Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Familiar Death Spiral? Spending More, To NOT Deliver Fewer Things.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Pentagon Choices ‏@PentagonChoices17 Sept
@POGOBlog Meanwhile cost overruns for 98 major weapons systems are running at 31%, over at the Pentagon pic.twitter.com/pJ6gkMZTyj

What military contractors call "Concurrency" is the same as a concept biologists call "maladaptive phenotypic dominance."

That means, excessive expression of some random set of traits, which subsequently turn out to be mistakes. Most people might roughly describe that as random, institutional momentum or habits taking us off course. In short, that happens when a subset of citizens are taking us all in a direction we may soon regret, if we even survive to express any regret.

More on DoD Concurrency.

DoD Concurrency is no different in principle than our many over-investments in cultural oddities like Big Finance, Control Frauds and Pompous Politicians, etc, etc, etc.

It's a state that inattention to group logic delivers any group to.

Why? It's a group-awareness issue. If a growing, changing group doesn't re-sample all it's internal feedback, and assess all it's options at an adequate rate ... it can't know where it's going. The whole point of steering is to react soon enough to avoid crashing into unexpected things that crop up, and instead arriving at a succession of preferred destinations.

If the wrong choice of driver is allowed ... eventually, the passengers only hope is that they'll wake up and realize where they've landed ... before it's too late to recover from their position. Even if they're lucky a few times, there's no long-term future in betting against the house, or playing Russian Roulette - by not paying attention to which chauffeurs we hire.

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