Ian Welsh does a great job of recruiting more of our unpracticed thinkers to facing our neglected but critical challenges.
The list gets a little long and redundantly precise, but all his points are helpful in recruiting the great, unwashed masses to things more important than pop culture and overly local gratification.
Of course everyone is
looking for a better way. Welsh helps out by suggesting a number of options to consider selecting from. We're drowning if naive suggestions, of course, which makes it difficult to select where to start. Welsh helps, right off the bat, because he focuses on surviving the looming challenge of ourselves, as the gateway to all other challenges. That's a lifesaving way to start.
Many of the subsequent topics Welsh draws attention to should be familiar to past readers of this blog. Welsh does us all a service by accelerating
recruitment of even more newcomers to these necessary discussion topics. After all,
it doesn't matter what some people know, if they can't get enough others to listen!
Points from Welsh's blog post that are worth expanding on.
1) At any one time, the bulk of individual as well as group decisions are ideological, not rational. Most decisions are quickly, automatically driven by assumptions or beliefs, not slow, emerging proofs. That's an inescapable reality for ANY evolving system in ANY unpredictable universe. We are only testing survival paths. Some times we have to back out of short - or very long - dead end paths. That's reality. Live with it ... or stubbornly die at the end of some cultural dead end.
2) As a corollary, most instantaneous problems that any system faces are ideological (i.e., system or institutional momentum), not practical or absolute limits. Most impediments involve how individuals or groups respond to challenges. It's not the challenges themselves that are tough. Recognizing that a situation or niche has changed is usually the slow part. Emerging perspective is what's always root-limiting.
3) Ergo, in our case, change is easier when people "believe" they should do things differently. Long before they prove why.
* That's just driving home what we always knew, but
fail to teach. Evolution proceeds by discovery, not calculation. We have zero, net predictive power, but lots of adaptive power. It's up to us to actually utilize our adaptive power, by driving an adequate pace of exploring, testing, assessing and recursively adjusting EVERYTHING in our long logistics chain (i.e., in our cultural "embryology" process; aka, our education and training systems).
4) Another implication is that, at any one instant, "leadership" of self or others, by individual leaders - OR BY CATALYST GROUPS - is mostly about
loosening allegiance to old beliefs, as a prelude to establishing trust in new ones. That's a continuous
"shaping" process. Cold calculation of emerging data can never keep up. This is an obvious corollary of the prior points. It's also one which some specialists are always forced to learn, yet one which we
fail to teach systemically. That's a failure of reverse perspective. As we discover new extensions to our old methods, those new discoveries ALWAYS imply subtle refinements that smooth the path for new students to arrive at our current, take-off point. Neglecting that process-tuning only slows the process of individual and group trains of thought boarding at the right stations. Want to know
how to steer a "vehicle" - even a culture - through the same or emerging obstacle courses, faster? Rethink and subtly change nearly everything about the vehicle -
including the deveepment process for all components - back
down to the original details. We do that ALL THE TIME in all industries. What on earth makes us think that that same lesson doesn't apply to our own education, training and policy-development processes? To every aspect of our democratic institutions and our entire culture? The last time we had a
Chip Kelly as POTUS was
FDR. We need to increase the pace of deliberative change, everywhere.
Welsh's essay is a great, example recruiting tool for some audiences. It could be even simpler for, say, younger audiences. It could also go even further for more mature audiences. Assuming that the readers of this blog include at least some of our more mature citizens, here are some extensions to consider.
There's no explicit mention of
instilling doubt as the 1st, shaping step in recursively tuning belief patterns. Letting go of the old accelerates forming new habits. Habits work, until they don't. So get in the habit of changing habits -
when required. When is change required? When individual or group
assessment methods indicate that it is. This isn't rocket science. Just the old cascade of adjusting what did work, once it no longer does. It's not new. All that's
new is how many people we have to teach perspective, doubt, altering beliefs and experimentation to, and how early in our education & training programs to introduce those changes.
There's no mention of the value of developing a more agile population, or team. One instilled from the get-go with the added perspective of - and appreciation for - evolving systems. An electorate consisting of people who always expect to have doubts & to change beliefs, and are quite comfortable with that condition .... are better prepared to keep starting and completing those tasks. Establishing perspective beforehand accelerates willingness to tackle all barriers.
A culture which teaches it's citizens to expect and pursue their own changes, will be least likely to fall into Cargo Cult tangents, and will be more likely to leave other cultures in it's dust.
Enough additions for now. Let's return to a particularly useful point that Welsh DOES make, from a refreshingly different perspective.
He does everyone a service by expanding perspective on one chokepoint topic that is the focus of especially, comically constrained ideological arguments among economists.
I'll expand his point even further, in order to drive home it's value:
"[Full-time]
Jobs aren’t [necessarily, or always the best or only]
way to distribute surplus, but if that is how you do it, you will only get surplus in a tight labor market."
Kudos to Welsh for opening up the full-employment issue for broader perspective, and hence broader discussion. What are the underlying Desired Outcomes? Achieving
AND KEEPING a more Adaptive electorate? If so, then surely we should remain open to simultaneously employing multiple approaches, so we can select from a finer range of more subtle adjustments, sooner rather than later. Ultimately, isn't that what "a more perfect union" is all about? A union that never stops increasing it's Adaptive Rate?
Duh!
* The fatal flaw of many "Austrian" economists, who assume supernatural local abilities to instantaneously calculate infinite variables, simultaneously. It's a massively self-evident fallacy, given the massively-parallel nature of both our universe and even our local contexts.
