How to change the world with high-level rules
Subtitle: Why we don’t need micro-management to change the world
By Olivia Geen, MD, MSc, FRCPC
| 8 min read |
Despite feeling very special, we behave very similarly to ants, birds, salmon… anything that lives in a social colony (i.e. society).
Of course our internal lives seem much more unique - our thoughts, emotions, feelings - and our ability to create new things in the world far surpasses other animal colonies.
However, as I often say, two things can be true at the same time. We can both closely mirror other species, and be unique in other ways. By seeing the similarities to other animals we can learn something about ourselves.
Today’s blog is about why we, like other species, don’t need to be micromanaged. I’ll break it down into four main “taster” ideas on the topic, including:
1. How ant colony optimization and human subway systems prove our intrinsic ability to optimize our world using only “high-level rules”.
2. How to spread such high-level rules using ideas adapted from Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point.
3. Why we need to consider unintended consequences of high-level rules
4. A reflection on high-level rules in medicine
Let’s begin.
“The goal of swarm intelligence is to take inspiration from the collective behaviour of social insects such as ants, termites, bees, wasps, and other animal societies such as flocks of birds or schools of fish.”
1) HIGH-LEVEL RULES IN ANT COLONIES AND HUMAN SUBWAY SYSTEMS
Ant Colony Optimization is a mathematical algorithm that is based on the foraging behaviour of ants. We don’t need to go into the algorithm side of things today, because the natural world of ants is what we’re interested in.
Simply put, a colony of ants is able to figure out the shortest path to food over time, without anyone “telling them” what to do. They optimize for success by following a very simple rule: follow the pheromones.
Here’s how it works: ants go out to look for food, and as they go, their little ant bodies deposit pheromones along the path. Other ants that come by after can smell and follow the pheromones, like leaving a little bread trail.
Over time, shorter paths get more pheromones, and therefore eventually all the ants know the best way to get food - they have optimized for success with a very simple rule.
Ants follow each other’s pheromones. Ants take less time to reach the food and return to the nest along Path A because it is shorter. This means more ants can come and go along this path in the same amount of time, and so the pheromone signal increases. Meanwhile on Path B, it takes ants longer to come and go and therefore the signal is weaker. Eventually all ants take the shortest path, by following the simple rule of following pheromones.
No single ant ever went out and “figured out” what everyone should be doing. No ant tried to disseminate that knowledge to all the other ants and convince them to follow their path. The individual ants don’t really “know” what they’re doing - they’re just following the rule of pheromones - but this creates a feedback loop that optimizes for efficiency as a collective society.
How about with humans? Let’s use the example of the subway system.
One of my favourite subway stations in Paris. It’s close to the Louvre and has all these fancy statues, just sitting in the underground. Only in Paris.
Picture this: it’s rush hour in Paris. Humans line the platform, swarming around, waiting for the tube to arrive. At last there’s the familiar sound, the rush of wind, and the chaotic scramble as the tube arrives and everyone pushes to get on.
Inside the train there are already people. As the rush of people move inwards, everyone naturally shifts around, optimizing the space so that as many people as possible can get on.
We’re following a simple rule: make space for other people.
No one had to come in and direct individual people, organizing the crowd, calling out over our heads “You! In the blue! Move 3 inches to your left and turn sideways!” or “Man with the backpack! Lower the bag to your feet so someone can squish up behind you!”.
Those are the things we do, but no one “told us” to do them. We figured it out on our own. We self-organize based on a simple rule.
At the next station, as more people squeeze on, we all shuffle ourselves around again.
What if the rule was different? What if the rule was say… keep 2 feet distance between you and other people to avoid catching COVID. Many of us saw and now remember how people behaved during COVID - if someone sat next to you it was returned with a glare and reshuffling to maintain your distance.
A simple rule drastically changes our behaviour when we believe and follow it. The micromanaging of the behaviour is unnecessary, as long as the rule is “high-level”.
Thus, high level rules are simple yet powerful. They are vague, yet specific. Do no harm. Don’t steal. Wish your mom happy birthday. They comprise only a few words, and yet, they tell us exactly what to do across a huge number of scenarios.
They allow people in all different contexts to naturally self-organize and achieve the desired outcome. You don’t need to control and micromanage people - just give them something high-level to believe in.
2) HOW TO SPREAD HIGH-LEVEL RULES
Now that I’ve made the claim that high-level rules are powerful, how can you start to use them to your advantage? Well, first and foremost, for high-level rules to work the majority of people need to believe in them. This is also known as societal norms.
If there’s a high-level rule, like don’t kill people, our society will only self-organize and optimize around this if the majority of people believe in it. It has to be something that we all agree upon, so that we all change our behaviour at the same time, to achieve success.
What makes people all agree on the same thing? That’s a much longer post for another day, but Malcolm Gladwell summarized many of the concepts in his book Tipping Point, where he discusses social contagion of ideas.
In a nutshell, ideas spread when:
The message is “sticky” (short, sweet, easy to understand)
The right people are spreading it (“connectors” with a large social network “salesmen” who are good at convincing people, and “mavens” who act as opinion leaders)
When the idea becomes a “must” for enough people that it spreads like wildfire (aka exponential growth, rather than linear).
In the end, you need a simple high-level rule that the right people believe in and then you need to wait until it spreads enough that it “tips” over into rapid near-complete domination. Once this occurs, humans will naturally self-organize and optimize for that rule, without you having to micromanage the particulars of how they achieve it.
This is a powerful truth, and one that needs to be managed carefully, because these high-level rules always come with the second catch: unintended consequences.
3) UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF HIGH-LEVEL RULES
While the above helps us understand how to spread high-level goals that will help us to direct our society towards good without having to micromanage the particulars… we need to be exquisitely aware that goals never exist in isolation; they exist in equilibrium.
The goal humans achieve on the subway line is to get everyone who’s waiting for the tube on at the same time, by following the simple room of making space for other people. However, the success of this goal comes with unintended consequences; the invasion of personal space; pick-pockets; spread of viruses, etc.
Everything is a dynamic balance of benefit and harm. The opposite goal of 2 feet of space helped with personal space, (likely) pick-pockets, and reduced the spread of COVID-19, but resulted in other downsides like people being late for work; social isolation; economic downturn, etc.
Thus, if you want to change the world, you need only change the high-level rules that humans follow, BUT you need to be aware of what other things that rule will “optimize” for as a consequence. The equilibrium shifts with our actions.
When we are in a system that seems out-of-whack, it signals to us that some of our high-level rules are having unchecked, unintended consequences.
4) HIGH-LEVEL RULES IN MEDICINE
The four pillars of medical ethics are great examples of high-level rules around which physicians have self-organized. They also demonstrate the concept of complementary high-level rules to maintain a balance and prevent disequilibrium. They include:
Do no harm (non-malificnece)
Beneficience (do good)
Patient autonomy (let people choose)
Justice (equal access to resources)
These high-level rules allow us to naturally self-organize towards the goal - health for all.
If it was just do no harm we might never offer a patient a single medication since they all come with potential risks. We also need the rule of do good so that we try things that we think will provide more good than harm.
Similarly, we let people choose their care, but we also (are supposed) to be aware of how healthcare resources are limited, and we must try to optimize towards people having equal access to healthcare, which sometimes (should) mean that individual people can’t have everything that they want.
However, the keen observer might notice that despite these complimentary high-level rules, our healthcare systems seems to be spiralling, suggesting we are in fact not in a balanced equilibrium, but rather in a dysregulated system headed for collapse. How could this be?
Somewhere, somehow, one or more of our high-level rules are having unchecked, unintended consequences.
For example, I wonder about the high-level rule in the US healthcare system of “make more money to keep the business growing”. What rule is countering this goal around which the system is self-organizing?
In the Canadian healthcare system, I wonder about the rule of “universal healthcare”. This is a good high-rule, make no mistake… but what is the counter rule that helps keep it in balance? We can’t provide care for all when we don’t have the resources. Inevitably, our system will collapse when it’s not sustainable. We need a new counter-rule that still aims to do good, but helps to maintain equilibrium in our system.
What about a new high-level rule of “prevention and cure for all”?
With this rule, everyone has access to the essential and high-yield components of healthcare - prevention (diet, exercise, emotional wellness (therapy!)), and essential treatment including acute hospitalization and treatment of curable conditions. If we followed this high-level rule, we might realize that when we’re into 5th and 6th line chemotherapy treatment for a disease that cannot be cured… perhaps we’ve gone too far?
Not doing things like providing 5th and 6th line chemotherapy can feel uncomfortable (we must follow the rule of beneficence!), but the risk is a system in dysequilibrium that spirals into collapse. We need to also follow the high-level rule of justice, which means we need to focus on the essentials of prevention and cure for all.
Disagree? Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just an ant leaving pheromones.
Olivia
Dr. Geen is an internist and geriatrician in Canada, working in a tertiary hospital serving over one million people. She also holds a masters in Translational Health Sciences from the University of Oxford, is widely published in over 10 academic journals, and advises digital healthcare startups on problem-solution fit and implementation. For more info, see About.
Influences:
1) Complexity science
2) Paris subway system
3) Malcom Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, 2002.
4) Ant colony optimization (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/introduction-to-ant-colony-optimization/)
5) Chip and Dan Heath. Switch: how to change things when change is hard, 2010.