Making progress is often the antithesis of things that can be managed in today’s common fashion, so progress makes way for management satisfaction. The key is the project management is simply a tool, and a useful one at that. It is not a recipe for success or an alternative to thinking deeply and differently.

Lastly, we have a seemingly ever-present din of the question, “will things ever be done?” I hear this repeatedly from those managing and funding stockpile stewardship. The answer is NO and will always be NO. At least if we want a competent and reliable science basis for national defense, the economy or just a generally progressive society, the work is never done. This question is so utterly lacking in thought and intellectual depth that it should be met with complete distain.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.

― Henry Ford

People thinking that science is something with a finite starting and stopping point have no business whatsoever being in any form of leadership. Science is a quintessential human activity and we humans make progress continually. To deny progress should be against the nature of our species. Killing progress is certainly opposed to the best interests of society at large. Science in support of national defense has been one of the most fruitful avenues for progress in science with benefits far beyond killing other people more efficiently. Most of today’s economy is founded upon the results from defense related research. These opponents of progress are basically enemies of the state, trying to undermine the foundations of our Nation’s strength. They’re out there, enemies of progress, friends of corruption trying to keep us from solving our problems. They’re everywhere.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

― Carl Sagan