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.

So Why DID The Moronic Aggregate Ever START Pounding It's Head Against The Wall?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




Because it would feel so good when they stopped? :(

"pressure on the European Central Bank to do “something” to prevent outright deflation is growing"

ECB translation: "Finally. Some signs of growth in Europe!!!" :)

Somehow this reminds me of the old moron joke.

So stop, already. And start asking why you started.

Or ... you could just do "QE" for a few years.*

Tempo is everything, is separating agile vs moronic aggregates.


* Why didn't the moronic aggregate ever ASK itself what QE is, and does? Because, because, because, BECAUSE ... because of the moronic things electorates do (at the request of orthodox economists). Of course that begs yet another question, but too few have the attention span to ask it, and more. They're busy pounding lemming heads against unemployment walls ... in unison. 

Capitalists? Their only suggestion is to start selling headache pills. Doh!

Bill Gross Close To Tripping Over The Definition of Fiat ... Let's Hope He Falls On A Dictionary

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Scrooge McDucks ... Say. Isn't that just an alias for Fiat McClucks? If it spends, taxes and lobbies by fiat ... maybe it IS all just fiat? Yet what good is fiat if we practice it on everything except thinking? Cluck, cluck. Poor McDuck. Clever enough to acquire a duck suit, but still no wiser than a chicken.

Bill Gross notes that extreme wealth disparity triggers declines in distributed savings, and declines in distributed investment too. Both are obvious, logical points. However, his ONLY suggestion is to tax the wealthy more?

Why? To get more fiat? For whom? For the issuer of public initiative contracts and public initiative coupons - i.e., fiat currency?

Note to Bill. The US Treasury doesn't need any fiat back. Beardsley Ruml said so, on page 35, 68 years ago!

Here's a hint to Bill. Let's assume the Treasury DID need to get some fiat back, in order to get more fiat to express. You know, in case the sky was falling. I'm just clucking! Bear, er .. duck with me.

1) What would it do with that extra fiat? Spend it on public contracts? :)

2) Who would get to earn and keep some of that extra fiat? Labor? But ONLY if their income increased more than their taxes did?

So, Bill, EVEN IF THE TREASURY DID NEED TO GET YOUR HOARDED FIAT CURRENCY BACK, IN ORDER TO HAVE SOME ... it would have to spend it and tax labor at lower rates to achieve anything with it.

So, count me dense, but ...

3) Why not just encourage the Treasury to spend more on labor NOW, instead of waiting to get your taxes back?

4) Why not just drastically reduce taxes on labor? NOW! Instead of waiting on both clawed-back fiat AND arbitrarily delayed initiation of further fiat?

What on earth is the difference between 1,2 versus 3,4? Only tempo?

And maybe parsimony? And even then, ONLY for this particular context? Yes, a fiat currency regime ALLOWS for an expanded Policy Space and increased Policy Agility. It guarantees neither, however. Only fiat combinations of awareness/initiative/intelligence guarantee faster/better/leaner application of fiscal and monetary policy tools.

What? Bill Gross says 3&4 might further reduce the buying power of his remaining private savings hoard MORE than strategy 1&2 did? Higher inflation than 1&2? Really? Maybe. It depends .. on a LOT of implementation details. Yet isn't increasing inflation just an increased tax on saved capital - i.e., just what Bill wants? And, hasn't Bill already concluded that the timeless purpose of national policy is to increase our real economic options, not just hoard fiat numerals in bank accounts?

Look Bill, mathematically, it hardly matters whether you raise taxes on capital faster than you raise taxes on labor ... OR ... you lower taxes on labor faster than you lower taxes on capital. Right now, please do whichever is bureaucratically simplest in our current situation. That is, use Occam's Razor. In a fiat currency regime, the difference between those two situations is purely a matter of semantics, not reality. Either way, the amount of fiat used to denominate a desired adaptive rate is a dimensionless number, one that scales with the size, adaptive rate, context and arbitrary habits of a given population. What matters is the social computation latency - and policy latency - required to recognize and implement adaptive policy. Reducing that latency across multiple situations STARTS by recognizing that 1,2 and 3,4 are mathematically the same.

You are VERY CLOSE to rediscovering the definition of "fiat." Go for it! Pull a Ruml.*

* What's that Ruml-ing I hear in the distance?

Inadequate Application of Common Sense: Gnomes Endlessly Pontificating About "Lack" Of The Very Demand That THEY Are Suppressing!

Commentary by Roger Erickson

The Century Foundation and New America Foundation invite you to The Inadequate Supply of Demand

Good Grief!!!

Can we just trade these bozos for Marriner Eccles, Beardsley Ruml and Warren Mosler? Today? As in, without further waste of hot air?

We're waiting on either incomprehensible stupidity, or incomprehensibly stupid mal-intent. Is there any functional difference? Do WE care which it is?

In other settings I'd recommend replacing the entire headcount ... but in this case there are no detectable brains to replace! Just idiot savants that are NOT saving anyone from the faux savant services being foisted on citizens.

Let me get this straight.

I'm "invited" to a @#$%^&*!!! "inadequate supply of demand?"

Here's my response: "No @#$%^&*!!! THANK YOU! 

 OUR aggregate demand is not THEIRS to dole out!!!

AAAAUUUUGGGHHHH! 

 @#$%^&*!!! on a  @#$%^&*!!!,  ^%&#$@,  *(+@#(  STICK!! 

Now I really am mad as hell."

"Alpert argues that we are now living a world in which labor, production, and capital far outstrip demand."

You don't say?

Any suggestion WHY that's been increasingly true, for 80+ years running?
Or WHAT the US Middle Class will be ALLOWED to do about it?
And WHEN?
And, oh yes, allowed by WHOM?

What? No comment there? You're "working on it?" On our diverted dimes? Look, I personally don't care WHAT you trolls do, on your time. Just get the @#$%^! out of OUR way, and stop getting between the citizens and their fiat ... or many, MANY people are going to get hurt, far worse than they already have been.

Remind me why I, or any US citizens, should waste time listening to these windbags spout stuff our grandparents already clearly stated, 80 years ago?

"Economists and political leaders have failed to see the cataclysmic shift in the global economy that resulted from the flood of labor and productive capacity unleashed by the end of socialist regimes."

Duh uh uhhh. Where have these trolls BEEN the last 80 years, when anyone with common sense KNEW this, and saw it, because they LIVED it?

"Alpert argues for bold new policy solutions to jump-start sluggish advanced nations—a new playbook for the new normal."

BMHOTK! Here's a bold new policy suggestion for Alpert and his little band of pork-takers too. How about you guys just get the @#$%^&*! out of the way??? Just @#$%^&*! off and @#$%^&* ? Wouldn't that be far simpler - and much faster? Instead of talking more of us to death?

Less talk, lower taxes, more investment of OUR growing fiat in OUR nation. 

There, I just summarized the situation for D-Al in ONE sentence.

Now he doesn't even need to have his stupid seminar or sell his stupid, $100 book, and we can get on to actually doing things, instead of his endless talk & endless book sales.

While D-Alpert & his Tijuana wags might CLAIM to be on the right path - which they probably read about in a FREE book somewhere, THEIR suggested TEMPO leaves OUR aggregate path lingering so long in their own, personal pocketbooks that it doesn't matter WHAT PATH we take at their suggested tempo!

D-Alp & company, if you're not part of an solution that is allowed to unfold with adequate tempo ... then get the hell out of our way, YESTERDAY?

End of suggestions. Actions needed instead.

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.

Why the Paralyzing Fear Over Exploring Options?

Here's a curious update.  The inscrutable secret to the evolving universe is no longer "64" but rather "welcome the symbiosis going on behind the curtain."

Why?  First, Warren Mosler famously sums up nearly everything by asking "How do you get people to explore their options?"

Historically, the answer is "Let their kids and grandchildren outrun their Luddite parents."  As Max Planck and countless others have observed, paradigms change as cemetery plots get filled.

The obvious corollary, summarized by people as diverse as Clausewitz, Wallace & Darwin, is that "tempo" counts, and that surviving species or groups are those who manage to further accelerate adaptive rate, not just adaptations. Overwhelming evidence suggests that the race to accelerate adaptive rate is what tunes everything about complex systems, down to the lifespan of their regenerated, recombinant components (e.g. us).

If any and all forms of recombination constitute the answer - whether quantum, chemical, molecular, sexual or cultural-recombination - then why all the sturm and drang over change? How did the most advanced culture in known history come to be paralyzed with fear over something as trivially welcome as extra spare time, aka "Unemployment?" Here are just a very few of countless examples - choosing some of the more interesting ones.

Unemployment In A World Without Jobs

Robots will steal your job, but that’s OK: how to survive the economic collapse and be happy

Future of Work: Custom Printed Bodies and the End of the 9-to-5 Job

Are you only worried about the Luddites momentarily surrounding your house, occupying your republic, and uselessly constraining your options? Or are you actually seriously worried about what humans could possible do with additional free time and accumulating resources?  The only proper response is to ask your maturing kids & grandchildren how worried they are, as they politely back away and vote with their feet. As situations change, new adaptations in recombinant systems arise from starting points about 5 layers beneath the surface of the existing processes. It's called "selection" - and it's how adaptive systems explore their infinite cloud of emerging options.  That demand for selection constitutes their Traveling Entrepreneur Task.  Don't fret, it's always been this way. Our kids & grandkids will effortlessly move on to explore the NEW OPTIONS exposed as they're freed from our OLD CONSTRAINTS.

I'll post the same symbiosis comment here that was posted to the Seeking Alpha story.

***

For Pete's sake! Coolies & muleskinners once rioted because the auto was going to un-employ workers providing other means of local transportation.

20 years later no one remembered what all the sturm & drang was about.

Those that find better things to do with their time will have a job. Those earliest to see better things for people to do, will be in policy positions.

How's that different from anything in the past? Only the details and scale or organization change.

Can you imagine the first eukaryotic cell, 3 billion years ago, arguing with it's distributed workforce of molecules & organelles?

Molecular Workforce: "If we allow those robotic mitochondria in, to automate all oxidation & electron transfer, then we'll all be out of a job. It'll be different this time! DOWN WITH SYMBIOSIS!!!"

History: "Sure was different, alright, but not along the dimensions you imagined. Now we have orders of magnitude more and more diverse 'workers' in millions of species - and whole ecologies - that none of us could have possibly imagined. Get over it."

The story of evolution is non-stop return on coordination.

It's not like it wasn't always this way. The tools invented the last 3.5 billions years allowed selection of the species & cultures existing today.

Ergo, those human cultures & nations that figure out cheaper/faster/better ways to do MORE with emerging tools ... will survive.

The Luddites won't - one way or another.

Will Rogers nailed it pretty well. Virtually sitting in the road will only get your current avatar 'dissed & ignored .. nowadays by a virtual robot truck. :)

Bottom of this rabbit hole is a simple truth. Human capital is more valuable than any other form of capital. It's better to horde coordination capabilities rather than any static commodity.

Yes, we as a people currently show worrying signs of doing nothing with our commodity assets than keeping our compatriots from using them in innovative ways. We explicitly discussed 2000 years ago that the Midas Touch only kills. Obviously, we knew that implicitly over 100,000 years ago, or we wouldn't have become an increasingly social species.  Not to worry.  Our kids & grandchildren will forget our limitations as fast as we allow both ourselves and - increasingly, the lagging adaptive rate of our customs - to populate cemetaries, real or virtual.

Yes, how we educate our youth is where we'll burden or accelerate their ability to explore their emerging options. OpenSource innovation looks like one of our few rays of sunshine at present.  Forget standardized Luddite testing, get your kids more practice at group coordination.   Americans used to have a "can-do" attitude.  We've simply exchanged it for a "can-not" message from faux economists denying the existance of public fiat.  You know the answer:  coordinate, then ask the faux economists "whose your Employer now?"

Next Steps for OpenSource Social Media, Inter-Connectivity and OpenEconomics

Take all the economic doom & gloom as one example. As another example, take all the kerfluffle about the Artificial-Intelligence "singularity", and fears that we'll be conquered by our own Borg machines.

Not to worry. As anyone experienced in Operations vs pure theory will probably appreciate, what matters above else is adaptive agility, and how to build more of it, cheaper/faster/better.

The way all "selection" occurs is through ontogeny - the rebuilding from scratch of complex systems, rather than the constant, recursive tuning of systems already to densely engineered to context. The desperate race to densely engineer JIT/JAN* solutions to fleeting contexts, dictates that endless hacks must be utilized. So many hacks are eventually used that all system hacks, from genes to fore brains to gold-std Central Bank operations, are first built on top of old hacks, and eventually completely replaced. They are rarely, if ever, redesigned.

* (Just in time / Just as needed)

Ontogeny works via agile recombination. NEVER underestimate that. Ontogeny means semi-random regeneration, where everything is reconnected to everything, and ONLY THEN relaxed to the minimal connections, data exchanges & inter-dependencies needed in order to map system function to a given, fleeting context.

There's a reason why all known complex species generate planned obsolescence into their members. Most lifetimes are tuned to the recent rate of context change that cannot be handled by plasticity of member behavior. Instead of endlessly hacking older systems, it's safer to re-launch updated models after intervals dictated by accumulating experience.

In the case of economics of nation states, it's not about the static assets tracked by economists & accountants. Rather, it's about the group intelligent agility quotient (GIAQ) that a given electorate can muster as contexts keep changing.

Design-build in construction is a practical analogy for those not familiar with biology. Decades ago, architects & builders recognized the divergence of what can be designed, vs what can actually be built, in sequence. Rather than the high cost of re-building with increasing frequency, a logical solution was formed. Design & construction were fused, basically dictating that only the skeleton of a design was constructed, before anyone attempted to finalize the more superficial design details. The same logic is followed in various forms of "Agile Programming", where initial function is tested before trying to nail down all superficial features & interdependencies.

Cultural evolution is no different in principle than physiological evolution. As contexts change, how quickly can a given culture reinvent itself & explore as many of it's available options as possible? What social catalysts can it invent - and how soon - to accelerate the process of re-connecting all old & expanding numbers of citizens? Then, how quickly can the same or different catalysts work in reverse to allow an enlarged population to relax into the minimal connectivity patterns allowing it to tune to a new context? And, how does it perform both steps WHILE ALSO retaining the intrinsic capability to do it all again, as soon as needed?

At the end of the Civil War, Joshua Chamberlain famously said: "We know not of the future and cannot plan for it much. But we can ... determine and know what manner of men we will be, whenever and wherever the hour strikes ... ."

Today, we must ask of ourselves and country a more distributed question. We still cannot plan for a completely unpredictable future. Yet we can, indeed, determine what multi-level, adaptive rates our citizenry & diverse processes can muster - when the micro-second strikes.

We can do that by developing the social instrumentation to connect everyone to everyone, upon demand, JIT/JAN. We can also allow most people to settle into the practiced routines that allow us to optimally adapt to a given context. When that context changes, however, we must have a populace previously and fully aware of the need to rapidly meet demands for radically adaptive change, and expecting to meet that challenge sooner or later. A population comfortable with change, and trusting it's ability to change, will be the superior "Context Nomads."  A population not prepared, will be less likely to successfully migrate across successive, changing contexts.

Can we retain a Context Nomad culture? Of course we can. We're already over-able to accomplish such maneuvers, as our various military, sports, theater, music, charity and business entities amply prove. All we're missing are two subtle requirements to scale group agility nationwide. First, incorporating "adaptive change at any moment" more fully into our teaching, training and practice habits. Second, selecting the social catalysts that allow us to practice responding to whatever changes we advise ourselves to prepare for, including surprises themselves.

We're mostly there. We've always had social mobilization methods, and are well on our way to formalizing them in virtual forms capable of supporting data throughputs previously unheard of !

In the case of the AI "singularity," it's far fetched. Who's going to rewire millions of new cpu models every 9 months or less? Who's going to redesign and rebuild all the "catalyst" machines that will redesign hardware? And what reference survival purpose will that hardware be aligned to?

What's seems inevitable is an inflection point in human GIAQ. Once our populations are better "instrumented," and can rapidly parse all OpenSource info across large populations - to converge to what matters most in any context - then large human aggregates will "know what they all know," upon demand, and be prepared to use it with agility too. After that, it's entirely a matter of practice.

Our cultural challenge is rather like that of the ~70 trillion cells in your body having their cake, and being able to wield a credit card, refrigerator, table, plate, knife & fork too - before someone else eats our lunch - and us - first! Tempo is always part ofan  agility equation. With group practice we can eventually even link, stage & sequence ingredients, utensils & ovens.

What proportion of available data is passed between your 70 trillion cells at any instance in any context? Amazingly little. Only what absolutely needs to be. 70 Trillion is a very large number. In comparison, with only 312 million members in the USA (2012), we have one helluva inflection point to go through ourselves.

There's still an additional subtlety that Economists & IT people don't fully appreciate from biology. It follows a thread that Walter Shewhart stated back in the 1920s - "Data are meaningless without context." We also know that most data are also irrelevant even within a given context. What we always face, therefore - in our adaptive race with tempo-driven milestones & frequent choke-points - is that all historically known instrumentation systems are under two types of unrelenting pressure. First, to converge to reduced bandwidth just minimally necessary for the RANGE of contexts we encounter. Secondly, and simultaneously, to retain the ability to adjust that range - through rapid recombination - to the changing demands of new contexts.

By studying the envelope of data exchanges required over time, we can evolve social media channels tuned to the minimally productive bandwidth which allows adaptive group agility.  We can do that WHILE retaining the capability to change any bandwidth, as needs change.  Developing the tools to change anything even faster is the real adaptive race.

The bandwidth point is consistent with all known sensory systems. All of our known physiological senses are constrained to the particular visual/auditory/tactile/olfactory/taste/vestibular BANDWIDTHS describing the minimal envelope of challenges we've recently faced. We've learned we don't NEED most data, and so don't need to collect, parse, separate or use most of it. That saves a LOT of overhead, and is an intrinsic part of agility, ontogeny & evolution. We can augment our data bandwidth at will, but will waste time doing so UNLESS and UNTIL it's actually required. 

As an aside, investors may think of the differing rates-of-change of multiple social-media data bandwidths as analogous to 2, 20, 50 and 100 day moving averages. In social media, however, the bandwidth of each data channel can drift with time, based on full-group feedback about group outcomes.

Rigorous bandwidth tuning will apply to all our emerging, OpenSource social media channels. There's an urgent need to "cut down the useless chatter" when short-term group agility is needed. The signal/noise ratios required for specific group maneuvers is a dynamic property defined entirely by context-specific group practice - called OutcomesBased practice. More to the point, to tune social communications upon demand, we'll need to describe, define and invent social sub-catalysts specific for the task of tuning social-media catalysts upon demand.  OpenSource social media already demands nested levels of catalyst & sub-catalysts.

We're just starting the process of applying OutcomesBased training to social media. Once practiced, the outcome will be astounding, compared to our previous abilities.

Only then will we be able to replicate agile social ontogeny, and drive the Adaptive Rate of the USA at a tempo ensuring not just survival, but also insanely great accomplishments we can't possibly predict or even imagine.