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Monday, February 18, 2013

Summary: A Nation Failing To Discriminate And Prioritize Dynamic Over Static, Transient Values

commentary by Roger Erickson

“The only downfall of our beautiful free-enterprise system is profit at all cost,” Billy Mills said. “When you pursue profit at all costs, you’re having to let go of some beautiful strengths you still have within you. You lose sight of virtues and values that ... make all of us." “We all make mistakes — ... it’s the virtues and values that keep us going forward.” ... Billy Mills nodded again. “The greatest degree of freedom ... calls for the greatest degree of discipline.”

It's telling that supposedly advanced statistical and engineering principles are also ancient tribal practices.

Somehow we've fallen way behind on methods to scale distributed discipline as fast as our population and degrees of freedom have grown. What happened to the maxim that methods drive results? Our methods are chasing to catch up to our ongoing outcomes, and barely treading water.

Sure we have to explore options. Yet it's the methods used to approach exponentially increasing options that matter. That's something we call parsing, or critical thinking, or accelerated pattern analysis. Those methods make all the difference in whether our methods drive, chase or diverge from survivable outcomes.

We're no longer a recognizable tribe. We're not even a coherent nation. Our country may fall apart very quickly if we don't quickly find & aggressively use methods for driving adaptive change everywhere. Knowing what to do doesn't matter as much as the universal concept of recruitment methods - knowing how to get enough system components to contribute to doing what's needed.

The very fact that most words in any language require disambiguation drives home the nature of our system management challenges. Most meaning in any language is supplied by context. A distributed democracy simply cannot grow without citizens who are able to think, and who are also deeply practiced in applying that skill.  Without distributed thinking about the ambiguity in every message an electorate hears, every day, we cannot adaptively manage our exponentially growing degrees of freedom.



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