CIA Dr Richards J. Heuer — “Information Collection vs Analytical Methods”

Information overload.

Intel Today
CIA Dr Richards J. Heuer: “Information Collection vs Analytical Methods”

VOX.eu — Secular rise in economically valuable personality traits

There is strong empirical evidence of a secular rise in intelligence, but a lack of consistently measured data has hampered the identification of a similar increase in non-cognitive skills. Based on an analysis of half a million Finnish males, this column presents evidence that a long-term increase in scores for traits such as self-confidence, sociability, and leadership motivation has taken place. Just as with cognitive abilities, higher test scores for personality traits predict higher earnings.

Modernity is not all that bad.

VOX — CEPR's Policy Portal
Secular rise in economically valuable personality traits

Markus Jokela, Tuomas Pekkarinen, Matti Sarvimäki, Marko Terviö, Roope Uusitalo

Ryan Gallagher — The Little-Known Company That Enables Worldwide Mass Surveillance

Big Brother watch. Going way beyond George Orwell's 1984 by transforming the Internet into a panopticon. 

The Intercept
The Little-Known Company That Enables Worldwide Mass Surveillance
Ryan Gallagher

Glenn Greenwald — US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

This is not the first time the U.S. has purportedly threatened an allied government to withhold evidence of possible terror plots as punishment. In 2009, a British national, Binyam Mohamed, sued the U.K. government for complicity in his torture at Bagram and Guantánamo. The High Court ordered the U.K. government to provide Mohamed’s lawyers with notes and other documents reflecting what the CIA told British intelligence agents about Mohamed’s abuse.

In response, the U.K. government insisted that the High Court must reverse that ruling because the safety of British subjects would be endangered if the ruling stood. Their reasoning: the U.S. government had threatened the British that they would stop sharing intelligence, including evidence of terror plots, if they disclosed what the Americans had told them in confidence about Mohamed’s treatment — even if the disclosure were ordered by the High Court as part of a lawsuit brought by a torture victim. British government lawyers even produced a letter from an unnamed Obama official laying out that threat.

The Intercept
US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

Glenn Greenwald   

The Retirement DEMAND LEAKAGES Will Continue To Grow, Until Aggregate Demand Picks Up

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

These people are all missing the point?

Hence,

The retirement Demand Leakages will continue to grow, until Aggregate Demand picks up. ... Doh!

THE problem? (There's only one?)

THE solution? (Really, Tina? There is no alternative?)

Or, is "retirement" a trick question?

Haven't these people ever heard that no plan survives contact with reality, and that the best way to proceed is to Never Tell People HOW to do things? There is never just one way, and the eventual, most adaptive route is always a total surprise.

Otherwise evolution wouldn't have taken this long to occur.

Even chemists eventually learn that it takes oxy + morons to create Luddites capable of really gumming up the works. Natural selection means that at least a few of even highly social rats will eventually abandon a sinking ship, instead of going down en masse.

And here I thought that the successive, asynchronous generations in our social species WERE both a way to optimize our aggregate demand AND save it for prior generations too! Such an ingenious solution available from the start, but maybe we're not smart enough to grasp that yet? We're certainly not scaling up the same principle, from families to our citizenry.

So what, exactly, IS the definition of intelligence, and why isn't it increasing with increasing population size? What good is a growing network if TINA can't connect the newly emerging dots?

The Saker — The Maidan - one year later

Today is the first anniversary of the deal made between Yanukovich and the "opposition" and guaranteed by foreign ministers Radosław Sikorski of Poland, Laurent Fabius of France and Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany. As we all know, the deal resulted in a withdrawal of the security forces from the Kiev city center immediately followed by an armed insurrection which overthrew the government. Predictably, Poland, France and Germany did not object. I won't recount all of the events which happened since this infamous day, but I think that it is important to look at what has changed in a year. I think that it also makes sense to compare what I had predicted might happen with what actually happened simply to see if a person if a person with no access to any classified data and who is using only "open sources" for his analysis could have predicted what happened or if this was all a huge and totally unpredictable surprise...

The Saker is a pretty good indie analyst, as his diary shows.

The Vineyard of the Saker

The Maidan - one year later
The Saker

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) Warning To Merkel on Russian ‘Invasion’ Intel

Alarmed at the anti-Russian hysteria sweeping Official Washington – and the specter of a new Cold War – U.S. intelligence veterans took the unusual step of sending this Aug. 30 memo to German Chancellor Merkel challenging the reliability of Ukrainian and U.S. media claims about a Russian “invasion.”

Take Away: "You need to know, for example, that accusations of a major Russian “invasion” of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the “intelligence” seems to be of the same dubious, politically “fixed” kind used 12 years ago to “justify” the U.S.-led attack on Iraq."

Signed by

William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.) 

David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.) 

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.) 

Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.) 

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.) 

Coleen Rowley, Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.) 

Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)

Consortium News
Warning Merkel on Russian ‘Invasion’ Intel

Washington's Blog — Forget “Peak Oil” and “Peak Credit” … Are We On the Downslope of “Peak Intelligence”?

Does this explain the rise in moronism?

Washington's Blog
Forget “Peak Oil” and “Peak Credit” … Are We On the Downslope of “Peak Intelligence”?
George Washington

"You f***ing Americans! Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we're not [allowed to use as much of your currency as we want, whenever we want to]?" :)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson*)

Coming from a British banker, that is drop-dead hilarious. Maybe he was fondly recalling the East India Company scrip? Or some of the UK-imposed Ghana colonial currencies. Or the infamous Hut Tax? At least one country has come a long way since then.





Yes, intelligent policy works, if simply used with agility. Meanwhile, however, elsewhere around the world:

"... leaders of the BRICS - China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa - will launch a development bank to be a symbol of their ambitions for global influence. The currency in which they have chosen to denominate its share capital is a familiar one, however - the U.S. dollar."

Ok then! Conclusion? Who says the finance industry is more trouble than it's worth? Without 'em, what would cynics & comedians (and counter-revolutionary counter-revolutionaries) use as fodder? :)

Wasn't it supposed to be our currency, and THEIR problem?

* This post is dedicated to Ramanan, who steadfastly believes that his home country can't control it's own policy until the USA reforms $US currency & fiscal policy. Whatever!

Talk About An Output Gap! It'll Persist Until We Lower The Barrier To Activating Group Intelligence

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

@#$%^&!!   Humans are capable of so much more than this!

The Ebook "Taken," documents horrors of child sex slaves

Why, in the 21st century, even as a 4th nation launches missions to Mars, is such a waste of human talent still so persistent and widespread?

The bigger story here is that dumb or neglected policy mistakes cause 10x more harm than all the damage which material aid mitigates, worldwide. That is exactly HOW and WHY "need" always rises to exceed humanitarian donations, year after year.

If we don't FIRST export examples, training and practice of improved policy making before blindly throwing material aid at tasks .... we ALWAYS encourage more looting than adapting, as the dominant, systemic local adjustment?

There is not a single situation on Earth that can be easily improved without paying attention to systemic, context-dependent inter-dependencies FIRST!

Tune the damn system! NOT just some of the components!

How? By helping people carfully tune their own contexts, before letting outsiders disruptively tinker with components in contexts that outsiders CANNOT be adequately familiar with!

Otherwise, it's usually as bad as pouring more gas into a leaking gas tank, in a rusting car with dangling parts still spewing sparks. Really? We can send a rocket ship to Mars, but we can't solve simple process problems in our own neighborhoods? Seriously?

If Data is Meaningless without Context .... then - frankly - the long term outcomes of random aid are meaningless too, unless interventions are carefully tuned to context, instead of just tinkering with random components.

Two partners need to practice together, if new dance steps are the desired outcome.

People trapped in a given context are - by definition - digging themselves into a hole, and need greater perspective more than anything else. If you as an outsider offer to help, they'll invariably ask that you jump in and help them dig.

Outside contributors have an equal but different dilemma. They have additional perspective, but inadequate "domain expertise." They cannot possibly fully know the context of those who need help, or they'd BE one of them.

Adaptive solutions, as countless examples document, come from building joint experience through interactions, so that affinity and motivation follow. Then, and only then, can participants EXTEND their vision of desired outcomes (goals higher than simply digging the hole deeper). Only then can the people originally stuck in the hole decide how best to alter their tactics, and find a better way!

By the time that process is done, they'll invariably ask for something OTHER than more shovels - which is what is usually easiest to "justify." And, as Gen. Patton observed, the solutions they come up with will be unpredictable, and NOT worth impeding. Plus, they'll amaze you (and themselves) with their ingenuity.

Put it this way. For God so loved the USA that SHE instructed Patrick Henry, Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson, James Madison, Ben Franklin, John Adams et al ..... to write the US Constitution .... BEFORE trying to hand out free food and clothing.

[i.e., She suggested that they first use their heads, to direct how BEST to use their hearts. Rumor has it that it was their daughters, sisters, fiances, wives & mothers et al, who relayed that sensible message. :) ]

If only we'd develop and use ALL of our available brainpower, instead of following the myth that 50% of them - or less - is adequate.


ps: Why is it so often true that gentle Sacreligion prods the most good out of all people, including bureaucratically organized religions? Is it because all people - even religious ones - will do anything in their power to avoid thinking, until absolutely necessary? And because shared laughter, as a neural catalyst, reduces the risk of staying around and activating those brain circuits - which burn lots of calories in order to execute logical pattern matching?

And, what's our next step, now that there are ~320 million of us in the USA? If shared laughter is so critical for reducing the risk of activating thinking in individuals ... what is the corresponding analogy - group laughter? - that lowers the risk associated with actually activating and leveraging Group Intelligence?  Is it the shared, group-behaviors of group acknowledgement, group sharing, and extending group affinity? Possibly? How could we find out? Practice? Sounds like exploring the return-on-coordination. Why the heck isn't that "Job1" in all economics textbooks? Instead of all the banal drivel called ISLM?

Reverse Engineering Ourselves Back To A Less Perfect Union.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Maybe we'll all go to jail soon, for trying to expose actual fiat currency operations?

There are growing numbers of clumsy responses, to citizen oversight of fellow citizens. Are these responses sliding to adaptive, or reverse social engineering?

We know about attempted prosecutions of Snowden & Assange. Yet there are many, less publicized citizen whistleblowers now facing prosecution, and/or already held in jail, uncharged.

Imagine a world where the only place where fiat can be safely expressed ... is under the protection of Russian gangsters! Oddly familiar?

Why is this happening? We can't hide everything from all the people, all the time?

Can anything adaptive come of it? That depends on our distributed assessments of our collective outcomes, and our subsequent, cultural adjustments. That is, if we're still capable of adjusting.

Is there a better way? Always has been. It's up to us to find yet another one.

What's that old saying?

No sub-group of bumbling bureaucrats is ever as smart as all of us?

So who says that prosecuting the smartest of us ever works out in the long run? Shoot the messenger just slows unavoidable adjustments, and is always maladaptive.

The issue is not whether various public agency bureaucrats are trying to do THEIR job as THEY see fit.

The issue is always their individual and group intelligence! If an electorate can't select the right people for the right jobs, AND PREPARE THEM WELL ... then everything gradually ends up in the crapper. 

Yet if citizens DO select well ... then something called a functioning democracy can occur. With byproducts like a functioning currency system, and functioning markets. Even a Middle Class!!! Remember that? We used to have one.

And what if an electorate can't or won't select to PREPARE it's own, budding citizens well? Literally everything just ends up in the crapper even faster?

Random examples:

Think EVERYTHING wired isn't bugged, at will?  Instead of going to any length to protect ourselves from people we tick off, it's leaner/faster/better to simply pay a bit more attention to not ticking people off in the 1st place? Ounce of prevention vs pound of cure? That's how evolution works.

Stratfor Works on Silencing It's Own Whistleblowers. (The story of one citizen is classic. Why not elect him, instead of jailing him?)

FDIC Prosecuting It's Whistleblowers too. (FDIC is silencing this whistleblower, Dwight Haskins.)

Whistleblowers can be everything from criminals to martyrs, but they always inform their public, and hence serve an adaptive purpose. By definition, efforts to prevent transparency inevitably cause more harm than good to every "system." If we aren't transparent, we aren't an agile system. If we can't expose our own operations, how can we keep finding better ways?

The "Obtuseness of Intelligent People" - i.e., So Caught Up In Subtle Patterns That They Never See The Context For The Details.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

The strange story of Atlantica - 1939
    (hat tip GEI)
Change a few words, and this plot could fit the history of orthodox economics ... or any other religion.

Morris Berman — The Parable of the Frogs

What does it take to produce large-scale social change? Most historians, if you catch them in an honest moment, will admit that the popular levers of social change, such as education or legislation, are bogus; they don’t really amount to very much. What does make a difference–and then only potentially–is massive systemic breakdown, such as occurred in the United States in the fall of 2008.

Counterpunch
The Parable of the Frogs
Morris Berman
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Olivier Knox — The world of 2030: U.S. declines; food, water may be scarce

Developing trends over the next 25+ years, according to the National Intelligence Council in Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds.

Yahoo! News — The Ticket

The world of 2030: U.S. declines; food, water may be scarce
Olivier Knox | Yahoo! News

Economics of The People Against Themselves

commentary by Roger Erickson

We're seeing the unfolding story of the people against themselves, which is tragic.  A capable populous divided, cannot be stood on it's ear by anyone but itself.

A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but a Group Mind is an order of magnitude worse thing to waste. Bill Mitchell, makes a valid point familiar to anyone working with any scalable system, whether biology, military, networks, software, or anthropology. "The brightest minds can be so dumb in particular circumstances."  Unfortunately, that holds more than triply for group-minds, i.e., collective intelligence ... aka national policy. The only way to leverage the economics of a group-mind is to exercise it. Otherwise, the dynamic value of having one doesn't compound, while the static costs keep scaling.

There are countless other examples than the one Bill Mitchell uses, such as our counter-productive efforts to NOT prosecute fraud, and instead over-zealously prosecute those who attempt to refer fraud cases. Given what our actual capabilities are, it's surprising how poorly we select what to use those capabilities on. It almost seems that frauds are running the asylum. The only other credible theory is that our distributed divisions render us conquered by our own disorganization. What would Pogo say about the irony in that reality? We've met the evil genius dividing & conquering us, and that distributed intelligence also defaults to us, simply for lack of exercising it's own, distributed IQ.  The perennial greatest enemy to each of us is all of us.

So why do locally capable aggregates tend to dissociate and fail as they grow? Simply because any rapidly growing population size initially makes more of it's members more isolated - regardless of whether growth occurs by numbers alone, or by increasing specialization of dedicated members. Any form of growth always dooms us to become collectively dumber, before we can get collectively smarter again, through expanded group practice. Coordination always has to chase population demands, and the latency of catching up differentiates surviving vs extinct cultures. For social species, every adaptive race is eventually a race to scale up coordination faster than either population or distributed capabilities does.

During that race, the cost of coordination rises exponentially faster than population size alone, and is ALWAYS the highest cost, by far, in any organized system. The ONLY return that exceeds the cost of coordination is the return-on-coordination. Hence, scalable coordination methods are the ONLY things worth investing in. It's the only way to save ourselves, our nation and our children. Everything else is a life-threatening distraction for all people in all cultures.

How badly will we have to fail, before it's again clear that we must once again quickly organize on an even greater scale? When we recover the ability to smoothly self-organize faster than we spawn new members? An amoeba can do that, so can every human embryo. However, no human culture on earth can gracefully do that yet - except the internet. We have brutal national growing pains that are embarrassing to watch in the mirror.

When will we learn, fast enough? Will the next milestone occur when everyone currently over 30 dies off? Or are we making Luddites faster than internet engineers? We don't need kids who cry wolf, but we certainly need kids who will cry "mobilize!" Since we're spawning more people, and exponentially expanding group potential, we need to continually mobilize to reach for insanely great things ... or else we regress, through our own intrinsic overhead, the cost of coordination.

I keep coming back to a simple, obvious but seemingly still uncommon conclusion. We need to accelerate how fast we learn to hoard coordination capabilities* - and we desperately need to reduce hoarding of everything else - since everything else only slows us down, and hampers coordination. Instead, we're still hoarding everything EXCEPT return-on-coordination!  And we're encouraged to do so by the failed paradigm of a totally brain-dead, maladaptive economics orthodoxy!   At this rate, some other culture could eclipse us rapidly and completely. Why isn't THAT threat to national security our #1 political campaign issue?

*ps: In fact, what we need to hoard, and continuously develop, are methods for accelerating our coordination capabilities. Or else we're toast.

Yazan al-Saadi — Stratfor Wanted Assange Out by Any Means

Quite a bunch they have there at Stratfor. Proof of why we need people like Manning and Assange.

Al Akhbar English
Stratfor Wanted Assange Out by Any Means
Yazan al-Saadi

Succession Plan for the USA: How to Re-purpose the Institutional Momentum of the DoD, Intelligence & Finance Industries

Defense, national security & finance industries have dominated US policy direction for decades, and large parts of the significant budgets of each of those three industries have become SECRET, outside the awareness of our supposedly democratic electorate. Can we survive this institutional momentum? Of course we can! But ONLY if we maintain a robust model for evaluating situations which may easily change faster than our public comprehension can follow.

  Humility & ability to explore the meaning of data streams outside our present understanding is perhaps the #1 requirement for national survival.

To gain perspective, let's wander afield, than come back to our present situation from another angle.

There are countless examples of past species & empires, whose evolving methods failed to help them survive successive challenges.  When a given aggregate fails to cross the next "chasm," the root causality is most evident NOT in the wrong moves it makes, or even in the "right" moves that seem obvious in hindsight.  Root cause always lies one step further back in the causality chain, at the level where institutional momentum caused subsequent decision patterns to become inevitable, and a foregone conclusion.

The root causality of aggregate failure always stems from inability to innovate on an aggregate-wide scale - i.e., an inability to spawn alternate methods and then actually select & propagate their use, widely enough & soon enough. The survival of our current national aggregate depends on the same process affecting every known species - whether molecular, cellular or social.

The issue of sustaining & increasing adaptive rate rules the lifespan of every species or culture. If we can use adaptive process control in defined applications, then why not apply that same talent to our most pressing policy demands, which are make-or-break for our national progress and survival?

In the USA too, our rate of adapting & enlarging our own methods will determine the duration of our republic. We can use past examples, such as failure of the Roman Empire, as guides, but must adapt those lessons to our own, unique circumstances. Above all else, we must constantly scale up our aggregate-wide analyses to encompass the increasing degrees of freedom which we have in choosing failure vs survival paths.

Every aggregate grows by painstaking creation & utilization of its internal institutions, from mitochondria within eukaryotic cells all the way up to the Pentagon, CIA & NSA within the USA. Once you look upon each institution - no matter it's setting - as a component in an organized, evolving system ... then the specific details get very boring, very quickly, from our net perspective. 

Yes, they all play a necessary but not sufficient role, and the tactical details are important at the tactical level. Nevertheless, they're all just components that are devoid of meaning outside their responsibility to their host. The ongoing role any institution plays in the adaptive process of its host falls into very predictable patterns.

The aggregate's task of successfully coordinating those subordinate patterns I call the "Entrepreneurial Aggregate's Task." The US-DoD currently masters this task more proficiently than any other cultural institution on earth.  However, just by doing so it is always on the brink of being able to destroy the very aggregate it serves, just as Roman militarism slowly dissolved the republic that harbored it. 

Compared to DoD officer-training, the level of strategic comprehension of staff in all levels of local, state & federal congresses is past the point of being a national embarrassment and ongoing calamity. That level of institutional decline in our democracy can only occur after prolonged, systemic neglect by a detached, dissasociated & increasingly inept electorate. It's our own fault. How do we recover from this increasingly distributed hangover? Let's take a look at the basic premises which every organized aggregate uses.

Interchanges between institutions & aggregates.

By definition, all newly evolving institutions shepherd dramatic increases in resource throughput, and thereby create their own positive-feedback loops within their aggregate. Keeping that simple rule in mind helps us place any and all information about institutions as tactical details, curious but potentially distracting from the aggregate survival strategy. All existing institutions are needed, at least transiently, but none EVER fully speak for the aggregate.

Yet whole aggregates constantly find themselves with their own, institutional tigers by the tail, and therein face their greatest dangers. There are always future resource streams to pursue, and infinite numbers of additional internal tiger-tails to grab. Static measures of local "value" don't guarantee you'll survive transitions, only agile transaction chains will guarantee that. Survival defines a dynamic value-path, where the only purpose of any local or momentary value metric is it's use in keeping the aggregate close to a constantly emerging survival path. Face it. We are "Context Nomads," wandering through an unfolding, unpredictable future.

It's when we get too absorbed with any transient, institutional-tiger that we over-adapt to an inevitably fleeting situation. When that happens, excessive pursuit of any given example of institutional momentum can take us too far off our unpredictable, adaptive path.  When that happens, our aggregate agility declines, and we lose access to the future.

Internal checks & balances smoothing transition between tiger-tails.

Surviving aggregates invent timely, context-specific checks & balances to survive. Their task is to design catalysts to herd their multiple, emerging institutions into productive vs unproductive interactions. Yet how exactly do they get all emerging institutions to cooperate? What are the internal signals for adjusting very dynamic tolerance limits? It boils down to extracting some distributed signal that is a reliable indicator of net aggregate agility or resilience.  That has to be done by aggressive trial and error, since most combinations of individual & institutional behaviors - no matter how locally impressive - are dead-end diversions from the aggregate survival path.

Never bet the farm? That's one useful rule. Keep a very long return path? That's another good rule. If a statistical or probability model of all existing resource streams is visualized, it becomes far easier to remember that most income-patterns produce local as opposed to global maxima or minima. Simply put, the approach you use to accumulate personal wealth may well preclude survival of your descendents. How do you mitigate that threat? By producing agile citizens and institutions, able to QUICKLY undo any unpredictable dead-end we've previously explored.

Never let examined, distributed trends box your aggregate into instances where the farm is already bet, and return paths are dangerously constrained?   That sounds vague & daunting, but it has to be done.  How?

Adaptive direction is best estimated as a time-weighted average of the net rate of changing outcomes. This is reflected in the corrected, net-present-value calculations used in investment schemes. If you're beginning to wonder why looking ahead is beginning to sound like common sense, don't feel alone.  Why on earth don't we follow that same logic when investing in policy, and also for investing in aggregate agility and resilience?

Now recall that aggregate behavior is all statistics, and mistakes are inevitable, not just possible. Given all this, why are we so sophisticated about engineering, mathematics, or sequestering local resources, and so pathetic about investing in aggregate agility? Why are there no investment forums on investing in democracy, or in a "more perfect union?" We've done that before, and can obviously do it again, so the question translates to "why aren't we making the effort?"

How to invest in emerging methods for scaling our rate-of-coordination?

It's here that we can return to looking at our own, national aggregate in a new light. For centuries, philosophers advised that "to know the truth, ask 'why' 5 times in succession." Iterative questions about causality peel back the institutional momentum that dominates aggregate decision-making at any given time.

In the case of the Roman Empire, the subtle, internal inversion from a stakeholder-driven military to military-dominated stakeholders is offered as one clue to empire collapse. From our perch, however, it's a bit comical to visualize military leaders increasingly adept at mastering the complex interplay of multiple forces and logistics support throughout whole regions - while remaining simultaneously blind to the analogous factors changing the fabric of their own nation!

Yet today in the USA, are we doing any better? Or are we only living out a bigger example of the same process? Has our inversion from stakeholder-driven fiat finance to fiat-dominated-stakeholders already triggered inevitable dissolution of the USA? Is our demise now only a matter of time?

That depends on how aware, perceptive and responsive our electorate is. If US policy must become more agile every year, are WE capable of re-designing the distributed methods that guarantee a successful aggregate? Can we generate the social catalysts that will generate newly agile methods, year after year? Sure we can!  It's a question of whether parents actually want this outcome for their children - and whether the children want it whether the parents will or not.

Sometimes, when a distributed train of thought is taking too long to board at a station, emerging imagination just hops on board and leaves without it. It's called uncovering options by exploring them, before they're fully understood. Our current US culture is rapidly losing moxie & innovative steam in part because we're not giving our youth shoulder enough practice at solving challenges.

If the DoD formally develops discernment through rigorous officer training, then why isn't citizen training and far more professional politician briefing our #1 priority? For us, a simple question arises, one that should be asked in the "citizen training process" of every person in every institution. "Can our aggregate survive over-domination of public policy by YOUR institution?" 

Our ability to improve that citizen-training, I predict, will define the culture of the USA more than any other process we use. At present, we're training citizens to store massive amounts of information, with negligible practice at selecting what little is needed to improve aggregate outcomes.  The result is citizens who are less comfortable taking responsibility for change.

To tune further capabilities from a changing aggregate, there's always something we should be doing differently, and some unpredictable surprises about things we no longer need to do. Why don't we find more time to practice coordination?

Answering that question requires staging, sequencing & linking of a few conceptual tenets - aggregate success, the 1st derivative of aggregate success, and the 2nd derivative of aggregate success.

1) Defining Dynamic Aggregate Success. Model the spectrum of conflicting institutional lobbies that guide & constrain our aggregate path.  View that spectrum not as static walls, but as a vibrant plasma that should be agile enough to sample many outlets, before settling on the outlet that - with reasonable certainty - looks like part of a net, adaptive path for our aggregate.

2) Methods for exploring aggregate options.  A model of the spectrum of methods by which aggregate agility is managed and increased. View that spectrum of methods as also not static, and rather as a dynamic list of catalyst techniques for generating cooperation, no matter the situation.

3) Methods for improving, not just maintaining our coordination methods.  A model of how an adequate supply of emerging social catalysts is spawned.   With a model, we can better manage our own social-catalyst logistics, so that social innovations will be available to our, hopefully still vibrant list of lobbies.  This boils down to a simple re-statement of evolutionary theory, ironically generated by our own Marine Corp, as a tenet of war campaign theory.
a) Success follows the quality & pace of distributed decision-making.  
b) We generate pace by the very act of distributing decision-making.

Note, with social disparity, we're already half way to aggregate failure.  Perhaps if we practiced staging, sequencing & linking of those 3 tenets, alone, we'd keep a higher proportion of our growing aggregate aware of aggregate conditions? It wouldn't be that hard to find out!

The answer seems to be that we simply don't discuss & practice coordination enough, by any measure.  We're heroically overworked individually, simply because we're not investing enough in coordination.

We could be evolving even faster. So far, we rarely even get to levels 4 & 5 of philosophical questioning, because things change so rapidly. Perhaps in another 100 years or less, however, real-time, public analysis of those steps will be required even in everyday life, not just in the DoD. At present, wider practice of even the first 3 steps might revitalize our culture. With that, perhaps a higher proportion of our citizens and policy staff would remain more aware of what their entire range of constituents has to offer, now & in the future?

Who knew that DoD was Zen?   I have no idea whether the CIA & NSA are even half that smart.  As a start, they're too secretive!   Perhaps if we focused more on our own, OpenSource institutional agility, would we ever need to worry about the stupidity of active Knowledge-Disparity, i.e., keeping secrets from ourselves?  If we instead just practiced improving our own, aggregate agility, other cultures would always be so far behind that they'd pursue us through Cargo Cult responses posing no threat to us.   That seems like a more audacious goal to set for ourselves.

It's our own neophytes, conned by the superficiality of their own perspectives which most often kill our aggregates, through pathologically naive, institutional momentum.  Such neophytes, by definition, fail to factor the time-averaged, rate of change of aggregate options, most of which lie beyond the personal awareness of all individuals.

Youngsters initially always fail to allow for the inevitability that they, themselves - or their greatest imaginations - may be evolutionary mistakes and an aggregate dead-end. Get over it. It happens. When it does, it's still a service to your aggregate, even if only as a warning example, no matter baffling.

How to acknowledge & recover fast enough from our ongoing trials & errors is a more dire answer to pursue. Given changing contexts, everything is eventually a mistake, so the only crime is prolonging mistakes after they become one.

Can we survive our next transition well enough to spawn further transitions?   It boils down to discounting tradition enough to generate more of it.  A tradition of audacity demands expanding - not constraining - our own traditions.

"We are about to bury rule by secrecy"

I hope this guy is right. (H/t to Roger Erickson.)