Chapter 11

Program evaluation (chapter 10) and neural evaluation (chapter 7) balance the same tensions. Both the micro neural level and macro program-level evaluations balance the global with the local, the long-term with the short-term. The performance manager, whether neural or programmatic, faces the need for constant innovation and adaptability while also trying to evaluate performance. This is a tension between flexibly adapting to short-term challenges and long-term intentions, or local with global needs. We discussed these tensions at great length in the prior chapter and proceeded to discuss how interactive logic modeling can help. We also saw how a basic neural mechanism we all have, when healthy, resolves these local-global tensions. It is tempting look to the temporal interaction evaluation model (TIE, chapter 7) for lessons that might aid the program evaluator and performance manager. One of the most astonishing accomplishments of our TIE neural-computational system is that it automatically coordinates local value with global value, as well as short-term and long-term value, as we discussed in chapter 7. Interestingly, some researchers describe temporal difference type models (similar to TIE) as “online” and even “model-free” to emphasize its remarkable ongoing flexibility in handling the ongoing sudden arising of value opportunities. Yet at the same time, the TIE continuously incorporates some estimate of future value into each immediate action. The neural TIE process has the advantage of constant recursive re-evaluation, similar to the evolutionary, “experimenting society” approach Donald Campbell (1966, 1969, 1973) applied to program evaluation (Campbell and Stanley 1963). When I first studied program evaluation, the standard textbook was Campbell and Stanley’s 1963 class. It was only later that I realized how much more Campbell had published on an evolutionary approach to planning and evaluation. Campbell called himself an “evolutionary epistemologist” (1974), advocating that society-wide program and policy evaluation should follow an evolutionary process of proposing diverse conjectures (“blind variation”) followed by refutation (“selective elimination”) of the experimentally falsified propositions. That is, he advocated selective retention of the variety of intervention innovations we dream up, almost blindly. We throw out the ones we falsify (Campbell 1974, 1975; Campbell and Bickhard 2003). Campbell realized the parallels and conflicts between evolutionary processes at the biological, social and cultural levels (see "On the Conflicts between Biological and Social Evolution and between Psychology and Moral Tradition" 1974). The parallels to Darwinian evolution through natural selection, “the blind watchmaker,” were explicit. One must balance blind variation with selective elimination for many reasons, but both processes are costly in program evaluation and performance management, so more of one may mean less of the other. More fundamentally, the tradeoff is between decentralized innovation and centrally controlled action and logic model-based planning and evaluation of long-term population health. Moving into the realm of global health, planners must additionally balance local and global at a yet larger scale, in turn requiring models of how world health is possible (Keane 1998, Robertson 1991). Across all scales of human health behavior, from individual action through organizational behavior up through societal and global levels, we see fundamental dilemmas of coordinating the local and global. This chapter discusses these sorts of issues and presents an interactive model of how local ethnic markers may evolve in the face of global difference. These local ethnic markers may help individuals choose behaviors that are healthy in the context of their local conditions.