A recent article (Mahr, 2022) published online by Politico quotes Rachel Walensky, the head of the CDC, regarding the fact that “the CDC alone would not be able to bring Covid-19 under control, and called for broader investment in public health at the state and local levels.”
“I actually really think many people have thought this is CDC’s responsibility, to fix public health [and] the pandemic,” Walensky said. “The CDC alone can’t fix this. Businesses have to help, the government has to help, school systems have to help. This is too big for the CDC alone.”
Walensky provides here a good point of entry into an alternative, ecosystem-based approach to addressing a transformation of the CDC and of public health efforts in general. The crux of the matter comes to a head in this statement:
“This year, the agency has struggled to strike a balance between the competing interests of a virus that continues to find ways to evade vaccines and natural immunity, and a public that is weary of taking the sort of precautions that federal and state governments have mandated.”
There are two themes of particular interest here: the competing interests of the virus and the public, and the public’s weariness with mandated precautions. These competing interests conflict in their fundamental orientation to relationships. The virus evolves via bottom-up emergent processes that adapt resiliently on the fly to changing circumstances by means of easily communicable and contagious contact methods. The public, in contrast, is able to change only via more belabored and mechanical processes imposed from the outside in, and from the top down. Where information flows quickly and efficiently in a standardized way throughout all the individuals inhabiting the virus’s multilevel networked ecology, much of the crucial information in the public domain is communicated only in incommensurable and incomparable terms that not only result in cumbersome miscommunications but even open the door to private interests’ self-serving efforts at spreading misinformation.
Balancing the virus’s and the public’s competing interests is as difficult and challenging as it is because the public interest is encumbered by institutions unable to deal with the virus on its own terms. But just as it is sometimes necessary to fight fire with fire, here it may be necessary to fight viruses virally. What does this mean?
Consider this: the virus is structured in terms of a formal genotype, a standardized phenotype, and an adaptive mutability harnessed by natural selection in a seemingly endless process of innovative evolution.
But public healthcare institutions, like institutions in general, are not structured as social ecologies giving rise to productively evolving communicable social contagions of innovative care. Instead, these institutions are counterproductively structured so as to make themselves particularly vulnerable to epidemics of misinformation. I would like to propose that this vulnerability emerges as a product of the ecological fallacy (Alker, 1969; Rousseau, 1985; Sedgwick, 2015), which involves a failure to create knowledge infrastructures sensitive to the differences between the forest and the trees, or between the map and the territory. Referred to by Whitehead (1925, pp. 52-58) as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, Bateson’s (1972, 1978; Star & Ruhleder, 1996) concept of the “ecology of mind” stressed the epistemological error made when individuals’ cognitive processes are disconnected from the relationships in which they are embedded.
This error is virtually endemic as a primary feature of the dominant paradigm of statistical modeling in epidemiology and public health. This paradigm takes uncontrolled variations in the meaning of numeric differences for granted as an insuperable constraint. Numbers are assumed to automatically be quantitative, even though it is patently obvious that having ten rocks in no way guarantees one of possessing more rock mass than someone else with two rocks. This contradictory situation is routinely and systematically ignored in the vast majority of statistical comparisons of test scores and survey ratings. Though this is not always the case (Barney & Fisher, 2016; Fisher & Stenner, 2016; Stenner, et al., 2013, 2016), in general, quantitative methods in education, psychology, and the social sciences mistakenly assume that theoretically rigorous and reproducible interval-level measurement is impossible.
Scientific alternatives to accepting the constant confusion of incommensurable instrument-dependent ordinal units, however, have been available for decades (Rasch, 1960, 1961, 1977; Wright, 1977, 1997; Narens & Luce, 1986; Andrich & Marais, 2019; Fisher & Wright, 1994) but are rarely put to use in systematic applications. Interest in developing such applications has increased in recent years as the metrological potentials of advanced measurement modeling have become more widely known (Cano, et al., 2019; Fisher & Cano, 2022; Mari & Wilson, 2014; Mari, et al., 2021; Pendrill, 2014, 2019; Pendrill & Fisher, 2015).
Keeping everyone connected so they can think together in common languages sets up possibilities for virally communicable, evolving contagions of care. These kinds of social forms of life need to be created to be reproductively viable, with genotypic, phenotypic, and mutability characteristics analogous to those of biological forms of life (Pattee, 1985, 2012).
These characteristics correspond to developmental and semiotic levels of complexity, where formal theories and concepts, abstract instruments and words, and concrete data and things are integrated within systems, systems of systems (metasystems), and in paradigmatic supersystems (Commons & Bresette, 2006; Nöth, 2018). The hierarchy of these levels is not one in which lower levels are homogeneously reduced to monotonous sameness in higher levels, as though they are subjected to some kind of purification. Instead, higher levels integrate stochastic patterns repeating over time and space at lower levels in forms that remain identifiable but not identical across different groups of individuals (Fisher, 2020a, 2021a).
The genotype’s formal encapsulation of the conceptual instructions for organizing a standardized phenotype’s morphology comprises an explanatory model, a theory, predicting the structure and function of the physical form of a social or biological body. The predictive power of thermodynamics then experimentally validates the empirical performances of thermometers, just as the predictive power of syntactic and semantic complexity experimentally validates the empirical performances of reading comprehension tests.
The repeatability and reproducibility of the formal theory and abstract instrumentation comprising the genotypes and phenotypes of social forms of life provide scientifically defensible confidence that workable partnerships have been established between them and human interests. The explanatory and theoretical models involved are, however, probabilistic, meaning that the concrete data never conform exactly with expectations. No matter how improbable an observation might be, it is likely to occur at some expected frequency. When a form of life executes a reproductive strategy involving trillions or quadrillions of opportunities for possible mutations to occur, it actually becomes highly unlikely that improbable combinations will NOT happen. The problem of fighting a virus virally is one of creating the social ecologies in which highly improbable creative improvisations offering evolutionary innovations become likely to occur.
We tend to systematically ignore unique local variations in physical variables like time, temperature, mass, etc. because they are either negligible or deeply embedded in the environment, like the daily shifting in the shadows cast by the sun, or the differences in the time the sun sets when traveling across a time zone.
But when anomalies are encountered in research, the evolutionary potentials of mutable concrete observations come into their own. Just as perturbations in the orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune, so also did a misplaced lead plate reveal x-rays; a nonsticking glue yielded Post-It Notes; and a dead culture in a Petri dish, penicillin. To systematically create contexts in which we can make the unexpected as obvious as possible, we need to make our expectations as clear and widely distributed as possible.
The disclosure of anomalies has long been recognized as a primary function of measurement in science (Cook, 1914/1979, pp. 400, 427-439; Kuhn, 1961/1977, p. 219; Rasch, 1960, p. 124). Not enough has been done to systematically construct measurements calibrated in common metrics with expectations focused clearly enough to make unexpected results stand out and demand explanation. Even so, Latour (2004, p. 217) recognized that:
“Social sciences may become as scientific…as the natural sciences, on the condition that they run the same risks, which means rethinking their methods and reshaping their settings from top to bottom on the occasion of what those they articulate say. [The] …general principle becomes: devise your inquiries so that they maximize the recalcitrance of those you interrogate.”
In the domains of education and social science, consistent inconsistencies in test and survey data speak to the presence of multiple constructs and opportunities for clarifying communications by addressing them one at a time. Once each construct has been formally described by a predictive theory and explanatory model that accounts for variation in items’ empirically estimated scale locations at fit-for-purpose levels of uncertainty, precision, and reliability (De Boeck & Wilson, 2004; Embretson, 2010; Fischer, 1973; Fisher & Stenner, 2017; Stenner, et al., 2013, 2016), they may then be combined in multidimensional arrays or indexes (Wilson & Gochyyev, 2020) that are more interpretable and meaningful than nonlinear, ordinal, sample-dependent, and ecologically fallacious scores could ever be.
When inconsistencies do not accumulate to a level contradicting either the construct theory or the instrument calibrations, they may nonetheless point toward new and actionable information useful in applications or pointing in as-yet unexplored new directions. For instance, when an identifiable gender or ethnic subgroup expresses disagreement on Caliper’s (Morrison & Fisher, 2018-2022) generally agreeable partnership items while agreeing with the generally more disagreeable systems items, a previously inaccessible opportunity for revealing and negating institutionally systemic bias may be in hand.
Such opportunities are made available by not treating each item as a separate universe reported as a mean rating in a long list of numbers. Instead, a theory of how the measured construct changes provides a narrative account that informs interpretation, situating all the items together in a shared quantitative frame of reference. Now, the theoretically and empirically validated models of the measured construct constitute an ecological environment giving voice to any and all unique concrete expressions.
There is, then, a general failure in our institutions to conceive problems in terms of participatory social ecologies involving communications structured by semiotic levels of hierarchical complexity (i.e., as heterogenously distributed boundary objects; see Bowker, et al., 2015; Fisher, 2020a, 2022c; Fisher & Wilson, 2015; Star & Griesemer, 1989; also see Fisher & Stenner, 2018). Though this domain is inherently conceptually challenging, it is no more technically difficult than a good many other areas of human endeavor in which huge successes have been won.
Returning now to the second point concerning the public’s weariness with mandated precautions, what is the alternative to force-feeding solutions to a public largely unable to comprehend or appreciate the epidemiology of infection rates and the efficacy of vaccines? What differences will follow from culturing participatory social ecologies that do not commit the epistemological error of assuming that concrete numeric counts can be safely assumed to be abstract quantities? How might effective social contagions of communicable care invigorate a public worn and weary with tiresome efforts that pay back only intangible returns? How can institutionalized systems of incentives and rewards be restructured to captivate imaginations and inspire new entrepreneurial innovations? How might the complexities of public health measures and management be made accessible to everyday people in the same way that no understanding of thermodynamics is required to make good use of thermometers? How can instruments be designed, calibrated, and distributed so that the imaginative level of the entire population is lifted without altering the intelligence or vision of any individuals (following here Whitehead’s (1925, p. 107) description of the change in scientists’ thinking in the wake of the quantum revolution in physics; also see Hankins & Silverman, 1999; Latour, 1987, pp. 247-257).
A playful absorption into the flow of language games provides the energetic, labor-saving lift that fuels the economy of language (Banks, 2004; Fisher, 2004, 2020a, 2022b/c; Franck, 2002, 2019). Shared languages and common metrics prethink the world for us, sparing us the trouble of creating our own languages and translating between them. Linguistic standards, metrologically traceable unit quantities, and currency unions all leverage the same principle of virally communicable meaning (Fisher, 2012a/b, 2020, 2021a/b, 2022a/b/c). Efficient markets obtain their virally communicable shifts in capital flows in large part because high quality measurement standards are incorporated in legally defensible property rights and financial accountability systems (Allen & Sriram, 2000; Ashworth, 2004; Barber, 1987; Barzel, 1982; many others). There are no logical or moral reasons for not trying to create similar markets for human, social, and natural capital; in fact, making the effort would be far more logical and moral than not trying.
By mapping a trajectory of citizen involvement and empowerment in public health initiatives, as is measured and managed in the Caliper assessment of ecosystem success (Morrison & Fisher, 2018-2022) individuals could be systematically, socially, and financially motivated to see where they stand relative to personal and societal goals, to their past accomplishments, to what they should do next, and to any exceptional opportunities for leverage-able remediation or advantageous strengths. Community and organizational initiatives could ascertain the typical cost of achieving certain outcomes and could reward lean innovations that improve quality by removing wasteful resource investments.
Entrepreneurs could mount solutions that function across previously siloed sectors, expanding new markets for previously intangible assets. Because processes and outcomes are measured in an objective unit quantity, they need not be produced internally but can be purchased in market transactions. Because skills and performances are represented formally and abstractly independent of the individuals involved, fair prices can support profitable returns on investments. The alignment of human, social, and environmental values with financial values will make it impossible to extract monetary profits when genuine wealth is being destroyed (Fisher, 2012a/b, 2020a, 2021b).
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