Our task. Rightsizing Adaptive Cultural Signals From Human Cultural Noise.

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

It finally hit me, as a conceptual summary. This is what Context Nomads do.

Our task.

Rightsizing adaptive cultural signals from human cultural noise.

Does our nation have an aggregate-OODA-Loop?  Of course.

AOODA-Loop?

Do we know how to tune it?

How? Through group practice?

What are we waiting for?

Aggregate, perceptual clarity? About our context, and major, not just trivial, challenges?

Where would that be aggregate perceptual clarity be formed, if not in the body of public discourse?

And where would it be expressed, if not in our Desired Outcomes, milestone goals, policies, strategies, tactics and tools?

As the US Marine Corp says, the scale of our organizational demands change, but it's always about ...

staging, linking, sequencing

... to master successive aggregate challenges.

Where are those challenges played out?  On a field we call Policy Space.

Using what toolkit?  The one we call Policy Agility, and it's cascade of component parts, down to individual skills & characteristics.

So what ARE we waiting for? Adequate preparation, in K-12 schools? Doh!

If you're worried about where your national vehicle is going, carping from the back seat is pretty inefficient, and there's a known cascade of ways to help arrive intact. 

Participate in setting the Desired Destination. Get involved in the decision process, at the decision point.

Pick your stage, and participate in leveraging the steering wheel, or the brakes, or the turn signals, etc, etc.  

And, participate in making sure that every component hears about every other component, so that poor maintenance of wheels, oil, brakes, coolant, exhaust, steering, heat, AC, ABS, fuel filter, generator, etc, etc don't derail the progress of the whole.

This is the greatest organizational challenge in human history ... but having made it this far, we're obviously capable of taking one more, even more distributed, step.  Only if we act together, and adequately provision all parts of our increasingly distributed whole.

Worth Reading: 1993 Paper On Strategic Fraud ... Applies To Diverse Contexts (& OODA Loops)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

OODA Loops aren't active ONLY in warfare, as the 1993 paper linked to below clearly shows.

Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit

The authors received a Nobel Prize based on this work, about just one aspect of 2G-5G war by parasites on their host, the USA and it's MiddleClass.

That Nobel award actually shows how naive people in other fields can be about the scope for applying misdirection when mastering Policy OODA Loops. After all, the "OODA" loop has been actively studied since circa 1926-1939, as Walter Shewhart's PDSA Cycle, and it's actual existence certainly predates the human species. The bigger the group brain, the more feedback loops contribute to the statistics of it's process control. Only the scale and the methods change.

We're all politicians now. That's what Democracy means. Hence, fraud and misdirection are our constant companions, everywhere, even in our own mirrors.

If we can't trigger an honest effort to re-orient after our own acts - in the midst of an unending FutureShockWave - then we can't possibly make adaptive adjustments in response to all the repercussions we ourselves trigger.

And if we're not re-assessing our own impact on our own outcomes, we can't hope to field OODA loops that are better/faster/leaner than the OODA loops of others - including diverse frauds, Innocent or not, both domestic and foreign.

Ironically, complacency involves actively defrauding ourselves of our future options.

Have you ever actually visualized a Control Fraud lobby arresting a Democracy's OODA Loop? It happens. Remember the Keating-5? The neutering of Brooksley Borne? Or the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act?

There have been more examples, in all disciplines and all arenas, and more are undoubtedly in the works. It's up to us to safeguard our policy OODA loops. That's possible, since none of us is as smart as all of us ... but that only matters if enough of us participate in our national OODA loop.

Until then, a group brain is a terrible thing to waste.

EVERYONE Should Be Aware - & Mad As Hell - That DOJ Refuses To Do 5th Grade Math

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

"DOJ’s strategy is a legal obscenity and has produced the greatest strategic failure to prosecute elite (and not so elite) white-collar criminals in DOJ’s modern history. DOJ has made it clear to senior (and even middling) bank executives that they can loot with absolute personal impunity. This guarantees future financial crises will be far more severe. But DOJ has reached a new nadir by giving top agency awards to those who lead its abject failures and by claiming that it cannot prosecute bank officers (hilariously rebranded by DOJ as “rocket scientists”) because DOJ attorneys cannot do 5th grade math." 

Liar’s Loans Ain’t “Rocket Science”

This is a long article, but well worth sending to everyone you can possibly think of.

"DOJ just gave its lead prosecutor team a 2nd "highest award," for failing to prosecute ANYONE at JPMorgan."

Wow! Maybe we should pay ALL citizens for NOT working! You suppose? :(

I can't even keep up with the volume of obscene news anymore.

What could keep our entire electorate AWARE of context? It will be something quite simple.

They're quite literally asleep at the wheel.

There could be huge signs posted, saying "CRASH AHEAD" ... and these current democracy drivers would still hand the wheel over to some drunk Neo-Cons, out of pure denial.

And disorientation. And lack of context awareness.

Yet somewhere at the bottom of every rabbit hole, including this one, there are some rather simple fixes to trigger. We need some focus, a consensus Desired Outcome, and an organized campaign to achieve it ... by any and all means possible. None of these bozos can be as smart as all of us. We just have to start acting like owners of our own Public Initiative.

What are the opposition - and our Innocent Frauds - doing?

"The top 'quant' at Enron, the honest and brilliant top risk officer, Vincent Kaminski, wrote recently about his regrets that he was unable to spot the fraud, at a firm that was 'rotten to the core,' because he did not understand accounting control fraud techniques."If so, then he should have been relieved of responsibility long before. Which just means that corp/national governance & risk-mgt was totally trashed, and inadequate. That's a good way to lose an adaptive race.

Brilliant? You be the judge. 

And while you're pondering, switch to earlier today.

"Three years ago, in the dark days of the housing crisis, regulators pressed for a controversial rule that aimed to crack down on shoddy and dishonest lending practices. Now they’re rolling back their plans."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/22/why-regulators-are-making-it-easier-to-get-a-mortgage/

What'd Bill Black just document? What on Earth is happening?

Control Frauds are running circles around our current Democracy?

They're inside our aggregate Decision Cycle? (perhaps just for lack of one, on either side ... )

What would John Boyd say about this competition between OODA Loops?

(That we're screwed ... if we don't drastically ramp up our distributed initiative ... and & start inventing & utilizing some "Fast Transients" ? i.e., "short cuts.")




ps: If this level of fraud is aggregate obscenity, surely existing anti-obscenity laws should protect the public from it?

In my mind, that suggests that things that Control Frauds & their servants say are NOT protected speech.

Where's our current Supreme Court? Oh yes, already bought & paid for .. with YOUR diverted Public Initiative, er fiat currency.

Innocent, Active And Accidental Semantics

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How Language Is Used to Deceive You: Politics, Business, World Events, Sports, and Law (1989)

We need another word in our language, to drive home the impact of semantics and self-parasitism, on our Aggregate OODA loop:

aggregate observations,
perceptions and paradigms,
policy orientation,
consensus and distributed decision-making, and
assessments of local and aggregate actions.

"Auto-immune" is well known.

Aggregate-self-parasitism should be just as well known as self-fraud, or even fraud.

This book is about the range of habits & tools used by the diversity of social parasites, working in diverse trades .... applied to the realm of human language.

Any suggestions?

Fascinating Reads: John Boyd And Orienting to Context (i.e., Driving Adaptive Rate)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

For those who know, there's a unbroken, inter-disciplinary link between:

Wallace_&_Darwin => Walter Shewhart => W.E. Deming => Toyota Production System => John Boyd

There's too much to discuss or read in one post, so here are some references just about Boyd, to start with. One can work backwards from there, just as Boyd did.

On The Making of History: John Boyd and American Security
http://www.usafa.edu/df/dfh/docs/Harmon54.pdf

BOYD ON AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/journal_boyd_on.html

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/158365-1/Robert+Coram.aspx

John Boyd’s Art of War
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/john-boyds-art-of-war/

Introduction to the Strategic Theories of John Boyd
http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com/p/compendium-colonel-john-boyds.html

ps: Paradigm, of course, refers to the set of methods which an aggregate (molecular, CNS or culture) uses while attempting to orient - successfully or not - to context, as the backbone of Adaptive Rate.

ps: ps: Shewhart's PDSA cycle looks at mfg adjustments post policy decisions, a method which Deming tried to push into policy & governance itself, and which Boyd re-named from the policy/goal/outcome perspective as the OODA Cycle or OODA Loop.

How Do Growing Aggregates Support Evolution Of Their Own, Emerging OODA Loops

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Steering Aggregate Adjustments To Distributed Change:

Developing A Faster/Leaner/Better Aggregate OODA Loop

Looking Back, Nearly 1 Year On: Before the Election was Over, Wall Street won

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Ever hear of an opponent being "inside" your OODA Loop, or decision cycle? Apparently, neither has 99% of the electorate. At least there's no sign of any statistically significant response.

Introducing "George" and the Control Fraud, plus the Middle Class hound, "Willoughby," who's in "hot" pursuit of said Control Fraud, the tormentor of the Middle Class.

Duh-uh, which way did they go, George? Huh? Which way did they go?
Whom? The former US Middle Class, or just their prospects? And who's George? And why are we asking him about anything?

Are we being Geithnered, in underhanded and persistent ways? Will the phrase "adding Summers to Greenspan" become synonymous with pairing insult with injury?  Are they flat out Rubin our nose it it?

Culturo-sclerosis Is Progressing Rapidly - Best Cure is an Openly Sourced Electorate

commentary by Roger Erickson

Warren Mosler's latest post pretty much sums up current economic operations: SNAFU. The vast majority of our national options are being ignored.

We're just sitting around doing nothing, while the 1% twiddle their thumbs on a proportional # of yachts declining so slowly that they don't notice.

We don't NEED more yachts. The vast majority of static assets are already sitting unused most of the time!

Yes, the absolute # of static assets are inching up, but dynamic utilization ratios are plummeting!  Our systemic management goals are tracking the wrong metrics!

That means that our real-outcomes and real-options-curves are both turning over, AND WE AS A PEOPLE ARE NOT NOTICING (at least not soon enough).  It's not good when the rate of context-change is inside our distributed, cultural OODA Loop. That means we're falling further behind the rate of change of a changing reality.

In cultural adaptation, as in business, as in war ... TEMPO (Adaptive RATE) is everything. And we're throwing it away! Culturo-sclerosis is not just setting in, it's advanced to the point where multiple-Luddite cultural bypass surgery may soon be the only option. Why not reduce the diet of pathological ideology now, before our cultural operations get so sluggish that a national-heart attack occurs? Even the distributed momentum of distributed bad habits can easily be overcome by smart but simple choices ... but ONLY if those options are actually explored and the choices made.

Only an Openly Sourced electorate is capable of operating a CICU (cultural intensive care unit). Someone has to start notifying all 315 million components of this sick patient, before it's too late to pay their last respects (to themselves!).  If we slow down any further, no one will even come to our nation's funeral.

A Must Read Briefing for Those Wishing to Understand Why Electorates Confuse Currency Issuers & Currency Users

commentary by Roger Erickson

Evolutionary Epistemology

by John Boyd (JB), explained by Chuck Spinney (CS).

Just as the brain of an individual has an "OODA Loop," so too does the group-brain of a functional culture or nation.

Tempo of individual as well as group decision-making matters. If we can't accelerate the process by which more people consider the difference options available to currency issuers/users .... we may tie our nation in knots long enough to commit national suicide.

It's happened before.

JB/CS goal: To Understand How the MIND Evolves an Interior Mental Orientation
(or, Changing Constructs of Meaning or what Thomas Kuhn called “Paradigms”)


Sugested goal for USA: We want our electorate to understand how a GROUP-MIND evolves a Cultural Orientation.

1) The "mind" = persistent patterns of message-passing among trillions of neurons.
2) Clearly "group intelligence" is held in the body of discourse of an electorate.
(Hundreds of Millions of people? Have we, the USA, even achieved a coherent, stable group-mind yet? Even if we have, how long can we sustain it in given contexts?)
Note: Various writers have suggested that humans permanently "captured" individual self-awareness only as recently as 2000 years ago, with the dissemination of written concepts by the Greeks. Others contend that the extent of individual self-awareness tracked the long, slow development of human language and culture, and is at least 150K years old.

Has the group-mind of ANY existing human culture fully captured group-self-awareness - and hence, optimized group agility? Tribal identities, affinity-methods and group agility are very old, but clearly don't scale, as is. No current nation has yet invented methods for permanently capturing methods that preserve group-self-awareness in a continually re-stocking culture. Isn't that our goal?

Implications:

The group-mind of an ad-hoc grouping of people is far more unstable than the laboriously-constructed mind of an individual. Groups can rapidly rise to astonishing levels of group-genius, and fall even faster to incredible depths of group-stupidity. (Lord of the Flies?  Orthodox economics?)

Our cultural embryology is nowhere near as rigorously constrained as our physical embryology is. (Cultural re-invention tracks "selective" cultural recombination.)

Group-minds have far more degrees of freedom, with the rapidly spiraling responsibility to select permutations wisely.

We need far more active practice at our current population levels, before we'll know what cultural-embryological tolerance limits will allow us to scale up to sanely organized populations with an order of magnitude more options (through either population and/or net capabilities). We want our electorate to know that we need more practice to determine what elements of our cultural-embryology will or won't allow us to scale further.

To know the truth about the current momentum of group-intelligence, it is, as philosophers say, necessary to "ask why, 5 times" (at least).

Ergo, we can't EVER accelerate cultural Adaptive Rate in practice, except by tweaking preparation ~5 levels back in all aspects of cultural or institutional momentum.

Group Agility = Group Adaptive Rate = tempo of re-tuning entire systems. (Whether professions, institutions, or cultures.)