Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Medical MMT? Legal in Which States?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Did you know that advertisers are now touting neuro-marketing as a powerful new marketing tool? For what? For selling more of whatever a producer wants to sell - of course.

Let's get straight to the biggest return, and circle back to review other, random uses of neuro-marketing after that.

Biggest Return. When will we apply this to public purpose, by tuning Public Policy to fit social-feedback?

Oh, maybe when we have mandatory, 100% voting, and no voting-process restrictions, at a minimum? Even that hasn't made politics in Australia much saner than ours here in the USA. Something more is needed?

Perhaps when P&G wants a box of MMT on every breakfast table? :(

Is there a better way? How do we skip over all the lame-brain, overly narrow applications of neuro-marketing tools?

Here's one, tongue in cheek, idea. Can someone declare MMT to be a non-toxic, group-brain-expanding, social-hallucinogen, so that we can get Philip Morris AND J&J (and all the F500/Russell3000/AFL/CIO) to promote Medical MMT? :)

Better yet, Social MMT, or simply Cultural Policy Agility.

Oh, Middle Class access to unlimited fiat will have to be "regulated" by "experts," of course. But heck, we're already DOING that, to protect citizens from excess exposure to their own fiat. So why not go cold fiat?
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Now, more about neuro-marketing. So far, it's an example of a new micro-advertising tool run amok. It's use is not yet selectively scaling up to help more than hinder macro-public-policy. The initial applications ignore return-on-coordination, and instead non-selectively promotes blind scaling-up of any & all micro-processes by unregulated merchants wearing blinders. Does the following make sense to you, AFTER you stop and think about it?

If you can sell more of product A by tuning it's sales pitch to brain scans of consumers ... why, then we can ALL sell more of ALL products, by tuning ALL sales pitches to the moment of power in ALL citizen's brain scans! Right?

Sure, in theory. We'd just have to keep ALL of us completely intoxicated - or at least over stimulated - ALL of the time. This, ironically brain-dead initial use of neuro-marketing methods, of course, exhibits the ancient fallacy of scale test just indicated. Tools use of, by and for advertisers ... a dumb society makes.

That's no way to make a streamlined physiology, nor any way to make "a more perfect union" that is selective about how to be more - not just different - than the sum of it's human parts.

For comparison, if each of the 200 or so cell types in the human body acted as merchants, and self-promoted as aggressively as the initial neuro-marketing model suggests - without tolerance limits - then most of us might well end up as all toenails (or other, randomly promoted, sub-types) and no brains! We got past that, of course, over 200K years ago. There is, of course, a good reason why we're all recognizably streamlined human replicas, controlled by a brain, not by self-marketers from all our ~200+ cell types (or our 60+ organs).  When will our Constitution and Nation also progress past it's analogous stage, and get to systemic thinking rather than dissociated, hopelessly Libertarian thinking?
random-component-of-component
The usual difference between theory and practice inevitably crops up. The response of any system to an upward bias in the volume of ALL sensory input is to bias inherent filters so as to selectively damp the input bandwidth, and very selectively damp out irrelevant inputs. It's part of the general phenomenon - and endless list - of "recruitment" processes that drives Adaptive Rate. Human markets and human cultures have adaptive rates too, just as their smaller, sub-components (humans) do.

This particular description of neuro-marketing, of course, exhibits the fallacy of scale test indicated above. Once we have a collection of people, not just a collection of cells ... then the process of selection becomes dominated by social signals accumulating as feedback between people, not just the local feedback between neurons WITHIN individual brains.

Compared to the human body (30+Trillion cells, 200+ cell types, 60+ organs) what do we have in the aggregate we call the USA? Something a bit more fluid, that's what. Momentarily, we have ~320 million people, thousands of distinct professions (changing yearly), and also tens of thousands of distinct units (families, private aggregates, public aggregates - also changing daily-to-yearly).

So, can we skip all the random, and just promote Medical MMT as a dynamic solution to dynamic tasks requiring infinitely agile fiat? :)

That would only require using aggregate-option-marketing (aka, cultural recruitment), instead of just random-component-of-component (i.e., neuro) marketing.

If you can grasp the distinction, then you can also appreciate the distinction between pharmacology and medicine, and the distinction between individual-health-repair and public-health-maintenance. So why not skip all the way to our greatest looming challenge? General welfare and net capabilities of the people, not just of that subset - the uber-merchants - who by habit drift into thinking that they are more equal than the rest of us?


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