Thursday, August 22, 2013

Orienting Group Intelligence To Scale-Dependent Inter-Dependencies

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Why does this topic keep coming up? Because it seems to be one of our rate-limiting hurdles to pursuing return on coordination.

As an example, Bill Mitchell writes that "mainstream economics is defunct, and we should decommission teaching programs throughout the world and introduce new progressive approaches."

That's always somewhat true, of all disciplines. The concepts of group adjustment, cultural agility, national evolution and national Adaptive Rate all lead, inevitably, to consideration of the tempo for introducing such changes.

And, a similar concept is being heard from people in many, of not most, disciplines?

The whole world seems to be seeing what Max Planck noted back circa 1905.
[No idea whether he was the 1st to express this.]

Much of the difficulty in reconciling scale-related axioms arises from CONFUSING MICRO-SCALE WITH MACRO-SCALE INTER-RELATIONSHIPS.

Specialists - in all disciplines - keep demonstrating that uniquely different properties are expressed at every scale of every type of organization. Yet the bulk of most electorates don't hear or fully absorb this simple message.

One corollary is that we have zero predictive power. But seemingly unlimited adaptive power!

Perhaps that is a topic we would do well to better DEMONSTRATE to all kids. Say, by age 10, if not before. After all, how are we to accelerate the rate of our own cultural autocatalysis, without recognizing and fully appreciating the impact of scale-dependent inter-dependencies?

Perhaps that simple step would better prepare citizens entering all emerging disciplines, and make them more comfortable facing a lifetime of scaling organizational tasks.

It's one thing to make individuals aware of this obsevation. What group effects might become evident if most or all group members grasped this concept? Could we hope that the average politician wouldn't be so ignorant about emerging group dynamics and our ability to explore emerging group options?

How would YOU demonstrate this concept to 10 year old kids, so that they would own the solution, rather than just accepting it as ideology from adults? How can we teach kids that what they learn to expect in local interactions, does NOT predict what can be expected as larger-scale interactions constantly develop.

ps: If you could get that concept across to a 10-yr old, then maybe there'd be hope for Greenspan, Geithner, Rubin, Orszag and Summers. Maybe even David Walker and Peter Peterson!

8 comments:

googleheim said...

From a mathematical physics reference point, what you are struggling to show people is that phenomena in nature is scale INDEPENDENT.

Not dependent.

The utilization of statistics in Thermodynamics, and quantum use of statistics is inherently flawed.

It is a guestimate and cloud.

Similarly, in relativistic physics the Einstein structure of the universe is considered to be governed and modeled by metrics which are invertible A and A^-1 as if nature is a square matrix or tensor. The metrics form the basis of the mainstream differential geometries of models of the universe.

This means we are teaching kids over and over that we live in a Euclidean world though we do not, and that the square fits the peg's hole. That the math underlying the cosmos's geometrical structure is square and invertible.

Forget Planck, he was calculating utilizing statistics which is inherently fuzzy and cloudy and does not generate a true picture of the universe.... It works for the most part but the next step forward is beyond this sort of math.

Roger Erickson said...

We disagree g'heim.

Degrees of freedom scale with system extent, with diversity of shielding phenomenon alone.

If you want to argue unified theory vs DoF diversity & spawning, then you may as well simplify it to Austrian economics vs currency operations policy.

Matt Franko said...

Interesting goog! rsp,

googleheim said...

Einstein metric = Austrian = "God does not play dice" = not scale invariant

Bohr = Topological Torsion = MMT = "God amuses himself with creation" = scale invariant

Scale invariance is exemplified by hydrodynamic models which describe EM, plasma, gravity waves, etc
from the small to the cosmological.

We create our money, not money creates us.

Roger Erickson said...

ps: to me, arguing unified theory vs DoF diversity & spawning ... is again mixing metaphors

and we've already learned that metaphors don't scale

Without context, data, and paradigms, and whole, presume inter-dependency hiearchies ... are meaningless.

We find the NEXT adaptive outcome, by trial and error, and THEN recursively re-map, re-tune and refine those inter-dependency permutations which secure the new beachheads.

And, some evolutionary beachheads may be occupied for millennia, before their probability of being a dead-end seems irrefutable.

Regardless of HOW you calculate those probabilities, the whole endeavor remains an exploratory, adaptive process.

Until it ends, there's no way to irrefutably "prove" whether the path was predictable or only explorable.

Roger Erickson said...

to be more clear

Without context, we find that data, and paradigms, and whole, presumed inter-dependency hiearchies ... are meaningless.

Tom Hickey said...

Unpredictability
            The chaos theory of unpredictability is an extension of the well-known Heisenburg uncertainty principle which states that:
)Mx )x . h
 
 
where h is Plank's constant. Essentially, this equation implies that either the momentum of a particle, Mx, can be known with certainty, or its position, x, can be known with certainty, but not both together. This uncertainty is inherent in how we measure things, and apparently exists because every observer tends to influence, to some degree, what is being observed. This basic principle of uncertainty at the quantum level has been verified many times in the scientific community. Chaos theory extends this uncertainty principle to the macroscopic level when we consider complex systems which are sensitive to initial conditions. In chaos theory, this principle is called Prigogine's Uncertainty after the 1977 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine's principle says that as systems become more complex, a threshold of complexity will be reached such that the system will begin functioning in unpredictable directions; such a system will lose its initial conditions and these can never be reversed or recovered (Briggs & Peat, 1989; Kondepudi & Prigongine, 1998).
       The future of any complex system is unpredictable. All that we can ever know of the future is in terms of probabilities. The future of any complex system, and this includes the psyche, can only be known totally (i.e., with certainty) by its moment-to-moment expression in the present.
            Jung (1978) writes,  "Between the conscious and the unconscious there is a kind of "uncertainty relationship," because the observer is inseparable from the observed and always disturbs it by the act of observation" (p. 226). Here Jung applies the Heisenburg uncertainty principle to the psyche.


http://www.schuelers.com/ChaosPsyche/part_1_16.htm

Roger Erickson said...

In retrospect, it's simply amazing that Priogene received a Nobel Prize for essentially restating thermodynamics & quantum theory in simple terms.

Plus, what he says is true of EVERY SYSTEM that ever evolved ... right up to the point where some unpredictable adjustment allows the system that luckily "lost it's initial conditions" to be re-invented as a more evolved system.

Priogene was about 3.5 billion years late in his observation? And that's just on planet earth!!!

His statement may have even been expressed prior to some preceding Big Probability Event, not just the last "Big Bang."

Still, all that leaves us with is the responsibility for SELECTING the novel range of social catalysts which will let THIS culture lose just the right proportion of IT'S "Current Conditions" ... so that we can get on with our local task of evolving faster.

i.e., sooner rather than later