Data-Wise And Context-Foolish, On A Scale More Epic Than Ever Before. The Task of RIGHT-SIZING AGGREGATE CONTEXT-AWARENESS

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




In case you haven't noticed. THE USA WON.

Yet now we're addicted to the form, and have lost track of the function.

The corollary message that this whole Snowden-NSA affair drives home?

The awesome, overwhelming power of the USA.

I don't see how anyone reading the details could conclude anything else except the fact that the US won, hands down, and now has the capacity to easily know & ward off literally every significant challenge occurring anywhere. We can, will and do know seemingly everything about anything ... but nothing about what any of it is for.

The bigger message here is that we don't seem to know what to do with that capacity, and with our victory.

We are actually misusing our victory so badly that we're actively trying to stuff square success into the round jaws of failure.

The only constant seems to be our systemic ineptitude despite overwhelming brilliance in every narrow discipline.

We're simply back to data-wise and context-foolish, on a scale more epic than ever before.

Even though we've been better than this before. 

We obviously couldn't KEEP our better capabilities. You have to conclude that our grandparents would be disappointed, and downright ashamed of us. We're supposed to be better than this, can be, and will. It's only a question of how, and when. Why is not up to us. If we can't regain our adaptive role, someone else will do that TO us.

The ONLY things that we don't over-teach in our schools?

As a start, how about the fact that, by definition, interdependencies between truly novel discoveries cannot be predicted? Certainly not in real time. And, that failing to acknowledge & explore unpredictable inter-dependencies is a guaranteed way to keep interrupting our systemic success? 

We are actively lying to ourselves about the unpredictability of systemic failure. Systemic failure is guaranteed by the unpredictability of emerging interdependencies. We only need to ditch the arrogance that leads us to lie to ourselves about our predictive power ... and then go about the easy task of discovering the awesome interdependencies generated as a totally free byproduct of our narrow discoveries. This is NOT rocket science. It's simple, aggregate practice.

To illustrate the easy part, say three people independently invent a hammer, a metal nail, and a saw. Do we arbitrarily focus on war hammers, nail-bombs and CIA-torture methods - and in keeping others from using hammers, nails & saws? Or do we discover carpentry, house-building, architecture and art - and who knows what else? It's all in our outlook, our ability to parse feedback, and our amount of practice at assessing aggregate outcomes.

WHY are we turning something so easy into something so difficult?

If the NSA can presume to predict the proclivity of oppressed, under-educated people to resent our actions, then they sure as hell COULD also acknowledge, track and report the proclivity of our own sociopaths to presume that they know how to constrain our Aggregate Adaptive Path, by Central Planning!

Further, the NSA's same methods could be re-purposed to Adaptive Use by our full aggregate, to track and assess our electorate's balance of listening over-much to our few sociopaths, versus to our entire aggregate's feedback. 

If we want Democracy, we have to invest in methods to extend and then KEEP it's benefits. That's exactly what we are not doing. Instead, we're investing in keeping admirers in other countries from emulating what we've already achieved. That reduces to investing in our own failure. It's self-assisted suicide policy, and we should outlaw it. Our own adaptive rate is our most valuable moving target, and we've taken our aggregate eye off of that target!

Instead of bothering to attack the NSA and our MICC, let's stop them in their tracks, and repurpose the MICC, just like we did with the banks in 1933. We can repurpose the MICC by gifting them a killer technology called a social mirror (full, aggregate, feedback awareness). Given a mirror, repurposing them will be incidental ... but only if they're forced to actually use our social mirror.

There is, actually, a simple, concluding question to draw attention to.

It's not just continuously right-sizing fiat currency supply that matters to a dynamically changing population.

How does any aggregate Right-Size Aggregate Context-Awareness?

And then continuously KEEP it right-sized, despite unpredictable changes?

Catching On ... 22 Years Too Late. Instead, Can We Carefully Define "Success" .. So That We Can Aim Directly At It?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Twitter exchange.

Better Markets ‏@Bettermarkets42m
RT @ritholtz: SEC Regulatory Exemptions Led to Collapse http://dlvr.it/3zt4lX

Roger G Erickson ‏@rgeOps Reply to @Bettermarkets @ritholtz
Ya think? About time someone other than William K. Black said so (for 20 years straight).

Wow! The pace here is breathtaking ... well, at least the pace of Middle Class wealth taking has been. (Wait .. isn't that a NEGATIVE pace, from our perspective?) Yes, Larry, that IS a negative pace applied to the General Welfare of the People of the USA.

At this rate our grandkids will learn how WE sold them into financial servitude. "Werks fur mi!"

Anyone ever heard of these concepts called "TEMPO" and "ADAPTIVE RATE" ??? How about the collective quality of distributed decision-making?

Where were these guys in 1992, when the Clinton administration STARTED accepting appointees requested by whomever was pay Greenspan and Robert Rubin. (hint: Greenspan used to WORK for Charles Keating, of the "Keating 5" fame)

In all seroiusness, given that we're 20 years behind the RobertRubin OODA Loop, what strategic issues should we NOW be looking ahead to ... to even have a snowball's chance in hell of catching up and ridding ourselves of our own, misguided cultural practices and the random parasites those practices breed? Cuultural life is warfare, folks, and we haven't been anywhere close to winning in your lifetime. 

Can we carefully define what success means, to a consensus of US citizens? So that we can aim directly at that Desired Outcome? Instead of wandering in the ideological wastelands for another 40 years?

Barry Ritholtz - he may mean well, but is the same guy who says that Warren Mosler's math "doesn't add up for me." If Barry and many others really mean well, we all absolutely must both radically bump up our tempo - and assess where it's really taking us - in order to meaningfully serve the USA. Either that or Barry & others honestly admit that they're in the game simply for their own momentary interests. When your country's future matters, ya either gotta step up to the plate WITH WHATEVER MATH WORKS FOR THE USA - NOT YOU ... or get out of the way.

The original examples to follow were Marriner Eccles & FDR, NOT Keynes and endless other academic blowhards. If everyone doesn't want to get involved, we can't succeed by letting various Central Planners tackle parts of American culture in isolation. Too much delegation defines a mob, not a culture. Too little defines gridlock.  Yet somewhere in between those dynamic tolerance limits lies the pathway for survival of an evolving system constantly tuning ITSELF - NOT being tuned by it's own, internal isolates.  None of us are as smart - or meaningful - as all of use. Every process is too important than the presumed process owners.  We need pragmatic test/assess/respond action cycles when they matter, not endless words years or decades after the war was lost. The words and theory follow, they can NEVER, by definition, lead. That's up to us. All of us. How do we do that?

It was a mistake to ever apply academic principles to leadership and exploration tasks. That's one root of all current problems. We have ZERO net predictive power. If we had any, we wouldn't have to explore and evolve. What we do have is seemingly unlimited adaptive power. It's up to us to collectively apply that power, with tempo and purpose, so that the academics have something to document - in OUR spare time. Meanwhile, we've got options to explore, and limited time to explore, analyze and respond to them ... and assess OUR net outcomes.

Jan Diehm and Katy Hall — Success Metric

The Huffington Post

Third Metric Redefines Success (INFOGRAPHIC)

Jan Diehm and Katy Hall

The Long Mistake - and making enough mistakes to correct it

commentary by Roger Erickson

Mistakes are the things we make enough of to outline and define what we call success.  If we make enough mistakes, we fall into the remaining hole called success. You would think that could be easy.  To succeed, just make enough mistakes. Yet, idiots that we are, we invest considerable resources into trying to keep ourselves from actively exploring the very things that define success.

Every scientist learns that asking the right question is more than half way to finding a useful answer. The right question for now is why we keep trying to stop ourselves from making mistakes.  In fact, we set up whole institutions with the express mission of keeping ourselves from doing things that, in past situations, were deemed mistakes.  Where's the logic in that.  Do we really fear that once a person has made a mistake, they'll keep making it, forever?  Has there EVER been any evidence for that, throughout all of evolution, including the last second of it, which we call history?

Is it a mistake to actively demand that we make no mistakes?  The answer seems rather obvious once finally asked - "Yes." Why? Simple statistics. Given zero predictive power, we rely upon massively parallel selective power, aka, rapidly shared feedback about accelerating, distributed trial and error.  In other areas we call it, for example, combinatorial chemistry.  Social species simply practice constantly expanded, highly distributed, group exploration of group options. At present, however, we're actively refusing to explore the rapid trials & errors demanded by every succeeding situation which presents newly unpredictable options? It seems that we've misread our own group logic, and concluded with the oxymoron that assisted group suicide defines progress, while also making it illegal!  Werks fur oos!

How are we supposed to fall into a hole defined as not a mistake, if we systematically refuse to optimize statistical sampling and parsing of "mistake space?" By magic?  In the end, it's our rate of survivable mistakes that auto-defines our Adaptive Rate.

So, if many of our most cherished institutions list the definition of mistakes in one situation, how many things on their lists will usefully project - unchanged - to new and unpredictably altered situations? Specifically when those new situations require unbiased recombination and re-exploration of all options?  What?  Another right question?  The answer is an unequivocal "Exceedingly Few, If Any!"  So, are most of our institutions mistakes?  Yes and no.  They clearly apply to past situations, and must remain as bridges over the situations we've traversed.  Yet we must NOT use them to limit trial and error recombinant re-exploration of new situations.  We haven't carried all this massive skill at physical/chemical/biological recombination, sexual recombination, behavioral recombination, cultural recombination and "options recombination" this far simply to not use it!

In conclusion, our suicidal defense of credentialism is our main weapon for fighting our own evolution.  We use credentialism to secure beachheads to keep but also quickly leave behind in our journey through evolution-space.  In genetics we refer to that accumulation with phrases such as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," or "junk DNA."  In building out virtual cultural variants based on - but projected from - human biology, we may use analogous terms such as "education recapitulates history" and "junk training exercises." The real value in such exercises is not junk, but they're not sufficient, and there is a remaining task.

The real point is tempo.  Our entire evolutionary past is constantly reassembled, in incredibly densely engineered steps, in 9 months of embryonic gestation.

How long does it take to prepare a human fetus and send it out with the skills needed to launch human biology and culture beyond anything it's entire history can predict?  Improving that ontologic/embryonic dance continues, with subtle steps that are incredibly arduous to select.

How long does it take to prepare human student-citizen groups and send THEM out with the skills needed to launch human culture beyond anything our entire cultural history could possibly predict? Are we putting in the arduous work to make, discriminate and select from enough minor mistakes?  Without making enough initial mistakes, and comparing notes widely and quickly enough, how can we "fall" into the next potential cultural success fast enough?

It's not just making permanent aristocracy out of previously temporary "tribal war chiefs" that is an example of a "Long Mistake."  We've also made orthodox economics as a court tool of aristocrats. Further, we've also made institutionalized rather than recombinant religions and other bureaucracies as a residual long-mistake to be manipulated by aristocrats.  And, there are harmonic oscillations of sub_long_mistakes - such as academia - within each of our bureaucracies. How many of our bureaucracies are caught up serving Long Mistakes, instead of serving group Adaptive Rate? Always too many, simply because we delay meaningful assessment and adequately honest group practice.

There are other, uncounted, parallel as well as residual long_mistakes as well, yet they are all example practices that keep us from maintaining the distributed mistake rates required to discriminate stasis from evolution, and accelerate selection of the latter.

Want yet another specific example?  The institutional concept of priests has been "one long mistake" as has, presumably, nearly the entire historical distribution of shamanistic and/or academically tenured mistakes.  They all attempt to help define success by exclusion.  Yet here we are, ritualizing memorization of the mistakes NOT to make, instead of focussing on earliest possible recognition of the successful holes that enough, survivable mistakes always expose.

How, indeed, do we accomplish the difficult task of stopping what we're doing too much of?  Once we've made enough mistakes to fall into success, can we let others get on with making enough NEWLY DISTRIBUTED mistakes,  fast enough, to fall into the new successes we can't possibly imagine?

We Can't Keep Learning and Relearning Things This Slowly, and Succeed

commentary by Roger Erickson

“If the agony we experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan-due to our inability to grasp the nature and scope of those wars-has taught us nothing else, it should have taught us to pay attention to the aspiration of the local people and thereby avoid inflicting pain on ourselves and others”

This was never a problem of available knowledge. Ditto for managing fiscal currency operations.

It's an ongoing problem of sampling, hearing and listening to data already available - far enough in advance to make educated guesses about whom to start trusting differently - thereby changing your pattern of trusted sources in real-time. That defines managing ongoing situational awareness while traversing an unpredictable survival path, and how we chase it well enough to stay within recovery distance.

If you wait for "credentials" to catch on to emerging reality, it's always too late. By definition, that means waiting for people who are experts in obsolete situations to become expert in today's situations. That can never happen in real-time, obviously. It's adequate for historians leisurly writing entirely academic opinions, but not for the people tasked with actually surfing and surviving situations.

Iraq and Afghanistan sure sound like situations where policy people meddled in tactics, rather than defining a worthwhile goal and trusting delegates in the field to rapidly improvise ways to shape the situation to a satisfactory conclusion - relying upon painstakingly tuned and retuned automatic stabilizers (aka, whatever operational reflexes work). The influence of orthodox economics on real-time fiscal/tax/monetary policy sound awfully similar.

Once supposed leaders don't trust their staff, and staff - including electorates - don't trust their leaders, any organization is completely vulnerable to top-down blunders.

How NOT to Explore Our Own - Available - Options

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



The following article by Peter Van Buren cuts across monetary operations as just one area where tactics are masquerading as national goals. If we don't systematically define what success means for us, we'll continually be recruited to campaigns whose relevance to our REAL if ill-defined goals continues to elude and frustrate us.

How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan -- or America A Guide to Disaster at Home and Abroad
Peter Van Buren

"I spent a year [in Iraq] with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion American taxpayers put up to “reconstruct” that country.  [Seven years] after their “liberation” by the American invasion of 2003, [many Iraqis] were still wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban landscape looking ... for food.

I flew home [one] day, a too-rapid change of worlds, to a country in which the schools of my hometown in Ohio could not afford to pay teachers a decent wage. Once great cities were rotting away as certainly as if they were in Iraq ... . To this day I’m left pondering these questions: Why has the United States spent so much money and time so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad, while allowing its own infrastructure to crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as “policy”?

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

Let's hope this is temporary ignorance, which we can remedy with discussion and practice. If we don't work as a culture to remedy these policy failures,

"Andrew," in a comment at Warren Mosler's site, nails a worse condition that we can easily fall further into.

"The economic prosperity of the 99% hinges on them properly understanding the budget deficit and National debt. The political power of the 1% hinges on the 99% NOT understanding."

Continuing that mismatch between group and class goals is not only stupid, it's a recipe for national failure.  If nothing else, let's make it an overt goal to cease, forever, the maladaptive habit of confusing ourselves, in order to rob ourselves.  How is that supposed to define success, either as creating a more perfect union, or as improving the general welfare of the people?

ps: There's an obvious generalization of Andrew's statement, one that is a given axiom of all variants of system theory.

The economic prosperity of any group hinges on the full group adequately grasping situational awareness and their options for shaping it.   None of us can be smarter than all of us - hence return-on-coordination is always the highest return.