Commentary by Roger Erickson
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket."
Why Do You Suppose That Is?
Is it because our existing group-intelligence methods don't scale as fast as population growth?
We had democratic methods that worked ... until they didn't. The inane details simply don't matter. Now we need new methods, capable of co-harvesting the talents of 315 million people with adequate agility.
How do you simultaneously focus the attention of more people than you could simultaneously organize before?
We need methods that scale beyond our current limits.
Yet we see few or no people focusing on this, the right question. If we don't get people asking the right questions, what difference does it make what answers our electorate produces? Without increasing social agility, where's our cultural Adaptive Rate?
(hat tip Dan Flemming)
4 comments:
Rodger: "We had democratic methods that worked ... until they didn't."
When did they work, and when did they stop working? That comment seems very vague and possibly meaningless.
Everyone's free to read their own version of history. There are many to choose from.
Didn't mean my comment to be rude. Might have came off that way. I am curious when you would consider the time period that democratic methods worked, and then when did they stop working?
In general, democratic methods have evolved with group size.
So, you can pick examples in EVERY decade of history where democratic methods "worked" like never before. The point is that the target moves, with maddening agility.
The history of what's called "small group theory" has produced the various stages of what we call social species, including all forms of human culture: family units, bands, tribal cultures, city-states, etc, etc.
Unfortunately, any set of working methods CREATES, by default, more additional options than current methods are made for or capable of leveraging. No given methods scale forever - or else evolution wouldn't be necessary. Organization spawns additional degrees of freedom.
The product of population_X_options always leads, not follows, any & all democratic methods. And, it's the most unpredictable details of democracy that matter.
Our collective Adaptive Rate defines how far behind our Options-Product we chose to be.
Yet regardless of how fast we adapt, the return on even more coordination always beckons, just out of our current reach.
Potential return on coordination is infinite, as far as we know. Unless you're expecting another Big Probability Event (aka, some inflection point like the imagined Big Bang).
Size of Output Gap is an interesting metric for managing an organizations Options gap or Adaptive Rate gap. We do know that if an Output Gap gets too large, some barbarians at the gate - dumber but less complacent thatn us - will notice it, and come in to DO EVEN MORE with what we've got. It's often complacency that kills organizations and democracies?
If local birth rate doesn't match replacement rate ... we're ceding our country to someone else. Just a matter of how soon. Traditional risk management preferred doing that via selective recombination - i.e., intermarriage & adoption, not just moving out and ceding all options to complete strangers.
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