"Learning To Navigate Context" ... vs "New Culture Is Always Putting An End To Much Of Older Culture"

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



A really interesting article here (below).

In general, this navigation essay touches on how much of the cultural-baby to throw out with the cultural-bathwater, with every, asynchronous step in generational turnover. Yes, there's always more ritual than most appreciate, which can theoretically be shed, but differentiating cultural baby-fat from a pound of cultural flesh, and when to shed it ... can easily get to be rather dangerous.

One has only to study embryology to appreciate the 2-stage art of recombination PLUS fabrication. We all know that lemons occur, despite all efforts at assembly line control.

That's before some people even realize that human culture is in a state of continuous, interleaved cultural-embryology. 

Many things not necessary for adults are QUITE necessary for different stages of development, whether during early embryogenesis or during childhood. In general, the more you know, the less you need ... but ONLY after you've learned that much. :)

Then, finally, you realize that WE need recombinant kids just to parse the unpredictable things your aggregate will need next.  That occurs even though you no longer personally need kids, and you eventually realize that at some point, your aggregate no longer needs YOU!

Get over it.

Hence, "oops" occur every generation within groups, and every singe time groups meet and merge. That's why large, current cultures spend as much or more time looking back as we do looking forwards. Recovering from our own mishaps is a large part of cultural as well as individual survival. Eventually, every individual metaphorically hammers their own thumb hanging a picture ... and every culture shoots a million of it's own feet. It's how we recover & adjust that counts.

In the end, we're all still Context Nomads, individually & culturally, and there are endless, unique tricks & shortcuts to optimally dealing with every context. The glory of survival really does go to those who re-orient and re-adapt soonest. That process goes on regardless of which individual or distributed thumb was hammered, or which pound of component or cultural flesh was usefully or harmfully shed.

Of Metaphysics and Polynesian Navigation

(hat tip Kevin, in a prior comment)

Return on Coordination

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)




Why does the economics field neglect return-on-coordination so thoroughly? In all complex systems, the highest return, by far, is the return on coordination. It pays to invest in coordination skills, by optimally distributing resources. Post WWII growth of the middle class proved that, as does asset allocation in all team activities, including military forces. No system is stronger than the weakest link, etc, etc.

So why can't a nation full of such smart people act more cooperatively, and leverage more of the compounding, potential return-on-coordination? It's a function of the behavioral habits citizens learn, and the drifting balance between multiple habits. What's our ratio of personally hoarding static assets vs collectively hoarding dynamic coordination capabilities? The balance between those two habits follows social connectivity, which follows our social methods, training & practice.  In short, when answering these questions, all roads lead to K-12 education and group preparation.  Our nation will become what our kids learn & practice.

That's what military officer training & War Colleges are all about. They've got the theory down, but even our vaunted DoD is still way behind on adequate practice. When pressure mounts, too many military personnel fall back on personally practiced habits (PowerPoint driven promotion ratings?) that are still more ingrained than group coordination.

Every human tribe had this problem solved - for small numbers. It's the historically rapid rise in human population that's scaled beyond our ability to manage it. We've outrun incredibly efficient tribal mechanisms that by themselves can't scale up adequately to meet the demands of our current population size. To start nibbling away at our exploding Output Gap, we'll have to discover & start using some very indirect approaches to teach citizens to covet & hoard dynamic coordination capabilities.  How?  Let 'em see and sense the allure of the incredible returns possible with coordination.    Organized teams can do amazing things - with enough practice. That means the opposite of austerity.  It means investing in the cost of coordination, and exploring how to optimally distribute the returns ... in order to tempt everyone to explore even more coordination.   That's how we'll transition to hoarding teamwork, not static assets. That's how we'll make a continuously more perfect union.  Show me a sport where teams win by hoarding equipment and neglecting teamwork.  Napoleon supposedly said that morale is to material as 3 is to 1.  In the same ratio, team practice and shared success must be rated at 10, at least.

Complex systems adapt by organizing increasingly agile exploration of increasingly distributed option sets. Teams achieve amazing things only when everyone plays their proper roles with exquisite timing. Note that increasing either population numbers or individual capabilities simply generates even more group options to explore. We're overwhelmed with increasing options, and our success follows the quality of our selection path. For now, we can arbitrarily define, teach and practice 4 stages of an apparently universal process of mobilization.

1) Group success "follows the quality [including tempo] of distributed decision-making." [Note: the USMC changes this link periodically. If broken, google "USMC Warfighting pdf"]

2) Groups "generate tempo by decentralizing decision-making."
    [Note: the USMC changes this link too. If broken, google "USMC Campaigning pdf"]

3) Groups decentralize decision-making by distributing resources well enough to allow distributed exploration of dynamic options.
(It's called liquidity or recombination. We teach one another, distribute resources where useful, & give time for study & practice  - all to generate more innovation.  Species innovate by exploring the unpredictable value generated by sexual recombination.  Cultures innovate by exploring options-recombination, which requires unrestricted liquidity, NOT hoarding of liquidity units.)

4) Groups continually re-prioritize decentralized decision patterns, by distributing feedback well enough to continuously re-align all actions with net benefit.

This ain't rocket science. Ancestors of every surviving species figured this out over 1 million years ago. All students should know this by 5th grade, not just members of sports, music, dance or drama teams.

ps: Physicists call this "reverse-entropy" [basically, if extra energy is available, a way to locally store it can & eventually will appear, and the attributes of that "culture" will reflect the inexorable statistics of energy moving around & settling into the most-stable components & patterns of components.  If more options are available, the culture will be molded by statistics of available energy into whatever form can accept that energy & sample those options.]

Ecologists call this "auto-catalysis" [Aka, any mechanism for cooperatively storing energy will create a sink for attracting & capturing the partners. A "probability of reinforcement" gradient results, just like any critter hanging around a food source].

We can do this.  No matter what we achieve, we ourselves or our kids will quickly be bored by it, and want  to achieve even more.  Quitters won't leave surviving descendants.

Gold-std & Closed-data-std ... Both Trash. We need Sexier, Speedier, Rockin & Rollin' Policy!

In a recent blog, Martin Wolfe says "We still have that sinking feeling."  and then goes on to reiterate much heterodox economic commentary from the last 70 years, without acknowledging a single source that preceded him.

Apparently, Wolfe has no idea how ironic his statement is.  It almost retraces the fractal history of expanding irony!

Why are group policy adjustments so tortuous?  Watching public policy adapt is like watching 300 million people slowly aligning to push a long train, while a few dozen idiots stationed in the locomotive keep engaging the brake!   The idiots are afraid of losing control?  Control of what?  I've heard of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, but I'd never before considered a whole nation where none knew what the others were up to.

Forget Clonal Selection, it's too slow.  What we now see is fractal competition & selection of the fitter fractal layer. :)  Can you clone fractal mutation rates?  Can we tally & manage the rate of fracking? :)   Diversive stuff, certainly, but we can do it, and must.  We started off relying upon sexual recombination to drive diversification rates in small aggregates.  Now we depend upon virtual fractal recombination in order to pursue the exploding number of options available to our aggregates of aggregates.  Yet most students - let alone policy staff - don't even get exposed to that concept.  In fact, we're told that diversity = subversity.  So be it.  If we're going to invent nonsense as a prelude to policy, let's make "Proversity" the goal and insist that "heterozygoality" is better than "homozygoality!"  :)  Let the selection begin.  Gentlepeople, start your virtual engines.

Do you ever wonder why policy staff so stubbornly refuse to read widely enough, and why academics & media staff also refuse to acknowledge operations literature outside their own country club?

Expanding peer review, peer credit & open access is what drives the research world, the scientific method and the past 500 years of the Renaissance. Journalists & electorates should try it.   After all, that's what defines evolution.

Yet it seems neither reality nor Martin Wolfe have received permission from the Queen to exist. How else would you explain UK fiscal policy?

While speaking out so weakly, Wolfe himself is part of the problem.  He apparently accepts that people like Marriner Eccles, Vickrey, Mosler, Godley, Goodhart, Mitchell & Wray etc don't deserve his permission to exist either. Perhaps not until he gets the Queen's consent? :(

Then, the courtiers have the gall to insist that you pay money to read Mr. Wolfe's Financial Times blog!  Timely delivery of plagiarism costs money, after all.  Finally, - to add insult to injury - the plagiarism backlog is effectively pegged to our Output Gap!  (If you're willing to wait a decade or two, you may one day see the following headline:  "Plagiarism Backlog Pegged to Output Gap," read by the last Luddite still reading owned journalists.)

We can actually retrace the fractal history of plagiarized operations insights.  When it's traced, it always reveals the stifling drag of having to engineer consent ... from the lords of Luddite.

And the Queen wonders how economists could fail so badly? She should try listening to more of them, more often, and also allowing them to listen to more of their own peers. Heck, just have the population listen to one another?  Ending the distinction of unproductive class is the common solution. You have to wonder what's stuffed under that hat collection.  Just another straw man that they weren't supposed to keep for more than a one day demo.

This is yet another example of why we need to make OpenSource news a policy.

We can't allow class-endowed Luddites to opine about & advise on our future without sharing what they presumptuously advise for us - especially when it's plagiarizing our own, decades old advice, now trotted out as au courant.  If we're even going to bother harboring such parasites, then we must save them from themselves, or suffer the rash.  National policy agility - just like tribal policy agility - requires rapid dissemination of emerging perspectives.  Call it open discussion.

As surely as we ended the restrictive gold-standard currency process, we must end the restrictive closed-data policy process. It's strangling our national initiative and agility. We can't run circles around our competition when 99% of the country isn't told which circles we're running, why, when or how. We're smarter than this. We should just Openly admit it, & get on with it.  Randomly running around straw men is a game for kids, or idiots.  If HP is ever to know what HP knows, the method will involve fiat communication, where every idea is disseminated as an automatic policy stabilizer, not CopyWronged & barred from effective group utilization.

Who knew that fractal sex-drugs-rock&roll really was the answer? :)  If higher rates of sexual recombination supplied past physical diversity, then better/faster/wider fractal policy recombination is what we need now.  It's called OpenSource.  Once you try it, it's addictive.  Face it, the scientific method is sexy.  We need to scale it up exponentially, not avoid it like some venereal disease.  All our virtual gods want us to go forth & multiply our virtual fractals.

Let us pray together.  "Oh Lords, let us be more virtually promiscuous, and yes, let it begin now."