With a bit of clever manipulating, Sally Aston had gotten the others to agree that there would be an administrative structure to oversee both the existing Social Tech High and Connected College. It would also set up and run a new Social Tech School for younger kids, up to grade six. As soon as she had the authority to do so, Sally set about creating it. Well, perhaps a bit before she actually had official authority. There was no holding her back. This would be something new, like no school board in the world, since it be based on the same social technology used in the high school and college.
“It must be connected, completely connected”, she told her husband, Drake Phillips. “I won’t settle for anything less. And I want it organized the way Ken Green runs his business, using decision making trios who are perfectly matched. I need you to find me a trio of faculty members who can represent the college. I won’t expect them to spend much time away from their real jobs, but I want them at least a few days a month.”
Drake was amused. His wife had so adamantly opposed the creation of his college. Now she seemed excited by it. That was good, but would it interfere with his plans to turn it into a university?
Did she even suspect that was his goal? He tried not to bring up the subject, but several times Sally had reiterated her opposition to a Social Tech University.
“Connected College is just fine, Drake. I am quite reconciled to it now. Especially since I will have the upper hand. But don’t you dare dream of a Social Tech University. That can never happen. Our high-school graduates must go on to the best possible universities, not one which happens to be convenient and tempting.”
Drake didn’t argue the point, but spoke about it again to the woman who was sponsoring the project and conspiring with him, Sarah Rivers.
“I can’t get anywhere with Sally, Sarah. I guess I have to do it behind her back.”
“Do you think you can get away with that?”
“Only if I have Ann on my side, and I think I do. Officially she is the president of Tech Fantasies, but in practical terms the three of use are equal. On some issue Sally and I might gang up on Ann and win the day. On this, I think it has to be Ann and I against Sally. Sad to say.”
“So we are not a quorum. Ann should be here.”
“Yes, I know. And one more person at least. I would really like the best student to ever graduate from Social Tech High here with us. She wants the university to exist and would agree to come here if it did. We have a little plan, actually, where we get Alice to study with me for a masters then with your daughter Beth for a doctorate. Beth has agreed to join the faculty, though she can’t do it right away.”
“Yes, she told me. For a conspiracy, a lot of people are in on the secret”, Sarah noted. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to just tell Sally what is going to happen?”
“Ouch. Well, Sarah, she has people on her side, too. When she was the principal of Social Tech High she made a lot of close connections, people who also want their students going to the best possible universities.”
“Well, just make Social Tech University a first-class institution, one of the best.”
“That’s what Kelly said. Our daughter is thirteen and in the high-school now. She’s in on the conspiracy too. Kelly has become quite friendly with Alice Ames, by the way, who is something of a mentor to her. Alice is at MIT, but they communicate by video wall.”
“Well, let’s just bring everyone here, using video as necessary. Beth and Alice are both at MIT and know one another. They get along and could share a video wall.”
Feeling guilty about the deception, Drake set up the meeting. At thirteen, his daughter, Kelly Phillips, was roughly the age Beth had been when Ann, Drake and Sally had met her. A prodigy then, Beth at 24 was now a full professor at MIT. Ann and Drake were 40, and Alice Ames was almost exactly half their age, being 20 and in her junior year at MIT. Alice could have advanced more quickly but had chosen stay with the closely connected group of people she knew from Social Tech High.
Beth’s mother, Sarah Rivers, was the oldest person in the virtual room at 41, and also the person with the most money. Not as rich as Beth’s father, she did have billions and could have chosen to endow the university all by herself. She also knew that she could make money by doing so. Sarah had already purchased a lot of real estate near the proposed site for the university. Those properties which would increase greatly in value once the university became a success. Sarah had no doubt that it would be.
As usual, Beth set the meeting on the right track, this time by pointing out that they still did not have enough people.
“We are compatible with one another, remarkably so, but not enough. To work together we should be linked the way the school and college are internally linked, with extremely close links. That is what Sally Aston is going to do with her school board, isn’t she, Dr. Phillips?”
“Yes. And I see your point. We should add links between us. Damn, that could be a lot of people. There are six of us. If we were lucky enough to find people who could link us together though one extra connection, that could mean 36 of us. If two extra connections, that could mean 72 of us.”
“Yes, Daddy”, Kelly said. “And I think we should use two links whenever we need them, to get really compatible connections. Seventy two people is not too many. You have the whole college to choose from, I am already linked into the college, and I am sure Alice and Dr. Green can find people at MIT to link them.”
“I don’t know, Kelly”, Alice replied. Seventy two people is a lot. It would be impossible to keep it a secret, and would be too hard to manage.Or would it? If we are strongly motivated we could bind them together. Might work. But surely your mother would find out.”
“I am sure she already knows that Daddy is being sneaky, and why. But she probably doesn’t realize how much support he has. She probably doesn’t think he can pull it off. I think Mommy is pretending ignorance so that they will not have to have it out, you know, confront one another. We need to pretend just as hard, pretend we don’t know she knows.”
The others all laughed. They liked Kelly. Everybody liked Kelly. She was so popular that people didn’t always realize she had both brilliance and depth. Kelly probably didn’t hide her abilities on purpose, she just didn’t want others to feel at all inferior to her. She brought out the best in people and made them see how good they could be.
These were also characteristics of Ken Green. Although Ken was neither young, female, pretty nor musical, they had this much in common. They also shared a belief that Ken’s enormous wealth didn’t matter at all, except when he could help others with it.
The others understood Kelly’s account of necessary deceptions which would hardly fool anyone. Given that, the idea of a larger committee made some sense, if they were all tightly linked and dedicated to the goal. The group of people at this meeting were somewhat blinded by their exciting common goal and not inclined to worry about what 72 such people might do. The idea they could be controlled was taken for granted with no debate.
This is an example of how a group of people who are not well-balanced can make the same mistakes. There had been no attempt to minimize their error-covariance. This made them just as bad as any ordinary committee. Sally Aston was being much wiser. Her Social Tech Education organization would be built on teams matched so as to minimize error-covariance. In this she had learned more from Ken Green than his daughter Beth had.
The common mistake that this group of people and the enlarged one created by adding internal links between them was simple: they all wanted a first-class university as soon as possible. To do this they would be willing to weaken somewhat the fundamental principle on which the college was based. Like the high-school, the college was fully connected at Level 5 or above. The university could be less tightly bound together, they thought.
Intending only to put together a group of people to guide the transition to a university, Drake and the others in that meeting had decided to put together a large administration. They should have known it would not quietly dissolve once the university existed. If they continued to use the power they were acquiring, remaining an unbalanced unit with a lot of error-covariance, the university would not run well at all.
Of course Sally Aston knew all this.
“Kelly.”
“Yes, Mommy?”
“What have you and your father been up to? You and your father and Alice?”
“Uh.”
“Don’t for a minute think I don’t know all about it.”
“Oh. Well, let’s put it this way. I never underestimate you.”
“Now I need you to promise me something. You and your father have been keeping something from me. Now you and I are going to keep something from him. You’re caught in the middle, Kelly, and there is no way out.”
“Um. Oh. Well, I guess so. We are going to have a secret of our own?”
“Of course we are. You got yourself into this. Actually your father got you into this, but we are not going to hold that against him. We’re just going to fix it.”
“Fix it how?”
“Well, this nice little structure he has established is not going to work. He’s going to have six dozen people making similar mistakes.”
“Oh, oops. I guess we should have thought of that.”
“Yes you should have. Is it true that you have Ann on board?”
“Yes.”
“Damn. Well, I’m going to talk to her and Alice, but not your father. He has too much invested in this already. I’m going to go on pretending I have no idea what he is up to. It would be better if you don’t say a word about it, too.”
“What do you want to do, Mommy? I thought you didn’t want there to be a university. It sounds like you want to help.”
“Three things. One, it really does have to be a first-class university, better than Columbia. Two, it can’t weaken the compatibility requirement. Three, I want Connected College to continue, as it is, in the same building.”
“Why? I mean, why keep the college? Daddy has been talking about transforming it into the university, replacing it with the university.”
“That’s no good. If the university is really going to be first-class, some of our high-school students won’t make it. We select a lot of them to make the school work, and it works beautifully. But that doesn’t mean they are all of high academic ability. You know how it goes, both are considered, neither compatibility with another student nor academic ability is enough for entrance. The university will have to be the same, but give a higher weight to academic ability if it is going to have high standards. So what happens to the students from our high-school who couldn’t handle the university? They still deserve a post-secondary education. That’s what the college is good at. It produces graduates with a good education, though not the best possible one.”
“Mommy! You’ve got it all figured out! I’m impressed. Why can’t you just explain this to Daddy?”
“Oh, fool man. He is too male to accept such wisdom from a mere woman.”
“Let me explain it to him.”
“Kelly, he has put too much in motion already with that damn big committee of his. The most we can do is erode it away, meanwhile making sure the college has some momentum of its own.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Well, I know how to craft a group of people who will make the right decisions. Sarah taught me. It’s the basis of Ken Green’s fortune. Hers too. I can’t understand why she didn’t think of applying it when falling for this big committee nonsense.”
“Oh. So, uh, how can I help? What do we do first?”
“Well, now that I am going to be in charge of the Social Tech Education organization, I have access to all the records of the school and college. That will let me pick trios of decision makes and pairs of estimators, just like Ken Green has been doing for years. I want to pick some from the high-school for you. Its got to be anonymous. You won’t know who they are, though I will. All you will have to do is answer questions. I’ll collate the answers.”
“I don’t know. I think I’d like to know more about how it works and do some of that collating work myself.”
“Good idea. OK, Kelly, we’ll set up two other groups. You will know all about them. But we’ll have to ask them entirely different questions, so we don’t bias your answers. That should be easy enough to do.”
“I am going to set up other groups, too, probably several. I’ll tell you about one. I like Daria Sensah very much. She has been such a big help to your father. I think I’ll use her in a group. Should be interesting.”
“I suppose you will use me to answer questions about the high-school and use Daria to answer questions about the college.”
“Not necessarily. Mostly, but there will be lots of general questions, too.”
“I wish we had information about the kids that will be in the Social Tech School. Then we could do it for them, too.”
“Maybe when we do entrance exams. It would be tempting to get Kate involved somehow”, Sally said, thinking about her middle daughter, who was now seven.
“Well, I hope you do. It would make happy. I think she has begun to feel a bit left out since the twins were born and I feel so badly for her.”
“That’s why I see you paying so much attention to her and being so nice to her when you do. I love you, Kelly, you’re good kid.”
“If I am so good, why was I conspiring with Daddy against you?”
“Because you love him as much as you love me?”
“Well, that’s one thing I don’t have to pretend.”
Kelly found her new duties quite remarkable. Questions kept arriving for her about decisions to make, along with some in which she was asked to estimate something, such as the eventual size of the university, or the cost of running it.
This had all been set up with little help from her mother. Kelly organized two groups herself. The first was a collection of three people who had shown little error-covariance on school exams. She didn’t actually know who they were, but all the multiple-choice questions and answers were available to her.
This data, which so many schools discard when they just tot up test scores was vital for calculating the probability that two or three students would make similar mistakes.
Using the social tech software on the school’s computer, Kelly received a list of suggested topics, things which might interest her. Looking at the suggestions, she did indeed find them all more or less interesting.
One concerned the future of the Markov music system she had helped to create last year. That would be fascinating, but Kelly had found herself with a wait-and-see attitude towards the subject.
Another concerned classes in the high-school. She wouldn’t have thought of that herself, but on looking at the descriptions of the software-generated choices, this one seemed very interesting. Then with software help, Kelly had selected a team of three individuals who seemed to know a lot about which subjects and classes were taught in the school. They were often right, but when wrong, tended to make entirely different mistakes.
This trio of students did not know one another, but would supply answers to questions when asked. For this they would receive a monetary reward – they were in effect being hired as decision makers, though they would not need to spend much time answering questions.
Each trio selected had agreed to serve as asked. They were only one of several to teams which would be assembled, so it would not be easy to find and collaborate with the others in their team. Perhaps they could have found out, but in the closely connected environment of the school, such an attempt to break the conditions of their contract could hardly be hidden.
Strictly speaking, the contracts did not prohibit conversations or friendships between the people, they just prohibited consulting each other to produce answers. Independent work was desired. Kelly would have to keep an eye on this. If two people who had little error-covariance before seemed to be developing some, that would be evidence of collaboration.
Assuming that the three did give independent answers, then those answers could be considered votes by secret ballot. Because of their low error-covariance, the majority vote was statistically likely to be the right one. If it was a two out of three majority, then the third was probably making a mistake. Of course all three could be wrong, but they were asked questions within their area of expertise would be less likely to be.
As well as this decision-making trio, Kelly also organized an estimating pair. She chose as a subject how many classes should be arranged for each subject. Because of their low error-covariance, when the two people disagreed, then statistically the right answer should be right in the middle, the mean between the two.
As Kelly was setting up and monitoring her little anonymous groups, she started getting questions herself. Some asked her to vote on a yes-no question. Some asked her to guess at some number.
“Mommy, answering questions is easy. But I don’t know what to ask my groups.”
“Did you let the software suggest topics for you?”
“Yes. I didn’t pick the one at the top of the list, but the first few were given almost equal probability, so I felt OK picking number three.”
“I am sure it was a good choice then. It would have been based on all your schoolwork last year, and you did show clear areas of interest.
Just use your imagination. Talk to various people you know. I bet questions will jump into your head. Try it.”
“What do I do with the answers?”
“Well, always use the computer to ask questions and receive the answers. The software will know what to do with them. It will be automatic, invisible to you. But you should also read the answers, to see if they suggest other questions to you. I bet they will.”
Now a student in the college’s graduate institute, Daria Sensah was doing the same thing on a closely related topic. Nobody had to tell her what to do. Daria was not doing this for Drake Phillips or another of his faculty members. She had been contacted directly by Sally. As an aggressive young woman who always knew her own mind and liked to take charge of things, Daria had an endless stream of questions for her anonymous teams to answer.
The only thing Daria did not know was where the questions she was asked came from. In fact she was a member of one of Sally Aston’s own teams, and rather suspected that, but Sally often just passed on to her questions asked by other people. Sometimes Daria was asked to reply to a question which had already gone through the process at a lower level. Since they had selected similar topics, questions proposed by Kelly in the months to come would often end up being reviewed by Daria.
While Sally was organizing her Social Tech Education organization in this way, her husband met with his committee or various parts of it.
Though Sarah Rivers had nominated various buildings for use by the proposed university and some had been selected, Drake wanted to use the current Connected College building too.
“No, Drake”, Ann Kelly told him in one of their meetings. “Sorry. You can’t have it. It belongs to Sally now. Well, it belongs to Tech Fantasies, which in effect means the three of us, but I’ll give her my vote, if it comes to that.”
“I see. Ann, you turncoat! What does she want it for anyway?”
“It is going to be a home for Connected College, of course.”
“Uh. Oh damn. She wants the college to continue as it has, doesn’t she? But who gets our academic accreditation? I was going to persuade them to keep the college accreditation under the new name, while granting accreditation to the graduate institution as well.”
“Well, there is a fine line we can walk. Maybe. Having faculty members with joint appointments to two institutions is common enough. Having your core faculty take such appointments might work. Splitting the undergraduate student body between college and university might help.”
“I suppose. Let’s see what happens when the time comes.”