The Tortuous Process Of Distributed Learning .... Watching The Masses Slowly Learn

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Escape From The Matrix: Alternative Finance And Investment Advisors

Very interesting, even if slow. The euro-zone may be slow to learn, but it's not like we're all THAT much more agile here in the USA.

ps: the close inspirations for the Matrix movies go back as early as R. Heinlein 1941, D. Knight in 1955, & P.Dick 1957, not to mention the vaguely similar ideas throughout classic literature - all of which stoke our collective imagination.

Every time I think of that, I'm personally VERY offended. Why on Earth wasn't every 10-yr old in the USA able to rapidly obtain OpenSource access to obviously adaptive memes like those early sci-fi books in that list? It would have made a difference for me, growing up. I've read only a very few of those texts listed, and obviously wish I'd read more of them, back when I was avidly reading sci-fi, in grade school.

We're actively retarding our cultural adaptive rate, aka the rate at which our electorate learns, and orients to changing context.

Wherever we could be going, we ain't gonna get there at this current rate, with too many brakes on, rent-seeking from Intellectual Property, instead of seeking the far higher returns on social coordination that even some amoebas are "smart" enough to stick to.

It's rather astounding to watch members of a social-species spending most of their time planning individual, rather than aggregate investing. As one of the Wachowski brothers' other movie character says, "That don't make no sense!"

Is it foolish to look for logic in the chambers of the human CNS?

For Cultural Adaptive Rate To Stay The Same ... Every Luddite Has To Be Stood Upon, Not Argued With

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Paraphrasing Isaac Newton and  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Reviewing "Game Tape" of Human Cultural Development, Before And After Designing New Plays To Try Out

Though relevant, this is not pure accounting hyperbole, so I posted it to the OpenOps blog.

Orthodox Economics Mistakes Men for Machines - And Current Electorates Mistake Economics as Predictive Policy

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Philip Pilkington: Mistaking Men for Machines – How Neoclassical Economics Relies on Computer Science to Misunderstand Human Communication
Orthodox economics misunderstands the dynamics of human communication?

Ya think? Pilkington's thesis is a fair restatement of the theory of evolution, where excessive amounts of data are ALWAYS available, and adaptive evolution consists of arduously SELECTING what amazingly little data actually matters. At any one instant, most data is irrelevant.

To organize on a larger scale? That takes distributed tuning of whole systems, not just the components.

What is distributed tuning in increasingly distributed systems? Exactly when all "strong" signals are roughly in gridlock [note, NOT in equilibrium, which sends the wrong idea] AND further system change is guided by the continuous emergence of new permutations of formerly negligible or at least weak and ignored signals.

Walter Shewhart summed this pretty well, several decades before Turing's musings about signals and local decisions. Shewharts terse note was that "Without context, data is meaningless."

That's why all biological sensory systems are leanly tuned to extract only context-relevant data from a much broader spectrum of available data. Ditto for analytical and motor systems. Every adaptive entity - including human cultures - is always tuned to context. That's what adaptation means.

Discriminating a signal from noise is only step 1.

Discriminating rare net context-relevance from masses of meaningless signals is step 2.

Discriminating what are even more rare, newly emerging and distinctly different signal-pattern-envelopes - from growing collections of context-relevance patterns? That massively parallel pattern recognition approach is what easily distinguishes massively parallel human central-nervous-systems from even the most advanced electronic CPUs now available.

Orthodox economics as we know it seems to have lost track of the following hierarchy, and of how species and nation survival is selected from all the useless data. Rather, it never even had it to begin with.  Economics as I read it is a art form for convincing arrogant aristocrats that they can remain in charge, benevolently CONTROLLING rather than systemically evolving adaptive economies and whole cultures. Please tell me.  Exactly what part of "Central Planning Never Works" don't these idiots understand?  They're barking up the the wrong asset curve.

Here's an adaptive hierarchy that we see repeated as systems scale, by adding layers of organization.

Contexts
Outcomes
Goals
Policies
Strategies
Tactics
Tools/Commodities/Data

Beneath all the selection and tuning tools a system builds up, there is another, deeper system feature that is preserved if any system is to survive. That is an intrinsic ability to change absolutely any part of the system. Only infinite flexibility preserves Adaptive Rate.

We don't discuss this aspect frequently enough to even have a robust vocabulary on the subject, but you can say that a branch of "operations" always cuts across and drives coordination among all the system layers listed above.  At least it does in those corporations, nations and cultures that survive. Some call that a "business culture," but every culture also depends on it's cultural methods for both ability and tempo. For now, let's call those cultural methods or habits the intrinsic operations that allow more cultural flexibility, and therefore a faster Adaptive Rate. In a national culture, social mobility, more liquidity in all it's forms, and less wealth or income disparity are all necessary but not sufficient drivers of higher Adaptive Rates.

Nowadays, Turing might have been driven to ask whether expressions of national Policy_Agility can distinguish blind institutional momentum (lobby "machines") from an actual Thinking Nation.

The answer is easy and obvious.

Getting a distributed electorate to ASK that question frequently enough is the hard part. No coordination => no adaptive culture. The alternative is just a bunch of individual, bureaucratic machines transiently lining their pockets, unable to recognize emerging cultural outcome patterns fast enough to matter.

Our cultural success will follow an index of how massively-parallel our nationwide coordination is, i.e, how wide our individual connections are, and how often we practice using all of them. How specialized we are, will mean nothing in isolation.

Those people who have a speciality will always have a job. Those teams and whole electorates who can most quickly know where, how much and when to use each other's specialties will ALWAYS survive and overgrow other cultures. The conclusion seems simple. All of us must both have our specialties, and self-coordinate them too.

Is that possible? We're in the midst of finding out. We can either do it ourselves, or submit to letting someone else rule us. TBTF bankers, anyone? The TBTF Bankers are brain dead! Long live the TBTF bankers! Or ... is there a better way?

Is There Any Culture Left, Anywhere, That is Agile Enough to Prevent It's Own Failure?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Not in Cyprus, not in the eurozone, and not here in the USA?

What could we possibly do differently? Everything? So why aren't we actually doing just that? 630 million right & left hands no longer know what one another need, let alone what 315 million people collectively need?

Not to mention one, supposedly organized nation.

Forget greater than. Are we actively making ourselves less than the sum of our parts?

We can't succeed trying to calculate everything individually. That's ridiculous, and mathematically impossible. Every organized system constantly employs uncountable numbers of credits and risky debits. We survive ONLY by ruthlessly prioritizing the top few gains, and continously writing off all the negligible & irrelevant debts.

The worst idiocy is to forgo unimaginable return-on-coordination, in order to chase irrelevant, static, supposed debts to self. For those of us with small, calculating minds, what part of "most data is irrelevant" don't you get?

Cultural OCD may be the death of our nation yet, if we don't keep it away from group policy channels.

How to Tune Our Economy? Practice, Focus and Coordinated Policy Development Effort

Commentary by Roger Erickson

"Much current analysis centers on the use of organization and communication of information to improve operational efficiency. For corp. management this could be useful. It is of no interest to too many in political office. Their minds are already made up and more information is superfluous." John Lounsbury, GEI

John's comment accurately drives home the point that it is our political policy methods that are completely obsolete and dysfunctional - regardless of the operational details. We have to change our policy development methods. That simple point has to be faced. Without it, we're wasting our time with all other "investing" issues.

How do we invest in improved policy development methods? If we don't find a way, no amount of investment in strategy and/or tactics will matter.

If the minds of our politicians are already made up, and immune to further information or feedback, that simply means that the same holds for the minds of most of our electorate. What do we do about that stark fact? How does a recombinant system that is that badly out of tune repair itself? For a start, it's hard to imagine 315 million people exploring emerging options if they're not yet aware of how many group options they have or how to find them, let alone how to adaptively explore those options.

There is endless literature on how increasingly complex systems are continuously tuned, year after year, decade after decade, millenia after millenia. The records of key steps are legion, from physics to chemistry to geology to biology to culture - and some key principles are easily discernable.

So why don't we bother to prepare our electorate to utilize those easily visible organizational principles? Why do we struggle to maintain an adequately informed electorate? Look in the mirror. The answer is a distributed one, requiring constantly evolving methods just to maintain the same enduring principles. Do YOU even want more information, or is YOUR mind already made up, rendering even you immune to additional information? If you're not immune, please read on, leave your comments, and/or write to me at rge (aat) OperationsInstitute (dott) come on!

Difficult organizational tasks are always solved through some version of the following process.

Eventually, via accumulated feedback, a process map becomes apparent, visualizing all the "places to intervene in a system." The control points. And with every step of growth, even that list changes and grows, every day! Plus, even keeping up with the growing list of supposed control points isn't even half of the task! [Once you read the list of "clutch, brake, accelerator, gear-shift, steering wheel" - you're fully capable of safely driving a car, right?]

Secondarily, further trial and error feedback indicates a sub-map, visualizing all the "methods for gracefully intervening in known control points." That's where inter-dependency maps start to be appreciated. Such maps are less easily described, and require experience, not just data. Total surprises are the norm. And, this map too changes continuously, even faster than the first map. That's why KM (knowledge mgt) specialists agree that over 70% of how all human systems work and continuously adapt is never explicitly written down. Instead, cultural operations, large and small, are only implicitly passed on, via "monkey see / monkey do" emulation or on-site experience. We all spend our lives embracing and extending muddle-through. Half the genius of our Constitution is it's brevity and focus on principles, and it's disregard for unpredictable details. Changing our Constitution neither precludes nor guarantees adaptive change in our culture. Only altering the cultural methods which we focus on will help us.

There is no other way. It's hard enough to write down parts lists, so any attempts to list or even describe the permutations of parts-list interactions and interdependencies that can occur in different situations immediately gets out of hand. It's simply not productive to even bother writing down all the past, present and emerging interdependencies. It's literally far faster to explore which subset are currently emerging, rather than try to read about the near-infinite super-set of inter-dependencies that could be but isn't currently occurring - at least not predominantly.

We could easily get lost in this necessary introduction, so let's arbitrarily focus, and bring the topic back to maintaining the policy space and policy agility of the USA. That's certainly a complicated task with attributes that change rapidly and continously. We've established that our task cannot be dismissed as either simple or easy. It requires actual thought.

Where are, say, the 50 most fundamental places to intervene in a policy apparatus that scales from local to national policy offices?

What are, say, the 5 most fundamental methods for gracefully intervening, in that diverse policy apparatus? Our goal is to produce desired outcomes by adroitly tweaking all our emerging policy control points both differently and simultaneously. We want to be better at that than any other nation on earth.

Again, we could be at this forever, so let's jump to a focus on changing the electorate's mind about minimum thresholds for what US politicians should be interested in. Does our electorate even understand the paragraphs above? Are our policy staff capable of maintaining our policy agility? When you're done laughing .. to tears ... we'll continue.

Ready yet? Take your time. Come back tomorrow if necessary - or even next week. It's a sobering thought, so if necessary, go get inebriated before returning.

Let's face it. An uninformed electorate isn't likely to elect useful politicians. We can't even predict the growing number of things an electorate should know, to maintain just-adequate Situational Awareness. Nor could we even list those things even if we could predict them!

Yet we can review and focus on key emerging methods that will allow us to regain adequate Situational Awareness, on-demand. After that, we still need the discipline to demand that those methods be used, practiced widely enough to matter, and constantly reviewed and adjusted further. Perhaps we need to focus on our own group agility, and prepare our students to keep that ultimate prize in mind as their #1 goal? We can leave them complete freedom to discover how, as their situations change. If we don't make them aware of why group agility matters, it won't matter how hard our disorganized individual offspring work at uncoordinated tasks.

There's a simple fact we keep coming back to with large economies and populations. "The more degrees of freedom a population has, the more organizational discipline it needs." If a focus on the emerging, key principles required for new situations isn't found ... the bigger organizations fail faster.

It's easier to man and operate a small boat than an aircraft carrier or cruise ship. Without a helluva lot more policy discipline - at least about key principles - an larger crew on a larger boat is dead in the water, and can quickly become a stinking mess. Witness the recent cruise line debacles.

Evolution is an iterative process, involving ways of selectively implementing succeeding layers of unpredictable methods. The key methods that matter are those that allow scalable discipline to be focused on the few things that will deliver access to additional degrees of freedom - i.e., expand our options. There's a needle in every every layer of every growing haystack.

To evolve, we need to focus on finding those needles - not the infinite list of things that are resource sinks but offer no additional degrees of freedom. To even be capable of evolving our culture, we need citizens prepared to pursue that goal, and practiced at the pursuit. If we don't prepare, we're deluding ourselves about our chances, and those we leave for our offspring.

This isn't rocket science. An ignorant electorate absolutely limits our degrees of freedom. Distributed ignorance drastically reduces our group options. A prolonged period of population ignorance absolutely precludes our survival.

So, how do we continually update the very methods groups use to continuously grow organization even as group size and capabilities grow? Sports coaching methods help a little, but they maintain fixed team sizes, so don't answer enough of our questions. Clues from all existing and emerging disciplines must be sifted and combined, just to keep up with demand to optimally organize all interdependencies.

Here's one example of what's being discussed in just one field tasked with constantly increasing demand for more group agility and more distributed group organization. In warfare, the quality of distibuted decision-making means life and death for entire militaries.

Misinterpretation and Confusion: What is Mission Command and Can the US Army Make it Work

That title raises an obvious question for US citizens. "What is Cultural Adaptive Rate, and Can the US Democracy Make it Work?"

Your feedback is needed. By everyone.

Do "Dynamic Value Credits" Come With an Associated Fiat Dynamic-Value Currency?

commentary by Roger Erickson

Short answer is no. The lesson is that we need to manage adequate liquidity, and ignore most details as irrelevant?

How are dynamic values such as piety denominated and accurately tracked? Only on faith? How about affinity credits? It's affinity credits, after all, that bestow the tremendous value of citizenship.

Maha Kumbh Mela Pilgrimage
Makar Sankranti. A Holy bath during this [kickoff] period carries special significance. Those who take a holy bath in the rivers acquire pious credits.

This phrasing is actually very revealing, and really fascinating. Most of our diverse credit systems, including those for dynamic values - the highest values of all - don't even require accurate accounting, but the least valuable of all - static asset credits - does?

This conundrum demands pondering. Some immediate observations follow.

We argue most over what little we think we know, not over what actually matters later on? Seems odd, given we have zero predictive power.  In short, we kill one another most often over form, not function? Are we, in actuality, evolved to individually be the diverse options we collectively demand feedback on? That would at least explain our mass tendency to argue over form instead of function.  Does form really predict foundational value? If enough diverse form is adequately sampled and compared, yes it does - which implies that we have to value failures as well as we do successes.  It's the array of all tests that accurately discriminates global maxima and minima, not just the idiot savant who - entirely by accident - stands near to what turns out to be an adaptive group route. Once on to the next context, we'll need the same array of context sampling, because yesterday's methods don't predict success tomorrow.

To improve adaptive agility, individual and group entrepreneurs have become progressively more flexible.  Despite all formal accounting, reality is that we safely ignore most formal accounting, and tunnel between formulaic paradigms - by flexibly changing our own form in response to ongoing feedback. Actually, all that's saying is that recombination - aka, indirection - constitutes, by definition, extra-dimensional tunneling around existing methods and toolkits, which then become immediately obsolete form in search of newly recombinant function. That's an obvious truism once stated that way.
Our options truly are endless, and rapidly expanding!

Yet anal accountants will continue to slowly calculate formal claims on what others will have always functionally occupied previously. LOL!
There really is nothing functional that's actually new to all of us! Intellectual property is a maladaptive myth! All we really have are wasteful arguments over the form in which we allow recombination events to distribute.
In a fully recombinant system - e.g., a social species or a tribe - to declare static ownership of anything is to declare obsolescence of both asset and owner? No matter the static asset, it's dynamic pass-through value is always far higher in an adaptive system. Recognition by group members of the ratio of dynamic/static valuation is, however, a function of interaction rates. Our success as a nation tracks our ability to achieve a pass-through economy as fluid as smaller tribal economies were. You can already see this trend in the changing definiton of poor and/or disadvantaged. Poor people today have conveniences that rich people didn't just one generation back.

Time to be complacent? Never! Without practiced interactions, we take too long to recognize and explore the higher-value dynamic options. Despite our personal conveniences, our group Output Gap is growing at a shameful rate. It's obvious to all that we're wasting most of our group opportunities, while squabbling over distribution of trivial static assets already available in excess!
It's good to remind ourselves of what constitutes adequate Situational Awareness. By definition, an adaptive system is always coordinating the transition of every static asset to be a component in new dynamic asset, but the tempo of that transition dictates adaptive rate. Consequently, adaptive rate is always dependent upon the latest transients affecting the tempo of recombination. This concept of multiple weak affects tuning process tempo is recognized not just as social catalysts, but also in chemistry and enzymology and physics as catalysts, co-factors and "channels," and in military jargon as "Fast Transients."

Wow! How are coherent patterns of such distributed selective pressures discriminated by groups? Basically, by iterative group practice, same as any other analog-computing-system or network. Even though individuals are the product of very constrained recombination and embryological processes, cultural recombination and embryology is nowhere near pushing the limits of cultural adaptive rate. As processes, cultural recombination and cultural embryology go on continously, in parallel time slicing, with increasing tempo. The average human today transitions through increasing numbers of professions, at faster rates, with greater agility - depending upon the diversity of team practice during both early education and adult work.

All this means that tribal cultures were correct in function, but struggled to scale specific forms for guiding coordination. Is that all we're also competing to do, just on a larger scale? The forms by which we scale populations involve use of larger and larger method sets - e.g, expanding toolkits?

It's not methods alone that drive results. That statement generates an overly simplistic outlook in most people. In everyday jargon, to productively convey our options, we should say that it's practiced, group agility in applying specific permutations of expanding method sets that drives results. In short, return on group coordination.  We need to have all our methods, and selectively use them too? Piece of cake! And an endless one too. No need for argument.  Let us eat our options cake, and accrue even more too!  We can do this.  Easily.

So Recognizable, Long Recognized by Some, & Tragic. Tears of Frustration are Understandable.

commentary by Roger Erickson

“Plan A has failed”: George Osborne on borrowed time as Britain tumbles ...
"Bungling Chancellor George Osborne's borrowing has soared by billions despite his brutal cuts - sparking fears of a triple dip recession yesterday."

There we have it. The pathetically slow outcome of credentialism, vainly waiting for verification from obsolete paradigms.

Has anyone EVER seen the past catch up with the present, let alone the future?

Those "believing" in credentials will refuse to even look for the nested irony hiding here in plain sight. Expect a vigorous, knee-jerk defense of credentialism neverthetheless. It's what they do, choosing to "be" something to Luddites over "do" something to surf emerging change that various "unimportant" people have invariably harped on for multiple lifetimes.  Why do we always relearn, too late, that EVERY process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners?

Our new options are always stockpiled, in spades. How do you get people to explore those options? Our biggest problem is to get complacent, unmotivated people - historians - to accelerate their pace of abandoning slavish allegiance to obsolete credentials. After all, credentials are - by definition - ALWAYS tangential to unpredictable survival paths. Otherwise, nothing would have changed on planet Earth these last 4.5 billion years, not to mention the last 200 years.

We always need to know variable amounts - but usually rather little - about the past, while focusing primarily on where we can go from here. We have zero predictive power but seemingly unlimited selective power, and are always facing situations of increasing, not static complexity and tempo. Hence, when selecting the next level of Adaptive Rate - i.e., new and faster levels of coordination and indirection - paying overmuch attention to credentials is, in practice, always an impediment to unbiased sampling and exploration of emerging options. Sadly, existing credentials are always a record of how we solved yesterdays problems, and WILL slow tomorrow's Adaptive Tempo.  Otherwise, there wouldn't be a steady march of new credentials.  The Credentials are dead!  Long live the Credentials!

Any person who asks his country to wait on existing credentials to endore uncredentialed change, is committing to treason, by being a merchant trading favorable positioning near to advantaged credentials. As Jefferson noted, "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

In a "be, or do" context, credentials represent the personal gain always tempting Luddites to oppose the pace of exploring group options.

OpenSource Mapping of Human Beliefs (Including Individual and Group Paradigms?)

Awesome! This is exactly what I've been wanting to do for years.

These guys have found a marketable way to sell the concept, even if they're not sure what to do with it. I'm sure we do.

The Belief Genome: an open source technology startup

With this sort of tool, one can more easily map out Deficit Terrorist cells and their supporting networks.  Then it's easier to organize a strategy for sending Bruise Missives to their key bottlenecks, the ones clogging our group thinking and preventing policy agility.

Yes, but what about Adaptive Innovator Cells? Can't we also map them, and send Groove Wishes, to collaborate and coordinate with them?

Adaptive war has indeed been virtualized.  The battleground for national and species survival has now moved to the arena where Luddites and innovators OPENLY contest for control of their national and cultural Adaptive Rate.

To paraphrase Joshua Chamberlain: We cannot know what specific contexts the future may bring, and therefore cannot much prepare for them.  We can, however, determine what sort of Adaptive Rates we can muster when those contexts strike.  To better determine those capabilities, we can map AND VISUALIZE all our cultural processes, so we can practice making Rapid Adaptive Transitions in our own culture.