Luddites Can't Wake to New Tomorrows, But SOME OF Their Kids Always Can ... If They Receive Enough Investment To Not Grow Up Too Fast

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Study Shows Why Some People Can’t Wake Up

Hmmm. No mention of the opposite extreme? Those who can't become unaware in the 1st place?

The study above suggests that the vast majority of humans, fall into the camp of "slow to become aware." That fits historical data, which consistently argues that people aware of foresight need lots of boringly, stable Luddite shoulders around, to stand on. So let's not complain too much.

The implication of such studies is that MOST group logic is never ready for the next level of inter-dependency demands?

Why is it that exactly what SHOULDN'T surprise any of us ... is ALWAYS ... what DOES surprise most of us? If that's a consistent finding, there presumably WAS good reason for it, but no proof that there still is. Our task is to explore emerging options, and select whether to keep or get rid of that prior feature. So knock yourselves out. If you don't wake up, it implies the human species no longer needs you.

If the less mentally agile are no longer helpful? Then it may well be time for a change, in the form of a very fundamental re-think of how we define context-oriented education?

If we're not constantly preparing our citizens to manage always surprising contexts .... why are we bothering to educate them at all?

Hmmm?

Let's see if we can think this through, and see any existing inter-dependencies.

The stage. The processes of sexual & cultural "recombination" - genetic or memetic or paradigmetic - are all based on repetitive spawning of adaptive "embryos" (individual or group) ... which then mold new generations to altered contexts, before hardening them into a variety of "adult" patterns. It's the succeeding crops of adults which must survive long enough to see which are or aren't selected by succeeding contexts - in order to spawn new variants. The purpose of adults is to re-sample reality before triggering change. The purpose of youth is to explore more diverse adult options. Our Desired Outcome is a recombi-Nation featuring constantly increasing Policy Agility, and constantly growing Policy Space.

Meanwhile, yes, as has often been said, things mostly change only one funeral at a time. We won't be able to survive that constraint forever. We need to find a better way.

Nevertheless, that's biology as we know it.  It's gotten us this far, and it's produced the human species as we know it - a species that absolutely HAS TO CHANGE, FASTER!

So what happens next, when rate of our own context change accelerates faster than rate of human reproduction? Very soon, we'll have to try additional physiological as well as cultural methods, just to keep up.

Historically, spawning at increasing frequency just didn't pay off. It seems to be a dead end.  Species that have diversified the adaptive race are quite clearly those that instead found a better way, and invented ways to afford to extend the "plastic," juvenile behavioral phase as a proportion of their species lifespan. The trend is fairly clear, from pre-invertebrate to vertebrates to birds & mammals and on to examples such as crows, parrots, primates, elephants, whales, etc, etc. 

Of course there are a FEW anomalies, such as the octopus. 

Nevertheless, of the entire range of "adult" behaviors, those that include investment in extended youth were most frequently selected for enhanced survival, and invention of new niches to live in. Humans have differentiated LARGELY by investing successively more in extended "embryonic" stages of both individuals and entire cultures.

(Well, we did, until the FiatDeficitTerrorists* showed up, and somehow tricked themselves into thinking that the entire, "ROYAL WE" couldn't invest more in the youth of a nation then we get out of them. By all known biological logic, FDT's should cause rapid demise of all cultures where their illogic prevails in adult stages.)

DTs aside, in order to push our cultural adaptive rates past emerging "futureshock" limits, current evidence suggests that surviving humans will soon, quite literally, be those that "never grow up."

War between crunchy/creamy/Skippy/PeterPan variants will ensue? :) Old salts & unsalted investor classes will compete at calculating the new spreads?

And beyond even that? What then? In a far distant future, perhaps most surviving adults will be SchizoPhrenics capable of selectively staging, linking and sequencing their actively generated delusions to match changing contexts, no matter how frequent? :) Now THAT'S a comical thought! We'll cycle through every known, and new, individual and cultural deviancy - in a week? Why, prejudices may finally come & go with the blink of an eye!

[Human diversity! From culturally-suicidal FDTs to easily bored cultural-SPs, and everything in between! We gotta love ourselves, no matter how deviant, for how long! :) ]

And, what if, in some far, FAR distant future, a period of no change ever broke out again!!! Then most schizoid geniuses might rapidly die off - from boredom and disarray! :( The GOP could return! With a vengeance, to successfully slow everything down again. See, we knew they had a use. It's just not here, and just not now! :(  In their glands, the wider the stance, the more regressive the result.

Clearly, challenges will remain, and evolutionary pressures will never go away. We should learn to love gramma & grampa Luddite while they're here. They'll be gone before we know it. Let's just agree to not go down with their ship, no matter how Titanic.


ps: Dan Flemming suggests the Wake Me Up Song as a possible remedy.

ps: ps: Luddites may prefer a tape of an unchanging, "Breathe In, Breathe Out" GOP cycle.

* Can someone PLEASE ask every Jane & Joe Sixpack in the USA, what, EXACTLY, a "deficit in fiat" actually means? Please? Use of the term obviously follows Sophist rather than consistent logical trends based on dictionary definitions. People are confusing "sophist" and "sophisticated" labels, and adopting Luddite habits rather than abandoning them. Nobel Prizes in economic sophistry are the result, and it's taking us backwards asleep, not forwards with eyes wide open and aware.