Monday, September 10, 2012

We Need Better Operations, Not Just Supposedly Better Tactics.

commentary by Roger Erickson

If you don't know tactics from strategy/policy/goal/operations, you're part of the problem. With neither situational awareness nor operational awareness, we're reduced to tactics masquerading as national goals.  Instead of policy staff discussing staging, linking & sequencing of economic maneuvers in our complex economic situations, we see idiots spouting gay marriage and abortion as key national priorities.

In that setting, the  following statement says a lot, but nowhere near enough.

"The eventual outcome would fulfill John Maynard Keynes’ dream of an international currency system in which both creditors and debtors share responsibility for maintaining stability."
The Tragedy of the European Union and How to Resolve It - George Soros

Keynes had a great perspective on economic operations, but he went off the rails at the goal and policy level.  Personally, I must completely disagree with Keynes' vision of an international currency system. That's as maladaptive as envisioning one, inter-physiological blood supply and blood type for all people. To maintain a high adaptive rate in any complex system, we must accelerate concurrent, multi-level selection at all levels of our increasingly distributed decision-making. In overly simplistic terms, we need competitive cooperation everywhere, in order to adapt - and that certainly includes preserving a selection market between sovereign nation models.

The most important thing anyone trained in any sort of systems science can do with the rest of our lives is help all professions share a deeper appreciation for our nation and culture as a system. Human culture simultaneously displays the most complexity and adaptability of any culture in history. Excessive cultural homogeneity hinders adaptive rate, and is suicidal. Even transnational currency homogeneity would be suicidal.  The eurozone's experiment with currency union preceding political union is only one case in point. It is a dead-end, and tempo counts more than they know. They will never recover the lost output from destroying their own creditor regions.

There are many research areas that understand these insights well, from different perspectives and using different jargons. Yet all of these disciplines are becoming progressively more useless to their own culture, through professional isolation. That's how so many, diverse, brilliant researchers end up working for and at the whim of policy knuckle-draggers like Karl Rove. It's a tragedy of epic proportions.

Results in most systemic research areas - from biology to military campaigning - are already stockpiled in excess of public utility. The public utility of these research efforts are actually declining, through isolation, and are largely relegated to endeavors supporting throughput of only trivial amounts of public initiative.

That's a tragedy because we know that initiative, whether individual or public, cannot be saved. It is either used well, or wasted well. Let's not waste it. Members of a social species cannot become so separated from their neighbors as to break social bonds we cannot live without. Loss of our return on coordination - while still scaling up the cost of coordination that comes with any and all forms of growth or development - only cuts off our face to spite our nose. It is mindless folly. If we cannot study and maintain our nation-wide connectivity, we cannot survive - no matter how much individuals know in isolated.   Our constant goal is a more perfect union, able, through accelerating coordination, to compound the value and capabilities of our individual citizens.  OpenSource is just a method that should be a universal, automatic stabilizer.

An evolving culture survives selective pressure through increasingly systemic adaptive response rate. If you work in any system science, please use your head to help your country, not just your transient pocketbook. We can only do that by keeping our colleagues close, and our Luddites even closer. None of us will continue to see further for very long, if we can't keep our Luddites alive long enough to stand on their shoulders.  The best investment is always in faster adaptive rate in our democracy.  Why aren't there investment vehicles expressly for that purpose?  There are, of course, but they simply aren't yet currency accessible.  I would challenge audacious youth nationwide to invent ways for all citizens to invest in more scalable democracy, faster/leaner/better.

Citizens don't let citizens be boiling frogs. We need optimal utilization of all of us.

1 comment:

jeg3 said...

Key point, systems & networks:
"The most important thing anyone trained in any sort of systems science can do with the rest of our lives is help all professions share a deeper appreciation for our nation and culture as a system."

Importance of networks, and why the criminogenic elements of society work to keep people from voting and organizing (unions, etc.):
"Math Tree May Help Root out Fraudsters: Applying Algorithm to Social Networks Can Reveal Hidden Connections Criminals Use to Commit Fraud"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120906092805.htm


Replace biology terms with economic terms.
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/pdf/1745-6150-2-30.pdf
"The new biology: beyond the Modern Synthesis"
"Background: The last third of the 20th Century featured an accumulation of research findings that severely challenged the assumptions of the "Modern Synthesis" which provided the foundations for most biological research during that century. The foundations of that "Modernist" biology had thus
largely crumbled by the start of the 21st Century. This in turn raises the question of foundations for biology in the 21st Century.

Conclusion: Like the physical sciences in the first half of the 20th Century, biology at the start of the 21st Century is achieving a substantive maturity of theory, experimental tools, and fundamental findings thanks to relatively secure foundations in genomics. Genomics has also forced biologists to connect evolutionary and molecular biology, because these formerly Balkanized disciplines have been brought together as actors on the genomic stage. Biologists are now addressing the evolution of genetic systems using more than the concepts of population biology alone, and the problems of cell biology using more than the tools of biochemistry and molecular biology alone. It is becoming increasingly clear that solutions to such basic problems as aging, sex, development, and genome size potentially involve elements of biological science at every level of organization, from molecule to population. The new biology knits together genomics, bioinformatics, evolutionary genetics, and other such general-purpose tools to supply novel explanations for the paradoxes that undermined
Modernist biology."


Explains Sociopathic Economic Beliefs, attenuation of the frontal lobe that leads to an obssession with an economic mirage, the gold standard. Or it's proxy, the European Economic Union which has become an example of disaster economics.
http://roselab.bio.uci.edu/Publications/94%20Rose%20Phelan%202009.pdf
“Gods Inside”
"...We believe that conscience is instilled in us by the successful functioning of our frontal lobes. Sociopaths are godless, in our terms. They exhibit the disturbing behavior of people who lack all contact with their endogenous gods.
Interestingly, an individual who exhibited congenital sociopathy was found to lack fully-developed frontal lobes, presumably also a congenital defect. However, it is not necessary to entirely lose a brain area to lack the function associated with that area. Most sociopaths are not known to lack frontal lobes. They do, however, show lower metabolic activity in their frontal lobes, suggesting some impairment of frontal lobe function..."