How Do You Get People To Explore Their Options? Give 'em Enough Income To Keep Doing So.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Speaking of trust, an erstwhile cartoonist examines the ...

Trans-Pacific Partnership

and, quite accidentally, ends up considering trust in government, and how to get people to explore their options. Could be worse. He muddles some of the issues regarding Free Trade, but at least he's against blind acceptance of the TPP ... for the simple reason that it ASSUMES that we can trust our lobbying process that produces the government we have. Amazing. We need a cartoonist to explain that? Maybe so.



What's also amazing? I keep reading (including in the TPP comic) of people getting Nobel Prizes for rediscovering common sense that peasants carved into stone inscriptions WAY before the Egyptians built the pyramids.

Don't rely on existing assumptions? (Daniel Kahneman) No kidding? That predates humans! Ever see a penguin afraid to go in the water even though it can't see any leopard seal?

Multiple people may both cooperate & compete simultaneously? (John Nash) Wotta concept! :( You mean like symbiosis, autocatalysis, or teamwork?

Weepin' Buddha on a decline! Are these people joking?

I'm sticking to my thesis. ANY aggregate* or network going through a growth spurt HAS to get clumsier (& dumber), before it can regain & extend agility.

Can I get a Nobel Prize for reminding the new, clueless hoards of THAT age-old observation? :( Or does anyone even care about getting Nobel Prizes any more, since our aggregate went through it's latest growth spurt, and triggered another round of deflation in aggregate intelligence?

Why? Good heavens. Do you have to ask? A network dependent upon interconnections & feedback ... that suddenly doubles it's number of nodes without increasing it's feedback interconnects by N! (AND TUNING them all) .... is a clumsy, ignorant network. [N! = N-factorial]

How fast does it take a disorganized, growing network to re-organize on a larger scale?

It takes time.

What's the half-life of feedback-based agility recovery in a network expanding faster than its inter-connects? 

There are endless options, but in our current challenge, we (or another country) will eventually evolve a culture that pushes to re-organize on a bigger scale, faster. Or maybe human nation states will do that through symbiosis - which sounds less statistically likely. Witness the EEU struggles, and the history of "Monetary" unions. How system evolution eventually occurs can't be predicted by prior systems, only discovered by trial and error.

We named our goal as "Adaptive Rate" over 150 years ago, yet we're still spewing students faster than we're reminding them what their core challenge is.

Until then, it seems that our culture won't have hit rock bottom until someone gets a Nobel Prize for rediscovering that 2+2 = 4. Once we stop sinking lower, we can turn the corner & start regaining cultural agility, and AdaptiveRight will reapproach survivable balance with CopyRight. It's a simple balance for any adaptive system: keep components alive a & adequately provisioned ... WHILE growing the system. Components eating their system is dumber than sawing off the limb they sit on.

* (not just adolescents, i.e., an aggregate of cells who go through an aggregate growth spurt, and yes, get clumsier before they can regain agility;  do I have to repeat this 12 times?)