Solving the Cat 3 problem

The opening page of this website introduced its central theme – Cat 3 problem solving as a project. The previous page laid the foundation to support the platform. Since this innovation in sociotechnology is all psychological and it impacts social operations to a scope and intensity far too large to be comfortably assimilated, there is no possible  way to transfer all our sociotechnology on a website. All of our successes have used face to face in situ, where the technology transfer can be guaranteed.

Plan B is the vaccine for the Cat 3 plague that works 100% of the time. As Plan B is based and structured on natural law, it inherits the properties of natural laws – omnipresence, generality, and indifference. This inheritance and live implementations make Plan B incontrovertible. It is in your best interests to refute that claim.

If you’re not into problem solving skill betterment, a popular choice, your fate is settled business. Your trajectory will parallel that of those you emulate and your wayward choices latch in, making it harder to reverse course. If you want to take a shot at a better life, there are requisites.

• You’ll have to use your cognitive faculties a great deal of the time
• You will have to engage hyper-learning to get over the hump, like a pole vault
• You will have to withstand the impact on your social status, for being successful
• You’ll have to abandon your counterproductive choice-making habits

In the beginning…

Figuring out the most logical, practical beginning to the resolution of the ultimate Cat 3 challenge is by no means clear cut. Where Genesis had the big void, we have to commence the project with a collection of genetically endowed, Establishment-brainwashed Homo sapiens. When it comes to Cat 3 P/S projects, that’s starting construction in the graveyard of failed attempts with the same people that produced the carnage. In addition, by definition, business as usual is death to success with solving Cat 3 problems. No exceptions.

The place to start your efforts, we learned from experience and Einstein’s dictum, is to go up a level to your processes of making choices. That is the atom in problem-solving universe. It is the root event in every narrative. You can take choice-making everywhere on anything and can account for almost everything. All things that happen to you are, in part, the result of choices made prior to the event. As Carl Jung said, people would rather call it fate, take the consequences and learn nothing. They don’t want to engage the complex network of choices that led to the event.

The selected second milestone in getting the ducks in a row is gaining awareness by the workplace keystones of the choice-making reality and that they have to scramble up to level ground with the psychology before material work on the Cat 3 project dares to begin. They can start by testing themselves against the list of biases encoded in their invariant genome. The most reliable and convenient list to use has been produced by scientific research and available on Wikipedia. Wiki ‘s treatment makes it unnecessary for us to go into details about subconscious-mind bias here. We’re not free of bias ourselves.

As you can see, there are more than 200 cognitive biases and the list increases as research continues. Testing shows that most people carry fifty or more biases into their social transactions. You don’t remove genetically-endowed biases.

Since all successful knowledge building gravitates to rationality, the companion psychological barrier to Cat 3 project success along with bias is irrational choice-making. An irrational choice is a decision that goes against or counter to logic. Irrational choice making is as prevalent in the highest professions as it is in the general population. Keeping in mind that reason is the only route to know anything about anything, your government in DC has not made a rational decision in the last century. Unlike biases, irrational reasoning can be fixed.

The classic informal fallacies of reason include ad hominem, authority, bandwagon, genetic, affective, and straw man. You guessed it: we are even biased about our biases. It is informative that wiki has no exhaustive list of widespread categories of irrational choice making. It does include many of the worst of them as separate topics:

Wiki choice-making websites

• Decision-making
• Rational choice theory
• Decision fatigue
• Decision theory
• Predictably irrational
• Irrationality
• Escalation of commitment
• Choice architecture
• Bounded rationality
• Emotions in decision-making

Setting the stage

“In dealing with money, our blind spot for exponential growth makes us save too little for retirement and borrow too much with our credit cards. Our failure to discount post hoc sharpshooting, and our misplaced trust in experts over actuarial formulas, lead us to invest in expensively managed funds which underperform simple indexes. Our difficulty with expected utility tempts us with insurance and gambles that leave us worse off in the long run. In dealing with our health, our difficulty with Bayesian thinking can terrify us into overinterpreting a positive test for an uncommon disease. We can be persuaded or dissuaded from surgery depending on the choice of words in which the risks are framed rather than the balance of risks and benefits. Our intuitions about essences lead us to reject lifesaving vaccines and embrace dangerous quackery. Illusory correlations, and a confusion of correlation with causation, lead us to accept worthless diagnoses and treatments from physicians and psychotherapists. A failure to weigh risks and rewards lulls us into taking foolish risks with our safety and happiness. In the legal arena, probability blindness can lure judges and juries into miscarriages of justice by vivid conjectures and post hoc probabilities. A failure to appreciate the tradeoff between hits and false alarms leads them to punish many innocents in order to convict a few more of the guilty. In many of these cases the professionals are as vulnerable to folly as their patients and clients, showing that intelligence and expertise provide no immunity to cognitive infections. The classic illusions have been shown in medical personnel, lawyers, investors, brokers, sportswriters, economists, and meteorologists, all dealing with figures in their own specialties.

How can we make sense of making sense—and its opposite? The question is urgent. In the third decade of the third millennium, we face deadly threats to our health, our democracy, and the livability of our planet. Though the problems are daunting, solutions exist, and our species has the intellectual wherewithal to find them. Yet among our fiercest problems today is convincing people to accept the solutions when we do find them.” Steven Pinker 2019

You must learn something else first

Solving Cat 3 problems is a venture into how Homo makes choices. That’s where it all starts. Brace yourself. It’s going to be a rough ride.

Making choices

The apex keystone core functionality of species Homo is its processes of choice-making. The number of choices being made within your envelope every day are in the high trillions. You have a trillion living entities on and in your body and each has to make choices to preserve and propagate itself while performing its function. Apparently nature decided you could not survive the Stone Age without them.

While you sleep, some executive control system is making and executing choices that reconfigure your entangled choice-making systems. How that control system came to be is anyone’s guess. How it works is and will remain unknowable.

In life, appropriate choice-making is everything and the whole multi-ringed circus is psychological.

1. Choice making is the essence of intelligence, as in Homo sapiens. Ross Ashby’s definition of intelligence as “appropriate selection” is incontrovertible. Simple. You can’t call someone who consistently makes bad choices intelligent. You can’t call someone who consistently makes on-target choices unintelligent. Intelligence is performance based, not opinions like wisdom, and it takes time.
2. Choice-making is the essence of prudency. The unchallenged mother of all human virtues insists you must make choices that turn out to be appropriate. When you consistently make choices that fail, you are being imprudent. Choice making is the central control room of life. It’s how you shape your trajectory into the future.
3. Choice making is the essence of control. See the action, choose your reaction.
4. Choice-making is the essence of control. The only resource you can control is your efforts. You choose your path and once on it you have choices about continuation or not. No choice is one and done.
5. Choice-making is the essence of problem solving.

It is easy to show that choice-making is another example of subject matter routinely discussed that has been intentionally left undefined and unresearched by the Establishment. It is not claimed by any discipline or a funded scientific study. A parallel is Stanley Milgram’s ground-breaking work on obedience to authority. Once we discovered that choice-making knowledge was deliberately forbidden by the Establishment, it became imperative to take it on as a Cat 3 problem. It had to be a gold mine and it was. In case you have doubts about the neglect, Google “choice making” and see for yourself.  Problem solving 1B hits, choice making 2.7B hits and decision making 4B hits. That’s over seven billion resources that miss the mark. Coincidence?

The paucity of useful information on intelligently allocating your efforts is inversely proportional to significance the choice is to your well being. Until you act on the choice you have made in your head, the choice is in limbo.

When you realize the crucial role choice-making is to your life trajectory and then consider the themes of your socialization, it’s a Ho Lee Schmidt moment! You were socialized to not make choices for yourself, but instead to execute those choices made for you by others who you don’t know and certainly don’t know you. Notice that the adages of socialization are telling you what not to do and describing the punishment coming your way if you disobey.

The activity of making choices has it all – in the extreme.

• Big history
• Huge significance to our species
• Fractal root system
• Consequences cascading to several infinities
• Extreme sensitivity to the law of optimality
• Undiscussable
• No one has working knowledge. Without intelligent choice making, things can only get worse. Surely you’ve noticed.
• Unfathomable complexity, entanglements and multiplicity. Structuring this conglomeration is a work in process.
• All psychological, no inertia
• A literature more diversionary and counterproductive than helpful. The field is swarming in charlatans.
• Everything about choice-making changes while you are engaging the process.
• There is no standard of care, no business as usual, nothing successful to emulate
• There are no mentors, schools, or veterans to interview
• Engaging this field has high-voltage impact on social status

There are big questions to answer

• Why was this knowledge and skill not part of socialization?
• Where is it safe to start?
• How are you informed as to what choices have to be made?
• How do you determine what the particular choices are?
• How do you know when you have enough actionable quality information (AQI) to make choices that deliver?
• Are the authorities meddling?

Some lessons-learned from our ongoing expedition into the world of choice-making

• In this department of your life, your intuition is poison to success. It does not get better with failure experience.
• There is no way to escape the cognitive demand. It is incessant. After awhile it doesn’t hurt quite as bad and it does wonders for your dignity.
• Avoid any and all attempts to simplify causation or consequences. Those attempts are being made by your intuition. Only the unvarnished truth works
• Any unsolicited advice you get from others is sabotage
• Due diligence on making intelligent choices pays off for you personally in several ways. It’s how you bump your trajectory towards prosperity and happiness
• The loss of your social status for the audacity to engage choice-making complexity is short-lived. When your choices turn out to be on target, you will rocket past your previous prestige high. The better you get at prudent choice making, the better you get at choice-making. You will become the “go-to” man. Your management will stop telling you what to do.
• Doing it right is far better than doing it wrong and firefighting the consequences.
• Every advance in choice-making feeds directly into Cat 3 problem solving, which is based on the process of elimination (POE)

Core concepts of rational, prudent choice-making

The reasoning toolbox for choice-making includes the laws of Nature, especially the 2^nd Law, logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the safe ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence, and the standards for making rational choices alone and with others that are transparent.

Rationality requires distinguishing what is true from what people want to be true. The temptations of wishful and magical thinking are always with us because our fortunes hinge on the state of a world that can never be known with certainty. It doesn’t help that we are biased to see what we want to see and disregard the rest, including the 2^nd Law.

Rationality is indifferent. It is the same for everyone everywhere, with a direction and momentum of its own. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill that must be infused and cultivated.

Man is a rational animal. So at least we have been told. Throughout a long life I have searched diligently for evidence in favor of this statement. So far, I have not had the good fortune to come across it. Bertrand Russell 1931

Regression to the mean

Regression to the mean controls choice whenever two variables are imperfectly correlated. Most people are oblivious to the statistical phenomenon and fall down its bunny hole. They come up with fallacious causal explanations for what is a statistical inevitability.

Management schools teach the illusion that criticism works better than praise, and punishment better than reward. So you drive subordinates when they perform below expectations. But since whatever bad luck cursed that low performance is unlikely to be repeated in the next cycle of work, they’re bound to improve and you validate to yourself that criticism works.

So you praise subordinates when they do well. When their next performance cycle is reduced, you erroneously  conclude that rewarding success is counterproductive.

When you note this tragic irrationality taking place all about you and the dire consequences, stop and think about causation. Who or what is the beneficiary? It neither helps the target person nor the society. Since it stems from social conditioning, not invariant human nature, it must be a condition the Establishment wants. Dominance at any cost? All we know is when this irrationality is eliminated, things social immediately get better. Easy to demonstrate.

Formal logic

When logic is called “formal,” it concerns itself, not with the contents of statements, but with their forms—the way they are assembled out of subjects, predicates, and logical words like and, or, not, all, some, if-then. Formal logic is concerned about the symbols and their arrangement as they are laid out to evaluate. It is blind to the content of the proposition—what those symbols mean, and the context and background knowledge that might be mixed into the deliberation.

Mistaking a nonrandom pattern for a nonrandom process is human folly at its zenith, and knowing the difference between them is one of the greatest gifts of rationality that learning can confer. While disbelieving in something before you look at the evidence is patently irrational, it’s also what we hold dear as prejudice, bias, dogma, orthodoxy, and preconceived notions.

The axioms of rationality treat the decider as a black box and consider only patterns of picking one thing over another. The utility scale that pops out of the theory is a hypothetical entity that is reconstructed from the pattern of preferences and a way to keep those preferences consistent.

Universal Catbert lament: ‘Our new employees had just completed a lengthy program of rigorous course work, often with distinction, but they seem unable to solve the real-world problems they encounter.’

Statistical decision theory

Statistical decision theory delivers actionable decisions. In coming down on one side or the other, you are committing to an action in expectation of its likely costs and benefits. This cognitive tool teaches you the distinction between what is true and what to do. It acknowledges that different states of the world can call for different choices in uncertainty, but you don’t have to fool yourself about reality to play the odds. By sharply distinguishing our assessment of the state of the world from what you decide to do about it, you can rationally act as if something is true without necessarily believing that it is true.

Human reasoning has its fallacies, biases, and alien interventions. Our powers of reason are guided by our motives and limited by our biased points of view. Prudent reasoning is impartial, reconciling our own interests with that of others. Impartiality is at the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our biased and incomplete notions into an understanding of reality that transcends us. Rationality, companion to prudence, is a moral virtue.

Authentic reason can always step back, look at how it is being applied or misapplied, and reason about the impacts in the design-basis events. The power of reason can reason about itself.

Your brain contains a logical symbol manipulator that can assemble concepts into propositions and draw out their implications. It can do recursion and rule-based reasoning. Formal logic is a tool that can purify and extend this mode of thinking. James Fisher 2022

Causality

Every event has more than one cause, all of them statistical. The statement seems obvious, but it’s regularly ignored. Treating every outcome as having a single, unfailing cause, leads to logical cul de sacs. If you hold that A causes B, it proves that C cannot be a cause. The single-cause approach is counterproductive.

You can make sense of the paradoxes of causation by recognizing that no event has a single cause. Events are embedded in a network of causes that trigger, enable, inhibit, prevent, and supercharge one another in linked and branching pathways. Correlation is not causation.

Even more elusive is the idea of interacting causes: the possibility that the effect of one cause may depend on another. We have no vocabulary for discussing and thinking about multiple causes in a network. This is an area in which a few simple concepts from statistics can help.

The world is a maze of forking paths, with every decision leading to a situation in which new decisions have to be made, exploding into an endless profusion of possibilities. Added-in is that the consequences of a selected task cascade in all directions. Reductionism is the enemy of a Cat 3 project.

Probability

The meaning of probability that matters in making decisions in uncertainty, is the strength of one’s belief in their mental models of reality. Probabilities are not about the world; they’re about our ignorance of the world.

In reasoning about probability, a discipline by itself, it’s easy to fall off the sled. Understanding probability is learning how to calculate the probabilities of a conjunction, a disjunction, a complement, and a conditional. They are the probabilistic equivalents of and, or, not, and if-then.

If rationality is not implemented in the mind as a list of propositions and a chain of logical rules, how is it implemented? Your environment is regulated by the consequences of irrational choice-making. Just look.

The general state of affairs

Even today, when data on just about everything is a few clicks away, not many people avail themselves of the internet to learn. We instinctively draw on our impressions and intuitions, which distort our understanding whenever the strengths of those impressions don’t mirror frequencies in the world. That happens when our experiences are a biased sample of those events, or when the impressions are promoted or demoted in our mental search results by psychological amplifiers such as recency, vividness, or emotional poignancy. The effects on human affairs are staggering.

The popular errors in reasoning have been called “cognitive illusions,” and the parallels with the visual illusions familiar to all run deeper than the obvious fact that our eyes and minds can trick us. They explain how our species can be so smart and yet so easily deluded.

Many of our conventions and standards are solutions to coordination games, with nothing to recommend them other than that everyone has settled on the same ones. There may be higher payoffs with other equilibria, but we remain locked into the ones we have because the Nash Equilibrium forbids it. Unless everyone agrees to switch at once, Plan B, the penalties for discoordination are too high.

On rational choice-making

In migrating Plan A to Plan B, the bugaboo that trips up most attempts is the law of optimality. The law’s penalty for a wrong start is failing the Cat 3 project. The worst part about Cat 3 failures is that you can’t recognize the inevitable demise until after the consequence cascade has occurred and the money spent is sunk cost. The second worst part is that project failure teaches you nothing about the required platform of effective work.

There are no examples of the winning Plan B platform in the record of Cat 3 problem projects that were solved when the project was wrongly initialized, good intentions don’t count When we validated the path to Plan B in 2013, we had the frame of reference for understanding the array of wrong paths taken by us and others and why their projects failed. In fact, most of the Cat 3 problems encountered have plagued humanity for millennia. Included are continuation of the species, war, and class distinctions. That no vaccine for OD was ever found before us testifies to the power of the optimality law in Cat 3 problem solving.

When the Cat 3 problem/riddle of organizational dysfunction (OD) was conquered in 2013, we had the opportunity to reverse engineer the process and by cranking the process of elimination (POE), arrive at the first package of work. It was building the knowledge platform necessary to support all the task actions that follow in the process of transposing the languishing Plan A organization, as-is, into a flourishing Plan B collective – a Cat 3 problem if there ever was one.

The starting task of every Cat 3 project is, exactly, what John Frank Stevens did in 1905 to complete the Panama Canal. Namely, stop the project and don’t proceed until you defeat the deadly plague that is assuring defeat. We call this ensemble of tasks The Front End (TFE).

The platform of effective goal-seeking is constructed from reality and rationality. You must obtain ground truth of system status and handle the information and knowledge of reality with prudency and rationality. Inconsistency is fatal to reasoning because a set of beliefs that includes a contradiction can be used to deduce anything and is perfectly useless.

Preventing the poison of GIGO from entering the project as actionable information is essential. The Plan B platform shows how you keep GIGO out by Grokked choices.

The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1710

The barriers to effective Cat 3 P/S that are addressed by the platform is bias in perception and irrationality in making task-action choices. The impact of biases is the distortion of reality truth into fiction. The impact of irrationality is making choices in Cat 3 projects that lead to calamity. Between the bad data and the wrong processing of knowledge for choosing task action, the chances of solving a Cat 3 problem plummet to zero. In that regard the record is comprehensive and without contrary examples.

The world of irrationality in making choices is just as widespread, various, and deep as bias. The consequences from chronic and irrational selection of actionable strategy can be far more significant than biases in judgment. Science has validated a branching collection of irrational self-defeating mechanisms of making choices encoded in our genome that serve no detectable positive purpose in the present or the past.

When you put biases and irrationality together in a Cat 3 P/S project that depends upon solidarity in cooperation and collaboration, the only rational conclusion is that solving a Cat 3 problem, by definition, is wholly impractical, a pursuit of the impossible When you realize that each person is unique in bias particulars, the notion that a group can make intelligent, prudent choices is ludicrous. Everyone has been on a committee.

So when the Cat 3 problem to be solved is significant and brutish, how can you expect a motley cabal of uniquely-biased irrational individuals to solve a problem that requires sustained collaborative effort?

The Cat 3 P/S platform must include fixes for bias and irrationality for the duration. The fact that Plan B exists, means effective solutions for bias and irrationality have been devised, developed, and deployed.

When we realized that system OD could never be fixed by reductionism, i.e., “fixing” its components, the Cat 3 approach went full rudder over to system think. As OD is a system problem, its solution must be a system fix as well. For Cat 3 that means the process of elimination (POE) using candidate, bold system fixes. Each candidate is a shot in the dark and must include a scheme for neutralizing the biases and irrationalities in one stroke. The system fix takes a thousand times more cognitive effort than a component fix that is soon erased by the Nash Equilibrium.

Our extensive hands-on experience in building and operating high performance teams provided a clue for getting to Plan B. We noticed that a team of very different individuals fixated on attaining the same goal, never had a problem working side by side with each other, never sending progress off track.

Team members recognized the biases when they emerged and made good-humored fun with them tit for tat. There was an unspoken, tacit agreement that goal-seeking progress was far more important than scrapping over cultural biases – at least until the project was successful and released. The odds are good that you witnessed this beautiful social behavior in your past and that it was fleeting.

Choice-making mathematics

Problem solving in any category is making progressive, goal-attaining choices – appropriate selection – intelligence defined. Understanding your mental machinery for making choices is necessary in order to have conscious control over your choices of task action that you put into service. There is correspondence between how your unknowable mind makes choices and how a knowable computer makes choices.

Both computers use Boolean algebra and process off/on bits. A variable in Boolean algebra can have only two values – Binary 1 for HIGH and Binary 0 for LOW. The desktop can process great quantities of these tiny-scope choices and can accommodate all the Boolean operators. Your mind has limits both in the quantity of bits and the Boolean operators it can run. Both your mind and your computer are running programs coded at the level of binary truth tables. Your mind full of neurons and axions makes choices by Boolean algebra.

As software must be fed information at the binary level a computer can recognize and act on, the mind, in order to solve Cat 3 problems, must be fed information at the discrete level a mind can recognize and act on. As your data processors are limited to binary forms of inputs, any other form of data you provide to your computers will just sit there, an inert lump.

The catch in these requirements is that in order to be able to feed the requisite form of micro information for the computers to work their micro steps, the algorithms must be based upon a reverse-engineered successful macro process. That means you have to have the fix in hand in order to prescribe the fix in the terms your computer and your mind can recognize and process.

Yes, your cloud-connected desktop can handle the gargantuan quantities of Boolean algebra operations it takes to get a Cat 3 problem-solving project over the goal line. But you must have a successful generic fix for Plan A  that you can reverse engineer to discern the pathway from start to finish. The Law of Optimality requires that you commence in the right place to start and all the subsequent incremental choices that eventually lead to goal attainment have to be correct. This is a task for your conscious mind, not your intuition.

Plan B is the generic fix for Cat 3 problems. The template that worked for the first success by the POE in 2013 has been used to solve other Cat 3 problems from front to back. It’s still a lot of work but it’s in a direct line and it cannot fail.

When we were faced with a Cat 3 problem, OD, that had no success examples, we were abandoned to the process of elimination (POE). It took four decades of our lives improving the productivity of the POE to give birth to Plan B in 2013. We were lucky that it came, but there was no luck in being prepared to recognize it when it did.

It took two years to reverse engineer the first Plan B in South Texas. That’s when we learned by before and after comparisons that we did not know the full causation field or the scope and cascade of OD consequences, or the substantial benefits beyond fixing OD that materialized with Plan B.

Having generic Plan B makes solving a Cat 3 problem a matter of following the script in sequence. It takes a lot of cognitive exertion, to be sure, but the trail is blazed all the way to the goal line and the path is lined with Plan B veterans to help you over rough spots.

Boolean algebra is the category of algebra in which the variable’s values are the truth values, true and false,  denoted 1 and 0 respectively. The basic operations of Boolean algebra:

• Conjunction or AND operation
• Disjunction or OR operation
• Negation or Not operation

A logical statement that results in a Boolean value, either be True or False, is a Boolean expression. A variable used in Boolean algebra can have only two values. Binary 1 and Binary 0.

There are six types of Boolean algebra laws. They are:

• Commutative law
• Associative law
• Distributive law
• AND law
• OR law
• Inversion law

Commutative law states that changing the sequence of the variables does not have any effect on the output of a logic circuit.

• A. B = B. A
• A + B = B + A

Associative Law  states that the order in which the logic operations are performed is irrelevant as their effect is the same.

• ( A. B ). C = A . ( B . C )
• ( A + B ) + C = A + ( B + C)

Distributive law states the following conditions:

• A. ( B + C) = (A. B) + (A. C)
• A + (B. C) = (A + B) . ( A + C)

The AND laws A . 1 = A

• A. A = A
• A.A¯=0

The OR operation.

• A  + 0 = A

• A + 1 = 1
• A + A = A
• A+A¯=1

In Boolean algebra, the inversion law states that double inversion of a variable results in the original variable itself.

• A¯¯=A

You will find no reference about this train of thought in the literature, but it is at the heart of Cat 3 problem solving. It is far above the mentor line.

More lessons learned

Invariant human nature is the actor while the environment sets the stage for the action directed by the laws of the universe. Natural law is the law of social experience. Human nature and natural law are the constants while the context of the play action is a significant variable.

All Cat 3 problems are system problems and most of their solutions reside well above the mentor line. For system problems, simple-cause responses are certain to be failures. You have to have the Cat 3 problem fix in service to discover the full set of causes and measure the full extent of the consequences cascade by comparison testing. Moreover, it’s the only way to certify which are the significant variables. Errors in knowing what’s important and what isn’t are commonplace. All this work is well above the mentor line.

That’s right, in Cat 3 world you have to have the fix and go back to front, in order to thereafter engineer the fix, front to back. What’s more, fixing the Cat 5 problem brings substantial system benefits beyond those associated with preventing the wreckage.

Causes, consequences, significant factors, and unpredictable system benefits: all the causes and fixes are psychological, knowable in part by black box testing but otherwise unknowable.

Wrap up

Leave the biases and barnyard cacophony of irrational choice-making be. Remind yourself that participation is the ultimate proof of concept. Voluntary coordination is impervious to irrationality and bias. Those afflicted with the imposter syndrome will validate Plan B veracity by running for their lives while you watch.

The field of bias and irrational choice-making is so widespread and deep it is obvious that piecemeal fixes are the pursuit of the impossible. When you witness a Plan B implementation for yourself and see that reality, effectiveness and performance are measurable variables that transcend bias, your evaluation becomes clear.

You will never be asked to enumerate your biases or take exams that expose your irrational reasoning. In Plan B they don’t register as constraints. If you find yourself in a situation where they do matter, you are in a Cat 3 mission-impossible environment.

Another feature of the Plan B platform focus on ground truth and rationality is the open invitation for comment and criticism. When you point out the flaws in the methodology and tactics, they will be fixed on the spot before you leave the room. To Plan B, flaws are just another item on the entropy extraction to-do list. Try doing that with business as usual.

Cat 3 milestone sequence

1. Categorize P/S problems, the problem universe, stated goals, what done looks like
2. Cat 3 Platform, this page
   1. Bias and irrationality
3. Social system, next page
   1. Transposition, syllabus
   2. Turnover to technical
4. Technical system, next page
   1. TFE
   2. Dynamic simulation of DBEs
5. Gargantuan ongoing example (Ukraine) Last page.

Don’t engage the task until preceding  milestones have been met. Skip one and it’s over.

Every day when you wake up, your subconscious mind runs a checklist of factors to be considered before charging off in all directions. The list begins with threats to survival. Your ability to endure the reality of what Nature is throwing at you. While no species can control nature, a species equipped with the necessaries can control itself to prepare for and prevent the calamities heading its way in the inescapable arriving future. The species that uses its intellectual gifts to foresee and prepare for the challenges it must face can beat the odds. The dinosaurs reigned on earth for millions of years before the catastrophe from space with their name on it arrived that took them out. A species that went extinct has no problem solving challenge to worry about.

Breakfast checklist

• Am I alive?
• Do I have food, clothing, and shelter?
• Is there a threat to harm me on the to-do list?
• Runup on the Maslow pyramid
• Is there a Cat 3 problem on the list?
• Can I get by with my biases and choice-making irrationalities on autopilot? Can I just wing it or will I have to think?
• Do I have to gatekeep the task action choices streaming from my subconscious mind? Or can I just implement them as they pop up on my teleprompter?

Can you get to self-actualization with your biases and your proclivities to be irrational intact?

Crusoe landed on his deserted island with all his biases and irrationalities. To survive he immediately became reality-driven, overriding his psychological handicaps so he could stay alive. With no social cooperation to worry about, he was free to chose to be objective with his reality and making choices that were keeping him going in the environment he was in.

If your standard for choosing is not the reality you have in your face, you will progressively degenerate. That’s Nature’s reality for you.

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