The Long Mistake - and making enough mistakes to correct it

commentary by Roger Erickson

Mistakes are the things we make enough of to outline and define what we call success.  If we make enough mistakes, we fall into the remaining hole called success. You would think that could be easy.  To succeed, just make enough mistakes. Yet, idiots that we are, we invest considerable resources into trying to keep ourselves from actively exploring the very things that define success.

Every scientist learns that asking the right question is more than half way to finding a useful answer. The right question for now is why we keep trying to stop ourselves from making mistakes.  In fact, we set up whole institutions with the express mission of keeping ourselves from doing things that, in past situations, were deemed mistakes.  Where's the logic in that.  Do we really fear that once a person has made a mistake, they'll keep making it, forever?  Has there EVER been any evidence for that, throughout all of evolution, including the last second of it, which we call history?

Is it a mistake to actively demand that we make no mistakes?  The answer seems rather obvious once finally asked - "Yes." Why? Simple statistics. Given zero predictive power, we rely upon massively parallel selective power, aka, rapidly shared feedback about accelerating, distributed trial and error.  In other areas we call it, for example, combinatorial chemistry.  Social species simply practice constantly expanded, highly distributed, group exploration of group options. At present, however, we're actively refusing to explore the rapid trials & errors demanded by every succeeding situation which presents newly unpredictable options? It seems that we've misread our own group logic, and concluded with the oxymoron that assisted group suicide defines progress, while also making it illegal!  Werks fur oos!

How are we supposed to fall into a hole defined as not a mistake, if we systematically refuse to optimize statistical sampling and parsing of "mistake space?" By magic?  In the end, it's our rate of survivable mistakes that auto-defines our Adaptive Rate.

So, if many of our most cherished institutions list the definition of mistakes in one situation, how many things on their lists will usefully project - unchanged - to new and unpredictably altered situations? Specifically when those new situations require unbiased recombination and re-exploration of all options?  What?  Another right question?  The answer is an unequivocal "Exceedingly Few, If Any!"  So, are most of our institutions mistakes?  Yes and no.  They clearly apply to past situations, and must remain as bridges over the situations we've traversed.  Yet we must NOT use them to limit trial and error recombinant re-exploration of new situations.  We haven't carried all this massive skill at physical/chemical/biological recombination, sexual recombination, behavioral recombination, cultural recombination and "options recombination" this far simply to not use it!

In conclusion, our suicidal defense of credentialism is our main weapon for fighting our own evolution.  We use credentialism to secure beachheads to keep but also quickly leave behind in our journey through evolution-space.  In genetics we refer to that accumulation with phrases such as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," or "junk DNA."  In building out virtual cultural variants based on - but projected from - human biology, we may use analogous terms such as "education recapitulates history" and "junk training exercises." The real value in such exercises is not junk, but they're not sufficient, and there is a remaining task.

The real point is tempo.  Our entire evolutionary past is constantly reassembled, in incredibly densely engineered steps, in 9 months of embryonic gestation.

How long does it take to prepare a human fetus and send it out with the skills needed to launch human biology and culture beyond anything it's entire history can predict?  Improving that ontologic/embryonic dance continues, with subtle steps that are incredibly arduous to select.

How long does it take to prepare human student-citizen groups and send THEM out with the skills needed to launch human culture beyond anything our entire cultural history could possibly predict? Are we putting in the arduous work to make, discriminate and select from enough minor mistakes?  Without making enough initial mistakes, and comparing notes widely and quickly enough, how can we "fall" into the next potential cultural success fast enough?

It's not just making permanent aristocracy out of previously temporary "tribal war chiefs" that is an example of a "Long Mistake."  We've also made orthodox economics as a court tool of aristocrats. Further, we've also made institutionalized rather than recombinant religions and other bureaucracies as a residual long-mistake to be manipulated by aristocrats.  And, there are harmonic oscillations of sub_long_mistakes - such as academia - within each of our bureaucracies. How many of our bureaucracies are caught up serving Long Mistakes, instead of serving group Adaptive Rate? Always too many, simply because we delay meaningful assessment and adequately honest group practice.

There are other, uncounted, parallel as well as residual long_mistakes as well, yet they are all example practices that keep us from maintaining the distributed mistake rates required to discriminate stasis from evolution, and accelerate selection of the latter.

Want yet another specific example?  The institutional concept of priests has been "one long mistake" as has, presumably, nearly the entire historical distribution of shamanistic and/or academically tenured mistakes.  They all attempt to help define success by exclusion.  Yet here we are, ritualizing memorization of the mistakes NOT to make, instead of focussing on earliest possible recognition of the successful holes that enough, survivable mistakes always expose.

How, indeed, do we accomplish the difficult task of stopping what we're doing too much of?  Once we've made enough mistakes to fall into success, can we let others get on with making enough NEWLY DISTRIBUTED mistakes,  fast enough, to fall into the new successes we can't possibly imagine?