If We Let Kids Play At Democracy More Often, Surely They'd Get The Idea Of tuning More Performance Out Of That Too?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Here's are 2 excellent summaries of what we're up against.

https://twitter.com/ARob7125/status/435819120110874624/photo/1

https://twitter.com/Politics_PR/status/435835189743214592/photo/1

Russ Huntley: "Amazing how deceptive numbers can be."

Exactly! If you string together the compounding error that accumulates from semantics x numbers x ideology x practice x background .... it's amazing that humans can get anything done at all

We're obviously pretty good at navigating through this fog of context. The point is that, with a little care, we could be a whole lot better.

One challenge is to encapsulate how to package and sell that "just a little care" program to all the people that don't yet know it, among those already here & those coming down the pike.

Paul Meli: "I've come to the conclusion that statistically speaking, Conventional Wisdom™ is a contrary indicator…it's most likely wrong.

What is the probability of a majority of citizens, on the average uninformed about anything not part of their core training, would converge on an accurate view of reality as a group?

I think the odds are vanishingly small."

Yes, exactly. It's only a matter of time.

That's mathematically proven by various theorems in set theory, Analog Network theory, General Systems Theory, AI and robotics.

And it's a key conjecture in the Theory of Evolution, too, not to mention peasant common sense.

Any system dependent upon incident data to navigate changing context will:

a) at best, only chase reality; 

    next question is the lag, & whether it's increasing or decreasing; as

b) a function of the cascade of new data & inter-dependency re-programming that is flowing through the nested layers of that system ..... as incident data constantly changes. 

We call that "learning," in people and teams. Cultures can learn too, and some cultures faster than others. And all cultures can learn faster in some conditions than during other times and/or other settings.

At this size and rate of population growth, is the USA becoming more or less agile at cultural learning?

What is perhaps the most simultaneously amazing and impressive feature of our group culture and our personal physiology?

It's how QUICKLY we can mobilize such deeply nested systems to do anything at all! Making agile adjustments in a cascade of millions of inter-dependencies is incredibly complicated! It requires a lot or practice.

To get this far, we obviously have the machinery. How much we get out of - and add to - our cultural machinery, is largely a matter of training and practice.

With just a little care, we can always get a lot more out of the physiological and/or cultural machinery which we have.

Recruiting enough people, fast enough, to that simple realization?  That is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, for our cultural evolution. :)

How do advanced cultures such as ours ever get enough practice? Actually, the answer is very well known & documented. It is largely through the play behavior of our youth, plus the more serious "play" of adult aggregates.

Youth always want to squeeze more performance out of whatever they're allowed to tinker with or play at. When many of us were kids it was often choreography, music, cars and/or wars.

If we let kids play at actual, functioning Democracy more often, maybe they'd get the idea of tuning more performance out of that too?

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?

***

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?

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.