Adaptive Feedback, Thoughts & Suggestions Not Adequately Disseminated - Change Nothing

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

At least not soon enough to matter.

To adaptive aggregates, tempo always matters.

A rough semblance of an issue widely disseminated this week is always better than a perfect discourse delivered long after the fact .... to too few.

The following is from a Dec 1 book signing at the DC office of the American Federation of Teachers.

"In his 18 years as an opinion columnist for the New York Times, Bob Herbert championed the working poor and middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book,Losing Our Way. Herbert’s combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99%."

Less than 100 out of ~320 million residents of the USA attended. There was minimal (if any) press coverage in the local DC newspapers.

Herbert's conviction? "The truth will set us free." Yet he doesn't say when. Perhaps when the truth is adequately disseminated? To a threshold proportion of the electorate?

And if data is meaningless without context, don't we have to simultaneously disseminate adequately adaptive perceptions of our national context either simultaneously, or beforehand?

“Asked by a World War II veteran, ‘What happened to us?,’ Bob Herbert does what he has done all through his remarkable career as a journalist: He sets out to find the answers from the ground up. Searching out the stories and experiences of everyday Americans, and digging deep into facts and figures from ‘the high noon of capitalism’ to the widening gulf of our present vast inequalities, he takes us to the heart and core of our troubles while holding firmly to the conviction of his lifetime: that the truth shall set us free. Here is America as revealed by a great reporter whose empathy with everyday people inspires trust on their part, honesty on his and discovery for all who make the journey with him.” — BILL MOYERS, Former White House Press Secretary

“In a series of haunting portraits, Losing Our Way is an unforgettable reminder of the struggles facing America’s middle class today. Herbert has given us a sweeping picture of what has gone wrong in America—how we have underinvested in infrastructure, let corporate policies dominate the education debate and fought needless wars that resulted in a tragic waste of life. A brilliant and devastating portrayal that explains how our priorities and policies have gone awry, Losing Our Way will make you angry and determined to put our country back on course.” — JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics and Author of The Price of Inequality

At the book signing, Herbert's book was available for purchase for $20.

If even 10% (32 million) of our residents received this book (which hasn't happened), that'd just transfer $640million from residents to the printers/publishers (including a tiny royalty to the author) - thereby feeding the very inequality they SAY that they want to erase. Might as well guarantee you'll never reach a goal, by triggering an infinite series of steps that also keep moving the target - like a clown kicking the hat he stoops to seize.

This is a distributed task which our aggregate cannot win without changing it's methods, to regain free, mandatory education of ourselves, by ourselves.

If those involved really wanted to make a difference, don't THEY need to be aware of changing context too?

Wouldn't it be far better to distribute Herbert's book as a free pdf, to every citizen in the USA?

There are more ways to lose our way every year, involving novel ways of losing track of both context and tempo.

Capitalism cannot operate separate from Statesmanship. 

Selling controlled access to insights works for personal competition among system components. Adaptive suggestions not actively broadcast & disseminated for free do not progress to Aggregate Adaptive Rate. 

There is no "I" (or capitalism) in teamwork, nor in policy, nor in statesmanship. 

If we cannot keep personal capitalism operating within tolerance limits, then we cannot preserve and manage Aggregate Adaptive Rate.

Statesmanship requires awareness of Aggregate Capitalism as well as the sum of Personal Capitalism, and it also requires the brains to see that our Aggregate Survival tracks dynamic co-optimization of the sum of those two variables across changing contexts, not optimizing either in isolation, in given contexts.

AS ~ Sum[ki(AC) + sum{Ij(PCi)}]

(i denotes transient contexts) 

(k & j denote context specific, polynomial variables)

Non-economist citizens used to learn such team concepts in the course of childhood, or at least in high school civics &/or calculus classes. What happened?

Render (to tolerance limits) unto hoarders all that serves personal gains & copyrights.

Render unto OpenSource, all that serves Statesmanship and Aggregate Adaptive Rate.

Put another way, if we can maintain separation of Church & State, why not separation of personal capitalism and Statesmanship? It's the only way we'll survive.

It's either separation of Corporation & State, or Fascism. It's our choice to make, the sooner & more widely the better.

Letting civil servants & citizens be divided & conquered by sociopathic wealth hoarders isn't the answer. Just define their operational tolerance limits and let them live within them, like all components of an evolving system.

There is no path of aggregate survival that does not involve dynamically adapting equilibria between increasing numbers of conflicting forces. Deal with it. There is no point in any institution "winning" by killing it's teammates. That's an oxymoron of the most base sort, that only moronic NeoLiberals believe.

Gotta Be Honest First, Or Math Is Useless.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Because there's no logic without "lo".

Bill Mitchell: "Still sinning … a German economist who cannot face facts"

Those that just can't - or simply won't - see, never put 2+2 together.

No wonder they don't - or won't - get to 5th grade math. Gotta be honest first, or math is useless.

You do the calculus of honesty.

The residual is that data is always meaningless without context.

You can IMAGINE any context you want, but that doesn't help when it comes to helping fellow citizens survive REAL context.

It's Not the Static Capital, Stupid! It's the Net SUM of (static + dynamic) Capital.

commentary by Roger Erickson

There's a reason I feel like I've been talking to a brick wall all my life.

My entire culture IS a freaking brick wall.

As just one example, orthodox capitalists are toxically confused over a fundamentally simple feature of all social species.

Every culture is, by definition, a brick wall. It's always been this way. The latent capabilities are always stacked out the Wazoo. They can be unleashed only by group practice. People who understand this innately are typically the youngest child in a large family. From the onset they get to observe team activity at work, well before they get immersed in it, and lost in defined roles. It's rather like the coaches kid sitting on the bench for years, before even being eligible to play.

One lesson it's faster to learn by observing vs being on a team is that any team member or citizen seeking credentials or prizes is, by definition, a "toxic" team player. Alfred Nobel should never have endowed the Nobel Prizes, since they promote and reward totally academic endeavors and misely perspectives, at the expense of operational practice.  If we traded every Nobel Prize winner in history for a double dose of Walter Shewhart, W.E. Deming and John Boyd, we as a country would be far ahead for the trade.  Academic prizes weren't necessary through 3.5 billion years of evolution, and aren't necessary now, unless taking our eyes off the prize has become our suicidal goal.

In adaptive systems, component and system dynamics are always in both competition and cooperation.  Net benefit accrues to the extent that they optimize the combination of local and group initiative, not either alone. Dynamic return on coordination swamps both team-only and individual-only strategies, by far. To say it formally, it's simple, 2-stage optimization in real-time, that expands via successive layers of increasingly distributed autocatalysis. However, you don't even need to say it formally. It's obvious to little kids sitting on the bench, watching, seeing many possible combinations of individual and team outcomes, while waiting for their chance to join and/or change the game, or imagine inventing totally new ones.

Orthodox capitalists are toxically confused over this fundamentally simple feature of all social species. How is it that we invented both calculus and capitalism ~500 years ago, and the two have never met! (At least not where it mattered most.  The two fields use one another shamelessly, but have never formally met.) You couldn't make this up.

For those with the opportunity to watch and recognize a system before joining, endless opportunities to tweak - or replace - the entire process are easier to see. Few immersed in arbitrarily specific roles (e.g., seeking "prizes") in any version of any game are as likely to see the spectrum of options for changing the whole game.

It's not the static capital, stupid! It's the dynamic, net sum of distributed (static + dynamic) capital. We are ALWAYS in the process of completely changing the entire game, OVER the objections of all the Luddites working harder at specific things they learned how to do yesterday. It's the infinitely nested Degrees of Freedom, Stupid! NOT any subset of them whatsoever. By mathematics alone, there are ALWAYS more options awaiting than we can possibly imagine. Go do something to enlarge your imagination, rather than leaving it where it is today. Ditto for your culture. Do something to trigger bigger challenges worth going after, and achievable only through complete indirection. Otherwise, we're leaving our latent capabilities unemployed. For what reason? Eating more twinkies? Get real, or get extinct.

How many people today would rewrite the entire US Constitution? Or invent something radically different, and even better? Why not? We did it once before. Are you seeking prizes in the current game, or willing to design games involving an order of magnitude more imagination.

Which sound more satisfying, and more fun?

Forget Paris.  How ya gonna keep people down in a role, once they've seen "gaym" systems?

The orthodox among you will be too inhibited to see the value in that degenerate statement.  Try exploring it in a virtual game first, then imagine selecting from some of the more interesting options that crop up.  The ones you haven't thought of yet, and can't even imagine.   They're out there.