by John Boyd (JB), explained by Chuck Spinney (CS).
Just as the brain of an individual has an "OODA Loop," so too does the group-brain of a functional culture or nation.
Tempo of individual as well as group decision-making matters. If we can't accelerate the process by which more people consider the difference options available to currency issuers/users .... we may tie our nation in knots long enough to commit national suicide.
It's happened before.
JB/CS goal: To Understand How the MIND Evolves an Interior Mental Orientation
(or, Changing Constructs of Meaning or what Thomas Kuhn called “Paradigms”)
Sugested goal for USA: We want our electorate to understand how a GROUP-MIND evolves a Cultural Orientation.
1) The "mind" = persistent patterns of message-passing among trillions of neurons.
2) Clearly "group intelligence" is held in the body of discourse of an electorate.
(Hundreds of Millions of people? Have we, the USA, even achieved a coherent, stable group-mind yet? Even if we have, how long can we sustain it in given contexts?)
Note: Various writers have suggested that humans permanently "captured" individual self-awareness only as recently as 2000 years ago, with the dissemination of written concepts by the Greeks. Others contend that the extent of individual self-awareness tracked the long, slow development of human language and culture, and is at least 150K years old.
Has the group-mind of ANY existing human culture fully captured group-self-awareness - and hence, optimized group agility? Tribal identities, affinity-methods and group agility are very old, but clearly don't scale, as is. No current nation has yet invented methods for permanently capturing methods that preserve group-self-awareness in a continually re-stocking culture. Isn't that our goal?
2) Clearly "group intelligence" is held in the body of discourse of an electorate.
(Hundreds of Millions of people? Have we, the USA, even achieved a coherent, stable group-mind yet? Even if we have, how long can we sustain it in given contexts?)
Note: Various writers have suggested that humans permanently "captured" individual self-awareness only as recently as 2000 years ago, with the dissemination of written concepts by the Greeks. Others contend that the extent of individual self-awareness tracked the long, slow development of human language and culture, and is at least 150K years old.
Has the group-mind of ANY existing human culture fully captured group-self-awareness - and hence, optimized group agility? Tribal identities, affinity-methods and group agility are very old, but clearly don't scale, as is. No current nation has yet invented methods for permanently capturing methods that preserve group-self-awareness in a continually re-stocking culture. Isn't that our goal?
Implications:
The group-mind of an ad-hoc grouping of people is far more unstable than the laboriously-constructed mind of an individual. Groups can rapidly rise to astonishing levels of group-genius, and fall even faster to incredible depths of group-stupidity. (Lord of the Flies? Orthodox economics?)
Our cultural embryology is nowhere near as rigorously constrained as our physical embryology is. (Cultural re-invention tracks "selective" cultural recombination.)
Group-minds have far more degrees of freedom, with the rapidly spiraling responsibility to select permutations wisely.
We need far more active practice at our current population levels, before we'll know what cultural-embryological tolerance limits will allow us to scale up to sanely organized populations with an order of magnitude more options (through either population and/or net capabilities). We want our electorate to know that we need more practice to determine what elements of our cultural-embryology will or won't allow us to scale further.
To know the truth about the current momentum of group-intelligence, it is, as philosophers say, necessary to "ask why, 5 times" (at least).
Ergo, we can't EVER accelerate cultural Adaptive Rate in practice, except by tweaking preparation ~5 levels back in all aspects of cultural or institutional momentum.
Group Agility = Group Adaptive Rate = tempo of re-tuning entire systems. (Whether professions, institutions, or cultures.)
Our cultural embryology is nowhere near as rigorously constrained as our physical embryology is. (Cultural re-invention tracks "selective" cultural recombination.)
Group-minds have far more degrees of freedom, with the rapidly spiraling responsibility to select permutations wisely.
We need far more active practice at our current population levels, before we'll know what cultural-embryological tolerance limits will allow us to scale up to sanely organized populations with an order of magnitude more options (through either population and/or net capabilities). We want our electorate to know that we need more practice to determine what elements of our cultural-embryology will or won't allow us to scale further.
To know the truth about the current momentum of group-intelligence, it is, as philosophers say, necessary to "ask why, 5 times" (at least).
Ergo, we can't EVER accelerate cultural Adaptive Rate in practice, except by tweaking preparation ~5 levels back in all aspects of cultural or institutional momentum.
Group Agility = Group Adaptive Rate = tempo of re-tuning entire systems. (Whether professions, institutions, or cultures.)
Has the group-mind of ANY existing human culture fully captured group-self-awareness - and hence, optimized group agility? Tribal identities, affinity-methods and group agility are very old, but clearly don't scale, as is.
ReplyDeleteAncient tribal societies did function quite well in terms of group mind. Their level of collective consciousness of some so-called primitive groups was actually quite advanced compared to the general level of collective consciousness nowdays.
The consensual approach was the naturally evolved approach to social organization. This changed with surplus societies, which were dominated by the military and priesthood — "temple and palace." The structure of surplus societies shifted to the authoritarian and hierarchical. One could argue that this institutional arrangement is "unnatural" and artificially imposed.
One reason that the consensual model of political organization is not used more widely is the long cultural tradition that has left humans unaware of their consensual past. The consensual model can be scaled, we just have to learn how to do it again, which is difficult in the face of millennia of tradition that militates against it.
Anyone that has participated in experiments with consensual living realizes that most of the problems arise from inability to overcome the programming. People that can do this have no problem with consensual organization, even in the military.
Moreover, there is already a lot of experience with consensual organization, even within capitalism. Look at Bill Gore's organization, for example. (Everyone is familiar with Gore Tech, I assume.) I was talking to him about it a couple of years before he passed away and urged him to write a book but unfortunately he never got to it. He died of a heart attack at 74 while back-packing. But here is a snapshot of his organizational method.
The Lattice Organization, W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc.
Anyone that has participated in experiments with consensual living realizes that most of the problems arise from inability to overcome the programming. People that can do this have no problem with consensual organization, even in the military.
ReplyDeleteOne of my chief mentors in consensual organization and living was a retired WWII master sergeant, who was also trained in intelligence.
Key issue, Tom, is that the given methods used to mediate consensual organization are context specific.
ReplyDeletefor every 10x increase in population and/or economic/cultural complexity, entirely new methods must be invented AND adopted.
There are reasons why the colony size of various termite/ant/bee social species are radically different. It all depends on the scalability of the methods they can generate.
Roger, consensualists are well aware of different types of org and their applicability wrt to context, subjective and objective. They are task-oriented and fir the type of org, strategy and tactics to the task in context. They often use a chain of command, responsibilities, etc. but that dissolves with accomplishment of the task.
ReplyDeleteThe point is to be adaptable within the overall context of voluntary consensus rather than hierarchy that is imposed through involuntary authority. In the consensualist view, when people are forced to do things, then interpersonal connection break down. This was also Marx's insightful estimation of commodity markets in which people are no longer dealing with each other as people. Consentualism holds that interpersonal relations are paramount in social organization and the the ideal is voluntary cooperation of free, self-sufficient individuals for mutual benefit. It's a matter of "leverage."
According to consensualists, the antidote to forced compliance is cooperation, coordination, sharing, P2P, etc, within the context of a commons. See consensualism. The way to deal wiht scalability is through distributed networks.
Here's another link to consensualism.
ReplyDeleteWasn't implying that consensualists aren't aware that methods must be reinvented with every change in scale.
ReplyDeleteWas only pointing out that the exact methods still have to be re-invented, by arduous trial & error.
Key point is that we simply need more practice ... and austerity isn't increasing the rate of practice. Nor is lack of focus on the nature of our need.
Was only pointing out that the exact methods still have to be re-invented, by arduous trial & error.
ReplyDeleteKey point is that we simply need more practice ... and austerity isn't increasing the rate of practice. Nor is lack of focus on the nature of our need.
This has been my emphasis in educational and social change. I have observed and participated in which experiments, which are abundant btw, and proved to myself that this is not "just theory." It works.
The overall issue is dispersion rather than concentration, decentralization rather than centralization, distributed systems rather than hierarchical systems, bottom up instead of top down, real grassroots rather than astroturf, and so forth.
The challenge is to increase freedom of choice along with providing actual options while also channeling increasing freedom to purpose instead of allowing it to distract and disperse through license. That has to be built into the culture with well-designed rituals and institutional arrangements instead of imposed top down.
We already know how to do this. We just need to remove the barriers erected by those who profit from not doing it, to the detriment of the entire system. This is now taking down the global environment, so it has to change and change fast or humanity will be in deeper doo-doo than we already are.
"Youth" in general is beginning to recognize that they have no future under the present system. Elders are also realizing that their progeny in future generations is also threatened. So expect social agitation to increase and also political repression by the forces of the status quo.