Aggregate Dystopia – Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale; Refusing To Acknowledge The Simple Act Of Aggregate Growth

   Commentary posted by Roger Erickson

Take another example, please!

Eurozone Dystopia – Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale

Once considered from another perspective, why should this surprise anyone? Is pan-cultural "dystopia" really so different from the painful, required responses required of other, observable growth spurts? Do the random DETAILS really matter that much? There are 1001 ways to reconfigure any nation, culture or economy. Yet it has to start with a consensus Desired Outcome, and the distributed will to achieve it, regardless of how.

Look at it this way. Just like human adolescents, any aggregate undergoing a rapid growth spurt HAS to get clumsier before it can re-establish how to rewire it's feedback & self-control instrumentation & management apparatus (e.g., "neuronal" systems), in order to regain and/or add aggregate agility for the new, enlarged size.

The red lines in the plot above are hypothetical, but believable, based on what we've already observed. Do institutional, national and cultural rates of change HAVE to peak, and decline? Is death and rebirth also the fastest way for nations and cultures to grow, just as for individual humans? Or can the pattern of cultural growth rate transition to a smoother, continuous progression?

Clearly, subtle extensions to Darwin's theory of evolution must be appreciated. Species and aggregate survival depends NOT just upon adaptive rate, but also upon the ability to sustain positive adaptive rates, and then also upon the ability to avoid intervening backward steps. It's the evolutionary rate, stupid! That rate is the running sum of all Output Gaps and Adaptive Gaps. Once opened, those gaps can never be regained. Allowing those gaps takes our destiny out of our own hands, and increasingly places it in the hope that competing aggregates may be even dumber and lazier than we are. Good luck with that hope.

For now, it's enough to stress that for a growing aggregate, e.g., a growing nation and/or human culture, it's the institutions which have to emerge, disappear or evolve in some new pattern, in order to fit changing scale. Even literature majors eventually catch on to this primordial reality.

"Everything [beneath the surface] needs to change, so everything can [appear to] stay the same."

Ya think? By one perspective, some quite obvious stages of adaptation are:

1) Recognize that self-awareness & self-control changes with size;

    (That's when honest feedback says things aren't working; "frictions" start to accrue,

     from skinned knees in adolescents, to depressions/recessions/class-wars in aggregates)

2) Prepare to change many things, as size changes (practice);
    (In physiological systems, various agents (molecular signals and/or hormones) have 

     evolved which help to actively grease the skids, so to speak, so that rates of 

     deconstruction & reconstruction in neural systems tracks the rate of growth in other 

     organ systems. This is true for everything from pupating insects to molting birds to

     growing human teenagers - and is still evolving in human super-aggregates, i.e., nation 

     states & human cultures)

3) Define success (what should the new-size aggregate be capable of accomplishing?) - and then don't settle for anything less.
    (Individual human "outcomes" and adaptive responses have slowly been defined, over 

     millenia of evolution. Human cultures are virtual machines, capable of rapid 

     adaptations ... when they select to adapt. If this perspective was instilled in our 

     education process, maybe our schools wouldn't be so obsolete.)

Why can't national populations re-define and "re-wire" their national institutions? And why won't they do so a helluva lot faster than in previous decades? Only for lack of intent, education, preparation and practice? What else do we have to do, that is all that more enticing or important? Watch videos? Overeat? Get drunk & pass out on the curb? Hoard nominal currency units?

All that is at stake is our cultural adaptive rate.

And all that's waiting is our endless list of expanding, aggregate options.

What are YOU waiting for?

What Will It Take To Trigger Some Cultural Adaptations In This Country? We're Long Overdue.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Video too.

From FDR to Obama, John Dingell rates the presidents

This story illustrates, indirectly as well as directly, much that's wrong with our approach to shepherding adaptive public policy. Some immediate thoughts, while reading this.

1) too few get experience or practice at legislating (only kids of politicians & rich people get to be unpaid pages & interns in Congress)

2) too many Congresspeople follow their relatives, or mentors? (may be changing?)

3) the turnover & diversification rate in Congress is far too slow (no one should be irreplaceable; resiliency means many are capable of taking over on a moment's notice; Congress is no longer representative of our changing electorate in all 50 states, regardless of ethnicity, which shouldn't matter to a melting pot)

4) Congress itself is too small, and too easily co-opted by ridiculous things like campaign finance

That's just outside of the many inside insights that Dingell mentions. Read the article to hear his many interesting observations. Will this be enough to make more people think?

Makes you wonder what it will take to trigger some cultural adaptations in this country. We're long overdue.

Will we adapt?

Or will we stop ourselves in our cultural tracks?

Unfortunately, The "Formulization" Of Other Disciplines Is Also Proceeding. Institutional Momentum vs Aggregate Adaptive Momentum.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

(evolving hitching patterns in different size mule teams)

And you thought that NeoLiberalism in economics was bad!

Rebels in many professions are resisting our current period of systemic decline. Take DoD Personnel Doctrine. Please! Or law enforcement mis-training. Or mis-education in general.

And now we can add sociology. For example, the following paper strikes me as an infatuation with formulae, in this case computer modeling.  The article may make some people think (about SOMETHING), but it is functionally useless as a guide to practitioners of Democracy in the real world.

Conditions for the Emergence of Shared Norms in Populations with Incompatible Preferences

"By means of computer simulations, we study conditions ... "

Is it different this time? Have new tools made distributed logic* obsolete? No.

If there's a computer, there's programmed software. And if there's a software program, 99.999% of the time, there is still a presumed formula for handling a presumed static context.

The insidious, main outcome? Creeping acceptance of formulaic methods reinforces a VERY BAD HABIT. Namely, the naive, underlying belief that systems adapt by predictively reorganizing previously describable degrees of freedom, rather than by completely unpredictable & constantly changing sorting following repetitive trial and error. That sort of institutional momentum delays our endless pursuit of Outcomes Driven adjustments and prolongs wasteful wanderings in Ideologically Driven dead ends.

The simpler, more useful message was already and always known. There are no Cookbook Recipes for adapting and evolving - i.e., no formulae, and no reliable program to use. Our degrees of freedom grow faster than our knowledge, habits, methods and practice base.

Our only recourse is ceaseless expansion of distributed trial-&-error, and frantic selection from our own aggregate feedback. No new tool changes the fundamentals of evolution.

1) We always face new aggregate challenges and capabilities, both demanding and bestowing orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom than we currently perceive. Constant exploration is required.

2) We have zero predictive power, yet seemingly unlimited adaptive power.
We can leverage that adaptive power IF we industriously utilize our full distribution of feedback and analysis. Tempo matters. [None of us is as smart as all of us, or as quick thinking when it comes to aggregate context.]

3) How do we survive every new niche we drag ourselves into? We start trying many things, and then start finding out - ASAP! - what starts to work. In the process, we reshape and tune ongoing, distributed momentum, based on distributed feedback.

4) So please cease, forever, the habit of trying to predict unpredictable adaptive formulas beforehand, and in the process constraining the very distributed activity & feedback which we need to drive massively parallel SELECTION.

5) Preserve fundamentals AND evolve more variables. Constantly retune a GRADIENT involving re-standardizing carefully selected infrastructure, while simultaneously promoting active diversification near the outer edge of your evolving system. [To use a building analogy, consolidate nearer to the foundations, and ceaselessly innovate nearer to the top floors. Our spectrum of innovation must include highly conserved elements as well as increased variance in some elements, just for OUR system to evolve. While not letting innovation fall completely to zero anywhere. To survive, EVERYTHING in our system must change. Just not at the same rates everywhere.]

What we have here - 2014 in the USA - is a lull in an unceasing civil war to evolve.

One combatant is our own urge to rapidly over-adapt to transient context, leading to efficiency traps.

The other combatant is our own requirement and urge to re-orient to changing context, sometimes leading to complacency about transient contexts.

Survival, obviously, requires surviving today as well as endless different tomorrows - but never any of those in isolation.

[Then there is also the constant burden of the untrained zombi or deadweight element, which actively resists any and all change, and actually believes that sitting in the middle of the road isn't suicide. They're not on anyone's side. They're just in the way. If we stop our civil war and pay a bit more attention to education and training requirements, the zombies should soon become statistically insignificant.]

Clearly, we need transient efficiency on demand, plus resiliency on demand, not either in isolation.

Right now, we've hitched up half or more of our own team backwards! Some are demanding too much efficiency, and some are demanding too much resiliency. How do we actually get our swelling ranks of combatants to lubricate all the random frictions, and make recombinant love, not factional war?

Since a formula for solving one, static context can be optimized ... does that mean that EXTENSION OF THE SAME FORMULA can provide optimal solutions bridging multiple, different contexts?

No. Most grandparents learn that the hard way, yet most fail to adequately teach it to their kids. Hence - SO FAR! - most grandchildren must relearn many things that their grandparents learned, but didn't pass on as a permanently incorporated part of our expanding cultural toolkit.

Ok. Does that mean that ANY particular formula will work for the unending stream of different contexts we face? NO!!! We've also learned that too, by trial and error. 

You might say that the only formula that works for any system, is to permanently discount excessive belief in any PERVASIVE formula whatsoever. The only formula that's workable long term is to decline all formula except that of a shifting gradient of distributed innovation.

Slowly change foundations, while rapidly sifting through new experimental variables.

That's how we preserve our aggregate adaptive momentum, while varying it too.

Does this work? Yes. And we actually have a tremendous opportunity to increase our Aggregate Adaptive Rate! 

How? By remarkably subtle and simple tuning of our citizen-development methods. It's a given that all citizens will face new horizons that none can predict or specifically prepare for. The most valuable talent to practice is comfort and familiarity with embracing and extending NEW perspectives on our own aggregate and it's situation.

Practice at audacious innovation - not formulas - is what used to drive American Ingenuity.

There's a difference between Aggregate Adaptive Momentum, and Institutional Momentum, and the former always wins in the end.

There's no reason why most citizens can't learn all this by age 10. Unfortunately, we're not even trying to prepare them!

Summary. New tools and methods are:

a) always prompting us to slowly, recursively improve our highly preserved foundation or "logistic" formulae,

b) while also distracting us from practicing further aggregate innovation.

There's a required duality between foundation and exploration. We survive by coordinating, not consolidating those complementary activities.

Aggregate success means grandparents embracing the inventions of grandchildren PLUS challenging them to explore agile vs formulaic applications of new capabilities.

Youth or beginners start with Institutional Momentum in perceived static contexts, and must grow into perceiving Aggregate Adaptive Momentum in unpredictably evolving contexts.

Without adequate aggregate challenges to generate experience, new generations inevitably get stuck in Static Context outlooks, which reduce their Adaptive Rate.

Our current challenge is to invent AND USE subtly altered education and training methods which permanently capture and preserve a higher adaptive rate in yet a larger population.

Froebel seems to have come close to realizing that, 200+ years ago, and most disciples of Kindergarten promptly forgot it! Go figure.

* Casey Haskins defines logic as "using evidence to draw conclusions".
Evolving, distributed logic is therefore: "using accumulating, distributed evidence to draw NEW conclusions about always changing aggregate situations." Clearly there are multiple, simultaneous levels of logic, and the very concept of logic, like data, is meaningless without context.

Tom Atlee — Comparing “Wisdom of the Crowds” to Real Collective Wisdom

“The Wisdom of Crowds” is about how accurate (or not) dozens or thousands of people are when they are guessing the number of beans in a bottle or predicting who is going to win the World Cup. The number of times their average collective guestimates are accurate is remarkable – which is the subject of Surowiecki’s book. But is that what WISDOM is really about? 

If some individual could predict the outcome of this year’s US elections, would we call them wise? Is that what we proclaim Christ or Buddha as wise for doing? 

I would love it if we would reserve the terms “wisdom” and “wise” for guidance that makes life better – especially useful guidance that makes life better for most or all of us – including all the creatures of this living, fragile Earth – over the long term. That’s what we need wisdom for, now more than ever. 

The traditions of the world’s great religions are one source of that wisdom, if we are mindful and heartful about which aspects of them we choose to follow, such as the near-universal Golden Rule of treating others the ways we would like to be treated. That’s wise. 

Various forms of systems thinking – from shamanism to ecology and complexity sciences – offer such wisdom because they deal with the wholeness and interconnectedness of the world. Nature’s ways of solving problems – as revealed by the sciences of biomimicry and evolution – also offers such guidance because nature’s solutions (and ways of generating solutions) have arisen and proven themselves through millions of years of testing.

Public Intelligence Blog
Tom Atlee: Comparing “Wisdom of the Crowds” to Real Collective Wisdom

For Those Who Can't Grasp Democracy - Consider the 2nd Derivative of Disruption

   (Commentary by Roger Erickson)

No Central Planning, No Central Control

There is plenty of evidence that large human "democracies" of this sort existed in multiple sites worldwide, in between cultural "development" cycles.

Evidence: large population or temple sites showing outcome of large-population labor, absence significant, long-term evidence for present-day combinations of agriculture, weaponry and/or warfare - e.g., Stonehenge, Catal Hyuk, Harappa, and many paleolithic & neolithic sites in South/North America, Asia, Africa & Europe.

One simple, unproven hypothesis is that it is our rate tool invention itself that stresses us.

When a subgroup of humans invent a new tool, practice or process ... they invariably misuse it (typically against their neighbors) for a long time, before settling into an optimal pattern of adaptive, distributed use (i.e., common sense slowly becoming common & obvious, through reverberating feedback).

Then another game-altering tool/practice/process is invented, which allows some parasites to bully the system again ... just 'cuz they can ... until we all wise up again.

You'll even hear this from experienced businesspeople: "I finally learned that just because you can ... doesn't mean that you should."

A core question for ORGANIZED systems is how to invent new tools, and AVOID misusing them before adaptively using them. This boils down to be the 2nd derivative of disruption. Just because some entire system has to be rebuilt per an altered design, doesn't mean that burning it down and starting from scratch is ALWAYS the most adaptive procedure. 

Rather than eradicating prior clans and clones before repopulating a new niche, a key advance invented by social species is to RAPIDLY scavenge, rescue and reuse existing populations, for immediate application to new tasks while accelerating exploration of new options in new niches. Whether you call it re-deployment or reorganization doesn't matter.

There are ways to titrate that path which produces the most new options, soonest. That titration method requires FULL-GROUP FEEDBACK, and we call it Democracy. Following that path requires continuous, real-time, statistical evaluation of the complex moment of adaptive power in a distribution of lost-vs-gained, net+local option-exploration.

Such titrated evaluation requires a statistical evaluation of a 2-stage optimization process. Keep the components well fed PLUS grow the net systemic options. Neglecting either stage feeds disparity, but not net adaptation.

Why Nearly Everyone Born After 1970 Should NOT Be Satisfied With Their Education - Or Upbringing

Commentary by Roger Erickson

And mostly disgusted with both of them.

Why anyone born after 1970 should be pissed.

Ok, this author is angry, but that's not really the point, is it?

For survival, the ONLY POINT - ever! - is to decipher context, and then adapt to it.

Note that I specifically did NOT say "analyze context." When it comes to cultural evolution and adaptive rate, there is no TRY. There is only DO, or exit the stage extinct, or enslaved by those who will.

Saying that you've been had is just a euphemism for saying that you've been clueless up to now. Those people who've had  you for lunch are NOT going to respond, after the fact, to complaints. Only action.

So.  What, exactly are you - and your little Middle Class - gonna DO about it, now that you've noticed? 

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Morris Berman — The Parable of the Frogs

What does it take to produce large-scale social change? Most historians, if you catch them in an honest moment, will admit that the popular levers of social change, such as education or legislation, are bogus; they don’t really amount to very much. What does make a difference–and then only potentially–is massive systemic breakdown, such as occurred in the United States in the fall of 2008.

Counterpunch
The Parable of the Frogs
Morris Berman
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)