Representation Of Dynamic Creation In Double-Entry Bookkeeping. It Doesn't Exist.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Finally, an economist who speaks my language!

[Economics] "is a classic example of trying to understand something that is essentially dynamic - innovation - in a static model focused on calculating the optimal or the most efficient allocation of resources."

Ya think? NeoClassical economics is absolutely blind to the greatest return by far, the return on coordination.

To economists of all stripes, it's like the history of evolution, and the history of the universe, never happened. Only this quarter matters. Yeah right, to them and dinosaurs!

And Peter Thiel is an example of an idiot savant, so naive that it's laughable, no matter his Buffet-like talent at over-adapting to a transient context.

Speaking of evolution, it's the art of charting an optimal path through an unpredictable series of transient contexts, occurring with unpredictable intervals. Over-adapting to any transient context is the surest way to fail to prepare for the next one, and hence a good way to commit suicide.

Economics is the art of optimal asset allocation for a single context. 

Hence, long term cultural survival is about USING ECONOMIC ANALYSIS WITHIN PRACTICAL BOUNDS. Is that really so difficult?

Having economists dictate the limits of Aggregate Policy is like an architect letting a carpenter with a hammer dictate design limits. All you can end up with is dents in everything, and a lot of damage.

Risk management is NOT leadership. Nor is asset allocation. 

Where can cultural evolution take us? Where will it take us? Don't ask lawyers, and for humanity's sake, do NOT ask economists. All they can tell us are the risks to today of going to someplace else or becoming anything else tomorrow, and hence they also can't grasp the risk of NOT changing, and not going somewhere else from here.

Capiche?

Any nomad would understand the risk of not moving on. You'd think human Context Nomads would understand the risk of listening to lawyers & economists, when it comes to deciding where to go next.

Don't ask me why they won't.  Ask yourself.

Navel-Gazing vs Exploring Aggregate Options. A Metaphor. The Paleolithic Aggregate_Brain Diet.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

I this what "nature intended?" Or, like capitalism, is EVERYTHING we come across just a statistical blip in the path of "Context Nomads" .... and "nature" didn't give us any instruction other than to survive (even ourselves)?

That brings up an analogy.

The Paleolithic Aggregate_Brain* Diet

To avoid you know what.

This is just one part of a bigger spectrum of tasks: ... HOW do we get people to KEEP exploring their (personal PLUS aggregate) options?

Hint, adequately provision the components (individuals) AND exhort them to do something other than just brainlessly over-consume whatever they initially market to one another.

Beginning minds start out over-consuming, yet growing minds soon graduate to lean exploration of insanely exhilarating options (personal plus aggregate).

Here's a quick example, below, featuring another review of evidence for human adaptation to low-grain diets (any combo of veggies/fruits/meats, plus occasional seeds thrown in).

Current uber-capitalists won't like this either, since they "don't do nuance".

Note that this data is curated & promoted by the USA NIH NCBI - National Center for Biotechnology Information. Think of it as analogous to Fed_Data, for Public Health, not economic data.

Comparison with ancestral diets suggests dense acellular carbohydrates promote an inflammatory microbiota, and may be the primary dietary cause of leptin resistance and obesity

Ian Spreadbury, GIDRU WingKingston General Hospital76 Stuart StreetKingston, Ontario K7L 2V7, Canada(613) 549-6666 x6520is15@queensu.ca

My synopsis (for those intimidated by non-economic, discipline-specific jargon):

Sure, grains/milk/cheese let large populations of humans occupy nutrient-poor regions, yet such high-density nutrients need never be eaten in more than micro quantities.

Note: I'd emphasize LOW-GRAIN, not no-grain. Even foragers find whole grains periodically.  

This fits into the general story of over-utilization.
We no longer know how little we need .... even while advertisements exhort us to over-use EVERY form of food (& other commodities, even fiat IOU numerals themselves).

Face it. Humans everywhere are bored. Not just Americans. There's more to life than consuming random stuff that advertisers ("pushers") encourage one another to over-consume. That covers more than just food.

What minimum food supply will get humans to the moon? How about to Mars? 

... 

How about to the future?

Analogously, what dynamically right-sized-commodity-supply will get homo sapiens to the future?

It's worth asking every 10-yr old worldwide these questions, so that they're primed to be interested in SOMETHING besides just over-consuming ... i.e., uselessly hoarding ... like the Koch brothers, or Warren Buffett, or all sociopaths, er, "billionaires."

Of course we can go somewhere from here. Where?

Just where advertisers suggest?

Or something beyond current imaginations? Surely there's no point in limiting ourselves. Instead, let's adequately provision our grandchildren, and overweight them with aggregate options, not just fat cells or hoarded public fiat.

Ever see an advertiser advertising tomorrow? Or just what feebly small amount they can imagine today? The difference is bigger than our Output Gap, it's our grandchildren's Options Gap.

This is, after all, just one of many necessary but not sufficient steps to take. Every human could and probably should, by age 10, grasp the Anti-Hypocritic Oath: "First, Do No Harm, Personal OR Aggregate." There are plenty of subsequent challenges, and we don't want to get in the way of all of those, current or as yet unrecognized.

Sure we've found ways to fix that. And we've also found ways to go too far. 

Can't we just fix that too? You'd think so, if more of us would only think, more often ... about how little matters, long term, ... instead of mindlessly spouting advertising to one another, without thinking ... and listening to advertising, again without thinking.




* For those with un-exercised imaginations, the intelligence of a "brain" depends on the organized inter-connections of all the neurons it contains (developed by practice). A GroupBrain depends on the patterns of discourse exercised among all the citizens of that group. Capiche? Imagine if Americans knew more of what Americans know to matter. That requires group practice, to whittle down how little matters to successive, fleeting contexts. We can only get there by selecting to practice, enough, on an aggregate scale.

The Deeper Meaning Of Entrepreneurism ... Aggregate-Entrepreurism

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)






If a collection of cells (you) can act entrepreneurially, why can't a collection of 330 million citizens act as a team? They can? How? How often WILL they? And why not all of the time, or at least more often than we have been cooperating recently?

How do we get our nation to explore it's aggregate options?

First, recruit an electorate to recognize and explore their BIGGEST options? Please tell me, if you know where to start, and how to do that. Clearly, there are many options. How do we most productively explore those aggregate options?

Now THAT is an interesting topic!

How can a RAIDLY EXPANDING auto-catalytic aggregate continuously reform both its internal-feedback sensing AND external-scouting strategies to constantly re-extract adaptive, aggregate context modeling from its (exponentially expanding? factorially expanding?) "option space?" (More plainly, simply explore its rapidly expanding options.)

Why, that would make us an Entrepreneurial Aggregate! That would be a whole far greater than just the sum of our individual entrepreneurs, "entrepreneurially" sequestering resources back and forth FROM one another! :(

This is truly the "Evolving Aggregate's Task." In fact, it's quite obviously every aggregate's #1 task, by far.

Making aggregate option explorations a snap? Now that would be exciting. Much more so than just trivial tactical tasks.

That's obviously what happens when agile teams explore contexts. It's the most important task facing national aggregates, and probably the most neglected. That's what Context Nomads do, and we are all Context Nomads, all the time, whether we know it or not.

The deeper meaning of entrepreneurism is to occasionally turn away from frictions and sequestering existing resources FROM one another, to the rarely practiced activity of exploring aggregate options for creating not just more resources ... but actually creating a pool of resources another order of magnitude larger than what we could previously access. Total teamwork? What a mundane, but ignored, concept! :(

The simple truth is that we as an aggregate are always capable of creating more wealth than any of us can currently imagine. Yet instead, for spurious reasons, we spend most of our time hoarding what we've already got ... FROM one another, instead of optimally provisioning our most valuable asset, our aggregate teammates! That is embarrassingly dumb, and the opposite of being entrepreneurs.

How much of available aggregate information do we need, in order to perceive emerging, aggregate context? Not as much as we initially imagine. It's clearly a matter of data-sampling methods and context-modeling methods and option-exploration methods. Surely that's not to hard to practice, aka, between wars, not just during world wars?

A method to simplify pictures makes chemistry calculations a snap

We actually have mathematicians patenting algorithms for extracting data images from complex data sets.

Why patent? Exactly so we can constrain the adoption rate of the application of the advanced method just invented, for narrow vs aggregate gain. And thereby slow our aggregate adaptive rate? Do tell! When is too much of one method (patent protection) too much to bother with as an aggregate? When it's time to adjust, can we DISCERN when to make aggregate adjustments fast enough to keep from harming our aggregate selves? Do we have ways to even sense that, soon enough to matter? Or only long after the damage has been done?

And why slow the population penetration of new inventions at all? Do we really know what we are doing? Is too soon ever too soon?

Since those two tolerance limits change, how do we stay safely between them, and pursue that moving target?

Our application of our emerging knowledge parsing methodology is too timid.

Our emerging methods are too useful to be limited ONLY to compartively trivial applications such as medical imaging or molecular modeling.

What about modeling our own cultural context, and our our aggregate adaptive rate?





Really? What if we tried being an effective NATION? What would motivate us to try that? I mean, something other than another war?

No one person can supply adequate answers, but we can start asking more challenging questions of one another.

What Was At Stake, And Ultimately Lost ... From Within. Are We Seeing The Demise Of CONTEXT NOMADS?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Have you ever come to recognize a people's failure to adapt, and lead themselves?

That observation can be made in more than one current setting.

In fact, it's a widespread & unmet challenge among literally billions of humans.

Here's just one of many, illustrative examples.

Andy:
"Unrelated Bill, but perhaps you will allow me to recommend a wonderful documentary and, in my view, a valuable historical record about the Miners strike in Britain in 1984-85. It’s called

Still the enemy within 

It looks at the strike from the miners’ perspective and that of their wives and crystalizes the battle (literally) between the State and organized workers plus what was at stake, and ultimately lost."

That's from a comment at: While Europe debates a placebo the disaster deepens

What is an observer of these - and many more examples - to conclude?

First, perhaps, that this all ties together rather simply. Our major difficulty is orienting so many people to the nuance of emerging group context. Organizing & re-organizing on this scale poses a novel recruitment task requiring new methods plus learning how best to wield them after they're invented. The herding cats metaphor applies as never before.

Second, that regardless of which & how many details are discussed, these are all rather straightforward failures to organize & re-organize any & all methods ... as context changes. That's certainly one general conclusion.

Our biggest problem seems to be our own, aggregate lethargy, mostly a cognitive lethargy. We're simply getting in our own way. No single challenge we hear people lamenting is in of itself in the least bit daunting. Our ancestors would howl with laughter watching us - once they sorted out the unfamiliar but un-daunting context.

Why? Because, none of our present stories are conceptually different from previous sad endings, such as the self-programmed demise of the Greenland Vikings, not to mention countless other stories of prior human challenges, successes and failures. We've come all this way, and now suddenly billions of homo sapiens can no longer execute staging, linking & sequencing of more group agility? That really is comical, as well as tragic.

Humans used to be good at change. In the past several hundred thousand years, we spread all over the entire globe in multiple waves - incredibly quickly - as NOMADS.  And along the way we quite incidentally diversified any & all of our methods AT WILL, as we became many different cultures, and even formed and recombined different subspecies!

Any ancient nomad could do this! Before breakfast. Without breaking a sweat.

Go anywhere and be anything ... in 2 generations. That's what we've always done. Call it the "Traveling Entrepreneur Task."

In fact our kids ... when we leave them alone ... can still do this with ease.

So what happened to too many of our present adults, in so many different settings? We're no longer geographic nomads, but since other aspects of context keep changing, we always were - and remain - Context Nomads.

Why are too many of our adults just sitting down and refusing to keep changing, even as the rest of the human troop (including their own descendants) go on exploring the next context?

Our primate ancestors came out of Africa and went everywhere. Now we honor them by refusing to keep going, by exiting the past & present ... and exploring new dimensions of cultural reorganization and evolution?

For shame.

Sayonara, old folks sitting down on the path. You're history. Do your descendants a favor, and quit urging them to hunker down with you, and abandon Nomadism.

No rapidly changing methods, no survival.

It's a wonderful, always changing world. Our aggregate options are expanding exponentially. And it's a shame that so many people can't find joy in simply exploring it AND all it's changes.

"Learning To Navigate Context" ... vs "New Culture Is Always Putting An End To Much Of Older Culture"

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



A really interesting article here (below).

In general, this navigation essay touches on how much of the cultural-baby to throw out with the cultural-bathwater, with every, asynchronous step in generational turnover. Yes, there's always more ritual than most appreciate, which can theoretically be shed, but differentiating cultural baby-fat from a pound of cultural flesh, and when to shed it ... can easily get to be rather dangerous.

One has only to study embryology to appreciate the 2-stage art of recombination PLUS fabrication. We all know that lemons occur, despite all efforts at assembly line control.

That's before some people even realize that human culture is in a state of continuous, interleaved cultural-embryology. 

Many things not necessary for adults are QUITE necessary for different stages of development, whether during early embryogenesis or during childhood. In general, the more you know, the less you need ... but ONLY after you've learned that much. :)

Then, finally, you realize that WE need recombinant kids just to parse the unpredictable things your aggregate will need next.  That occurs even though you no longer personally need kids, and you eventually realize that at some point, your aggregate no longer needs YOU!

Get over it.

Hence, "oops" occur every generation within groups, and every singe time groups meet and merge. That's why large, current cultures spend as much or more time looking back as we do looking forwards. Recovering from our own mishaps is a large part of cultural as well as individual survival. Eventually, every individual metaphorically hammers their own thumb hanging a picture ... and every culture shoots a million of it's own feet. It's how we recover & adjust that counts.

In the end, we're all still Context Nomads, individually & culturally, and there are endless, unique tricks & shortcuts to optimally dealing with every context. The glory of survival really does go to those who re-orient and re-adapt soonest. That process goes on regardless of which individual or distributed thumb was hammered, or which pound of component or cultural flesh was usefully or harmfully shed.

Of Metaphysics and Polynesian Navigation

(hat tip Kevin, in a prior comment)

The Chief Difference Between Science & Other Human Enterprises Such As Economics, Warfare & Politics Is That Brilliant Blunders In Science Are Less Costly.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

Revisiting Freeman Dyson's book review: 

The Case for Blunders

This is a useful lesson - with two relevant postulates - for those interested in the public utility of political economic & economic policy lobbying.

Postulate #1: Disastrous [aggregate] decisions are most often the result of influential people pursuing partisan squabbles and neglecting the long-range interests of electorates?

I'll wager that few experienced REAL scientists would argue with that conjecture, and few experienced military strategists either. (Almost all economists simply don't count, since they ONLY make theories, and NEVER realistically test them, let alone adjust them in real-time to ages old - let alone emerging - operational results.)

Postulate #2: This illness of factional friction vs aggregate coordination is a disease to which governments - and electorates - of all kinds, including democracies, are fatally susceptible?

Of course. Any arguments? Hardest thing for any aggregate to do is both grow it's numbers AND better organize them ... simultaneously.

So the $100 question is how to stop beating our aggregate head against that distributed wall?

How do we reduce our susceptibility to that fatal, distributed tendency for aggregate policy development practices to dissociate vs further coordinate?

Any suggestions? Hint. I'll also wager that the most productive adaptive step we could make most likely involves some recursive process tuning. Where? Working on a process step buried somewhere near 5 steps back (plus or minus 2?) in our interleaved, "cultural-recombination" development cycle for raising new citizens. 

Here's one of many possible approaches, asking "why" 5 times in succession, to arrive at one fundamental blunder in our approach to constantly refining aggregate education.

Step -1) Why do we have ossified policies?

(Because we don't approach aggregate policy as a rigorous, outcomes-based science?)

Step -2) Ok, so why DON'T we practice aggregate policy as real science (outside the occasional scientist or military general)?

(Because most policy staff NEVER learn the scientific method, nor appreciate it?)

Step -3) Ok, so why do electorates select politicians who have no grasp of aggregate policy as a science, not just sociopathic horse trading?

(Because electorates aren't educated well enough to explore aggregate options more scientifically?)

Step -4) Ok, so why aren't all voters previously steeped in enough system science and aggregate policy-selection science to select better political "leaders" - instead of settling for lawyers competing to avoid local risk for non-cooperating factions?

(Because scientists and system scientists in particular don't get enough training or practice at crossing traditional boundaries and applying well known scientific methods & insights to tuning emerging policy questions, and also to circumventing non-scientific social taboos?)

Step -5) Ok, so why aren't more citizens trained to audaciously apply available scientific methods & insights to existing and emerging policy questions?

(Because our education system trains all students in constraining, task-oriented service habits, instead of aggregate-outcome-based teamwork. We are still Context Nomads, wandering into new contexts every year, but we no longer train our own children to embrace the full-spectrum task of approaching net-context exploring ALL aggregate options. We've balkanized our own electorate, by training all citizens as specialists who tend to know more & more about less & less, until too many know everything about next to nothing?)

In short, one suggestion - out of many options - is to go back to OBT&E, and find any & all ways to KEEP that approach, throughout all aspects of cultural education. Humans were successful nomads throughout history. Surely we can reclaim enough of those skills to remain successful Context Nomads.

What is "THE QUESTION" - Looking Beyond ISLM & Similar Inanities

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Comparing the irrelevant, archaic ISLMists with real scientists triggered this blog.

For example, this video about Einstein repeatedly mentions:

1) fusing many things, into ... "what is the question," and

2) time has no meaning; an evolving species simply DOES NOT CARE how long the next step takes.

That has helped me clarify one way to express my long-held thesis - that we're already at a transition point in human evolution.

Where have we been? Scientists - i.e., human "thinkers" - throughout history have pushed the boundaries for fusing whatever incident data WHICH ONE HUMAN MIND COULD ABSORB.

Where are "we" going? Upon reflection, the non-dialectic approach above obviously DOES NOT SCALE without limit. The very paradigm loses relevance. There is already a new question overriding all the previous ones.

We've seen it before. Far in the past, some single-cell organisms reached the pinnacle of context representation WHICH ONE CELL COULD MIRROR, MAP AND NAVIGATE THROUGH. The next step for cells was themselves fusing into massively multi-cellular aggregates - aggregates which could be capable of fusing inputs, options and mappings far beyond the paradigms which any single cell could ever even manipulate.

What, analogous limit are we humans at, even now? Our next step is quite obviously massively multi-personal cultural aggregates. And the next analog to a theory of relativity will be a fusion NOT of space-time into a unified field topography, but fusion of context-options into one, unified context_space topography, exposing the possibility of appropriate mapping and navigation methods.

Ergo, it's no longer maximally interesting to even consider what information any single human can mirror, map and navigate. What is the EMERGING QUESTION that defines the frontiers our descendants will navigate? What context extensions - with extended dimensions - can our emerging CULTURAL-ENTITIES mirror, map and navigate - which will be beyond our personal ability to even comprehend?

Once stated that way, it no longer matters what an individual knows. It only matters what an aggregate collectively perceives, explores and selectively navigates.

Soon, a single node in a choreography ensemble, marching band or evolving culture ... will no longer even be able to perceive the dimensions of Options Space which are already open to the growing ensemble it is a component of. The units themselves - us - won't even field the degeneracy instrumentation able to mirror and parse all the added dimensions of context mirrored by the aggregate. It's mathematically impossible.

The ONLY choices of interest represent two directions on one, extensible tensor. Regression into the churning reverberations of prior states, and death. Or, expansion by diversification, into options and an options-space beyond ourselves. Actually, our choices don't matter, since time has no meaning. The latter will occur, here or elsewhere, regardless of our choice. We can't even tell whether it already has! We're not even aware of most species of life existing in a gram of matter anywhere on earth, nor are they cognizant of us. Who's to say what might already lie, mutually undetected both "upstairs" from here and downstairs from there.

Our greatest residual point of interest? How will we eventually accommodate our own evolution? All components crafting a greater whole are constantly selecting which local options to trade for which collective options, while conferring added security statistics. To build a cultural "physiology," we will presumably all retreat to being the equivalent of liver cells, i.e., "professions," plus some fraction of stem-people, able to go anywhere and trigger mutation and/or re-growth of any type of needed subunit, even if only adipose-people.

With promise of a guaranteed supply of Scotch, would YOU be content living out YOUR days as a respected - even renowned! - liver cell? :)

As for what it will be like "upstairs" - well, there's no use even speculating. We're either going with the flow & enjoying the ride, or fighting currents through dimensions we can't even perceive.  Since we can't perceive where we came from nor where we're going, why not just act like Context Nomads performing Real-Resource-Taxis, and truly enjoy the changing scenery?