Commentary by Roger Erickson
If WE individuals are so smart and educated, then how come our NATION is so screwed up? Instead of overwhelming details, lets stop, look at our situation, and look for things to simplify. As a start, lets consider coordination of human discourse, natural selection, cultural adaptive rate and cultural evolution.
Personal Situational Awareness.All of our citizens are constantly distracted with details that don't matter. Of course those details seem to matter, but never as much as we think they do. As individuals, our constant need is to carefully select our actions, so that we generate a ratio of many details becoming irrelevant as the consequence of one action. Individuals navigate through life by keeping that ratio high. If we don't, we're stuck with static growth plus rigidity, which never ends well.
Group Situational Awareness.As citizens in a family, community and nation-state, we live not just in a social setting, but an intensely
eusocial one where we can't succeed by acting alone. Humans are successful ONLY when they compare notes and find the fewest, distributed changes that render the largest number of irritating details irrelevant. Call it social tuning, but we're champs at it, when we take the time to do it well, or bother to do it at all. Faster growth track adaptive adjustment, not social rigidity.
So why, at this particular time, aren't more citizens bothering to coordinate, enough, more of the time? Right now, is it largely because they're not getting enough group practice?
Behavior: Individual Default Mode vs Practiced Group Mode.
Our default mode as individuals is to conclude that existing "herds," committees and electorates are never adequate for all existing tasks. That's always true, by definition, since every group success simply generates additional options, and the task of exploring them - before some competing group does. Yet that doesn't mean that herd-like electorates won't soon be up to those tasks.
Instead of decrying current group capabilities, we make progress when we just get on with enlarging our group capabilities. In politics, it's called enlarging policy space, and increasing policy agility. It shouldn't come a surprise that solving those tasks requires group practice, but, amazingly, we're producing over-trained "professionals" and citizens who are indeed surprised by that fact, if they even come to grips with it at all. In short, we're not preparing most citizens to practice group coordination as their original, fall-back habit. We are what we practice, so it seems we need to rethink early education. If we don't, then we're stuck with one current result: narrow theorists running national economic policy, and jealously defending their personal turf against pesky irritants citing mere operational realities.
If there's a better way to begin organizing 315 million people, what do we start orienting to? Regardless of the details, the highest return is always the return on coordination. Could we generate better coordination, nationwide? Ya think? Currently, our dynamic asset allocation sucks, and hence our Output Gap is large and growing. We're certainly failing to optimally leverage our dynamic assets. Do we really need to spend another decade arguing arcane details? Shouldn't we just island-hop past every detail which we can make operationally irrelevant? Let's get on with it.
Exploring Group Options.If there are always an emerging shortlist of simplest things we could do to produce the biggest change - how do we prepare ourselves to look for those things, find them and leverage them? It starts with the distributed situational awareness that prepares people to look for their own opportunities to help consider and recognize group options. Immediatley, that requires increasingly distributed group feedback, and constantly expanding group discourse.
There's a very simple reason why tribal cultures relax to ~5 hours a day of physical work, matched with inordinant amounts of discussion time. The simple fact is that the time spend discussing and carefully selecting group options worth exploring pays off far more than ANY amount of individual heroics. Return on coordination trumps all other returns. Measure twice, cut once. Sample group feedback adequately, explore fewer dead ends. Sure, we can fill up a given niche - and overadapt to a given situation - by running a static automaton 24x7. Yet to invade a new niche, and expand our options by orders of magnitude, we need people working half-time, and spending half-time planning ways to tackle bigger challenges.
Subsequently, it's a matter of getting EVERYONE constant practice at quickly recognizing and exploring those options as they do emerge. It all starts with national goals, since citizens can't practice teamwork if they don't know what they're looking for. Given the
unending string of unpredictable situations, our adaptive methods themselves become our goal. Our #1 goal could simply be to keep ourselves in a highly practiced state,
optimizing our ability to adapt, regardless of what we have to adapt to?
Staying In The Race, ByAdapting.
We are in a constantly accelerating adaptive race, but aren't making our students and citizens comfortable with that fact. There's no need for fear, loathing, anger and wasteful bickering - especially over irrelevant details! We're fully prepared to enjoy the race at hand. An old saying in car racing is that
slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Every race boils down to a selection process, selecting to do just the right things in just the right order and timing, before moving on to the next race. The same is true of cultural adaptive races. We just call it cultural evolution instead of a race, but the principles are the same. Success follows group practice, and our practice at group discourse hones the
quality of our distributed decision-making.Evolution is simply an endless litany of claims that herds can't get smarter and more agile, even though they always do ... eventually ... by adopting unpredictable permutations of a greater array of methods. Inevitably, they have to do that slowly, before they can do that quickly. What's merely improbable always gets done, sooner every year, despite our increasing efforts to actually stop it from being done.
Active Discourse as Natural Selection.Herds and electorates - aka, human cultures - evolve by ACTIVELY SELECTING unpredictable permutations of more methods, from growing toolkits. Human cultures initiate natural selection through active discourse, and accelerate adaptive rate by honing full group discourse. They use that discourse to accelerate selection of all the distributed physical tests involved in exploring options - i.e., what to do, in what order, in transient situations.
ACTIVE DISCOURSE soon delivers the merely improbable, through iterative practice.
The same age old process is observed everywhere - from quantum mechanics to biochemsitry to human culture. Intially build out lean novelty, then see how much relaxation you can get away with, while building up distributed resiliency again. Then do it again. Without distrubuted resiliency, there's not enough distributed diversity to discover and focus on the next improbable task ... before some other culture does. Without enough practice at coordinating, we can't concentrate and then redistribute static and dynamic assets fast enough to matter, when situations demand agile national policy. Human cultural adaptation always comes back to reforming national cultures that can expand policy space and policy agility faster than others can. In the end, we always hang together, or we hang separately.
How do we start practicing and growing distributed policy agility?The puzzling part is why we - supposedly smart humans - are at this moment increasingly overtraining people in all professions to possess narrower situational awareness. We're generating too many people afraid of change, just when we need people comfortable with the opposite. Must we have a die off? Or can we just completely change what we call basic education? And do so quickly?
Every year, more citizens seem subject to very real threats for allowing things that preserve other peoples required degrees of freedom. Such "frictions" are inherent in tuning any system, and optimally distributed adjustments must be found, through accelerted discourse.
As one arbitrary example, consider how insurance regulations, physician malpractice fears and inflexible public health laws, etc all constrain patient options. That brings us back to the dead end of attempting growth through rigidity - which never scales very far. Slowing group growth only occurs when groups don't practice changing enough distributed options often and rapidly. It's no surprise that groups who aren't prepared to change, change more slowly than groups that are prepared and have been practicing. What happened to coordinating American ingenuity? Kids are still born with that as a natural trait, and enter school with it. Nowadays they just exit school without it.
There's an long list of things we need to start doing differently. And an even longer list of things we could start doing differently - if we were more prepared. Why don't we prepare all kids, students and professionals to practice generating agile change? It should be fun, not always threatening.
Evolution, aka scalable natural selection, boils down to simply discerning - on an increasingly larger scale - what's fun & profitable to change, and avoiding what isn't. That requires practiced agility, otherwise called life. Instead of enjoying life practice to the fullest extent of our capabilities, we're constraining couch potatoes in detention. The outcomes is that they don't know what to do if they ever do escape detention. No wonder. They never got enough practice.
"Recess ogres*" started in grade school, and are now infecting every adult profession too? Why? It's not enough to hate kids? We have to hate ourselves too? This can't go on.
It's gonna crack.Our Tea Party is simply a food fight in Congress. Note to Congress and to our electorate. The existing methods used by Congress are so obsolete you should be ashamed for not diversifying and becoming more resilient, sooner. Will you fix some things in your own House - and Senate - before trying to run a country whose diversity you're less aware of every year? Quit meddling in tactics that must exhibit increasing diversity, and instead focus on some policy steps that really are critical. How about expanding our policy space and increasing our policy agility? Tomorrow?
* Recess Ogres: The mean people who volunteer to haunt elementary school recess periods, stomping, pounding staffs, and constraining exhuberant kids from expressing innate exhuberence. "Don't run. Don't talk. No discourse. No thinking. Stop moving. Stop having fun. No smiling. Stop. Stop. Don't. Don't. No. NO!"
Their mantra is: "American ingenuity is a PRIVILEGE, not a right." The orginal rentiers. They're actually instructed to act as though they really hate kids, and citizens too. And they get lots of practice at it.
