Why Won't More Scientists Peer-Review Reality? Citizens Too.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Scientists are hopless. Not THAT beer reviewed journal, silly. I mean ones critical for democracy.

Let's get serious.

Why do our rulers carry out winning political campaigns in trashy tabloids ... rather than peer-reviewed journals? :(

Prof. Brad Lewis notes that "I think many economists just ignore it because it's not in the peer-reviewed stream" - which brings up fundamentally interesting questions about power, politicians and scientists.

And overall, that's just not good enough. After all, if war is too important to be left to the generals, surely every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners?

So why won't more scientists peer-review reality?

In science programs, we're taught everything about science, except WHY to pursue it, and how best to leverage it for mankind. That's stunning, if you stop and think about it.

Rulers & politicians like their scientists meek, malleable, and above all else, submissive.

Pair that with how little it takes to bribe & neutralize scientists & academics, and you have our quasi-feudal NeoLiberal state.

Here's my contention:

'The most important question in every science field - in fact in every human discipline - from day 1, may well be:

"how do we coordinate current & emerging knowledge in each discipline, with current & emerging knowledge in all disciplines?" '

That, after all, is how aggregates evolve.

Move over combinatorial chemistry. Combinatorial Cultural Evolution is demanding it's due. Or else!

Let's drill down a bit deeper into this same topic.

Why don't more scientists use "Design of Experiments?" There are some fundamentally solid reasons in key instances (i.e., when experimental space or "policy space" includes discontinuities such as phase-changes, rather than smoothly extrapolated functions), but let's leave that question to later. The bigger & more immediate conclusion is that asking why more scientists don't use "Design of Experiments" is a relatively trivial question - asked most frequently by investors and accountants.

The far bigger question?

Why don't more citizens at least refer to Design of Experiments - and constantly enlarging perspective - when trying to run their [supposed] democracies?

That's a far more fundamental question, and the answer is known. Our entire education system, from top to bottom, trains citizens to seek overly simplistic solutions to a series of increasingly complex tasks. Doh!

Increasingly, our schools stunt, trap and enslave students intellectually, rather than setting them free. If that doesn't change, we can't change, fast enough. Specifically, our Adaptive Rate won't meet the demands of an accelerating Future Shockwave - unless we fundamentally & continuously improve our K-12 schools, so that all citizens act like owners of democracy, and practice contributing to where we're going, instead of leaving it to a small bevy of sociopathic "owners" practicing Central Planning.

If we don't selectively increase our rate of interactions .... we're dishonestly making a mockery of the scientific method, and of evolution.

We already know that aggregate evolution is leveraging the increasing inter-dependencies among growing numbers of components, across multiple levels of organization. That's why we have molecules, cells, cell-types, organs, physiologies, human cultures, and multi-nation alliances.

The way all aggregates handle an unpredictable stream of transient contexts is by reconnecting everything to everything, on-demand, before transiently settling into a relaxed organizational state continuously tuned (but not over-tuned) to a given context. That's exactly what we do every night when we go to sleep. Upon waking every morning, we've done the best we can to make sense of yesterday's data deluge, and interpret it per ongoing models ..... OR ... we've determined that it's time to re-assess everything (which we do mainly by replacing parent models with offspring models).

It seems reasonable to conclude that national aggregates of humans need a sample/assess wake/sleep cycle every bit as much as our personal aggregates of CNS neurons do. If citizens don't do periodic After Action Re-assessments at a quite fundamental level, then we don't have a democracy. Worse, if we don't educate and train citizens to be up to that frequent re-assessment task, then we can't have a democracy.

"I'm A Multivariate Process Slave, And So Are You." That's The More Appropriate Statement.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson, hat tip to Russell Huntley.)




The folks at ZeroHedge are doing more harm than good, by promoting one of their standard, pet concepts.

I'm A Fiat Slave, And So Are You

[i.e., fiat currency is bad for you]

This is, sadly, a widely held and actively promoted view of modern fiat currency.

Tragically, it's fiat currency that sets us free from gold-plutocrats & oligarchs who traditionally were more easily able to control & manipulate the currency supply. Yet like all new tools, we have to learn to wield our new degrees of fiat.

The underlying task is to organize faster than our numbers grow.

That's difficult. Imagine how hard sports coaches work, just to train tiny teams. Now imagine if basketball, rugby or football teams added a player a day. No current coach would keep up.

Our most important research topic is our own policy apparatus, and yet it's the thing we most assiduously try to avoid changing. Holding all but one variable constant, and changing just one thing at a time works in the lab, but that is NOT applicable anywhere else in life, where massively parallel, combinatorial experimentation is a given.

I'm A Multivariate Process Slave, And So Are You

That's the more appropriate statement.

As Context Nomads, we're juggling more knives with each changing context we enter. Therefore, unlimited access to more degrees of freedom is an absolute requirement, not an option.

ps: How can we be in debt when the so-called debt is denominated in metrics which we can make in unlimited quantities? That's like becoming personally indebted to one's own personal initiative. Can a fool be convinced that he's indebted to his own myths? Sure! Yet the problem is not with the myths, but with the fool who believes them - and who can't discern the difference between static value and dynamic value, or between fixed correlations and arbitrarily derived variables. Worse, such fools can't discriminate the cost-of-coordination from the return-on-coordination. Maybe they never took high school algebra.

ps: ps: What's next? Because situations are more complex, and demand bigger/faster/leaner aggregate responses every year (i.e., a more agile electorate) ... ZeroHedge will complain that we're all becoming slaves to a growing vocabulary?