commentary by Roger Erickson
In Germany,
"Merkel is voicing the household analogy. It’s intuitive, MMT is not. That is the challenge we face." [Dan Lynch]
Who says existing monetary operations are not intuitive? By definition, existing operations are ALWAYS intuitive, that's how they end up being existing operations! It's not that the obvious isn't intuitive yet to some, it's just that those not yet finding it obvious haven't yet been exposed to the context that led people working in that area to come to obvious conclusions and practices.
Confusion over what is & isn't intuitive always reflects isolation, lack of communication, and lack of connections in a struggling organization.
You know, putting together what people from
John Law to
Marriner Eccles to
Warren Mosler have said, plus what
Robert Heinlein said, plus what
Walter Shewhart said, plus what
Dan Lynch said, above, [plus a little intuition :) ] we get:
"Data is meaningless w/o context. Therefore, what's intuitive is not intuitive w/o a proper grasp of context. Therefore, if you want to bamboozle most of the people most of the time, it's better if you don't let your marks catch on to actual context." Otherwise, called "divide & conquer."
Grasp of context is what we call "situational awareness," hence the post title.
Why is it so hard to get individuals to examine context first, and data secondarily? It goes back to a saying by an 19th century naturalist:
"People will do anything in their power to avoid thinking." Why? Because it's actual work. To think, one must burn calories, and people have multiple mechanisms for conserving calories unless absolutely necessary.
Why is it even harder to get whole groups to simultaneously examine context first, and data secondarily? First, there's the extra work of alignment - called the "
cost of coordination." Second, there's the lack of exposure to the payoff, the return-on-coordination.
Reassessing context before interpreting data is an endless, indirect process further developed only with practice. It also requires a more agile - i.e., interconnected - mind to start with. That's why humans are better at it than most other species. And it's also why kids are better at
starting it than adults ... but the habit grows & persists only if practiced - and can be completely suppressed with enough drill.
As a corollary, a group can't be agile if the group-mind isn't kept adequately connected.
Finally, thinking can be a very domain-specific habit. Angela Merkel had years of practice thinking about chemistry & physics - sometimes twice before lunch! Yet she may never have acquired the habit of actually thinking about operations in other areas, such as fiscal & monetary policy.
That's a bad sign, overall. When it comes to thinking, the best habit of all is to be fiercely independent about when to think, how much, how thoroughly, and how well. The glory really does go to those who find a better way, faster ... and there's currently no fiscal operations glory (and precious little overall) in either Germany or Greece.
Group thinking? That's defined as the body of messages passing between the elements of a group mind. Our group intelligence is held in our "cloud," our body of public discourse. If that body of discourse on any topic isn't sampling enough diverse perspectives, across multiple disciplines, it can't claim to have enough situational awareness to adequately assess the implications for a group of any amount of data.
If we're going to discuss what's intuitive for one person, we have to also ask what's coherent intuition for a group mind? That obviously depends on the amount of experiences, observations and discussion that are shared across statistically significant fractions of the group.
We're back to some simple truths. First, every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners. Second, fiscal and monetary policy as an example, cannot be improved without widening the base of people and perspectives involved in the discussion.
What doesn't yet seem intuitive for too many people can only be solved by ending their isolation, and bringing them into the experiences, observations and/or discussion of contexts they're simply not yet adequately aware of.
Only then, intuitions in operations and policy circles converge to some form of adaptive common perspective. Only then will our group situational awareness allow shared data to be more useful to us.
