(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)
In case you haven't noticed.
THE USA WON. Yet now we're addicted to the form, and have lost track of the function.
The corollary message that this whole
Snowden-NSA affair drives home?
The awesome, overwhelming power of the USA.
I don't see how anyone reading the details could conclude anything else except the fact that the US won,
hands down, and now has the
capacity to easily know & ward off literally every significant challenge occurring anywhere. We can, will and do know seemingly everything about anything ... but nothing about what any of it is for.
The bigger message here is that we don't seem to know what to do with that capacity, and with our victory.
We are actually misusing our victory so badly that we're actively trying to stuff square success into the round jaws of failure.
The only constant seems to be our systemic ineptitude despite overwhelming brilliance in every narrow discipline.We're simply back to data-wise and context-foolish, on a scale more epic than ever before.
Even though we've been better than this before.
We obviously couldn't KEEP our better capabilities. You have to conclude that our grandparents would be disappointed, and downright ashamed of us. We're supposed to be better than this, can be, and will. It's only a question of how, and when. Why is not up to us. If we can't regain our adaptive role, someone else will do that TO us.
The ONLY things that we don't over-teach in our schools?
As a start, how about the fact that, by definition, interdependencies between truly novel discoveries cannot be predicted? Certainly not in real time. And, that failing to acknowledge & explore unpredictable inter-dependencies is a guaranteed way to keep interrupting our systemic success?
We are actively lying to ourselves about the unpredictability of systemic failure. Systemic failure is guaranteed by the unpredictability of emerging interdependencies. We only need to ditch the arrogance that leads us to lie to ourselves about our predictive power ... and then go about the easy task of discovering the awesome interdependencies generated as a totally free byproduct of our narrow discoveries. This is NOT rocket science. It's simple, aggregate practice.
To illustrate the easy part, say three people independently invent a hammer, a metal nail, and a saw. Do we arbitrarily focus on war hammers, nail-bombs and CIA-torture methods - and in keeping others from using hammers, nails & saws? Or do we discover carpentry, house-building, architecture and art - and who knows what else? It's all in our outlook, our ability to parse feedback, and our amount of practice at assessing aggregate outcomes.
WHY are we turning something so easy into something so difficult?
If the NSA can presume to predict the proclivity of oppressed, under-educated people to resent our actions, then they sure as hell COULD also acknowledge, track and report the proclivity of our own sociopaths to presume that they know how to constrain our Aggregate Adaptive Path, by Central Planning!
Further, the NSA's same methods could be re-purposed to Adaptive Use by our full aggregate, to track and assess our electorate's balance of listening over-much to our few sociopaths, versus to our entire aggregate's feedback.
If we want Democracy, we have to invest in methods to extend and then KEEP it's benefits. That's exactly what we are not doing. Instead, we're investing in keeping admirers in other countries from emulating what we've already achieved. That reduces to investing in our own failure. It's self-assisted suicide policy, and we should outlaw it. Our own adaptive rate is our most valuable moving target, and we've taken our aggregate eye off of that target!
Instead of bothering to attack the NSA and our
MICC, let's stop them in their tracks, and repurpose the MICC, just like we did with the banks in 1933. We can repurpose the MICC by gifting them a killer technology called a social mirror (full, aggregate, feedback awareness). Given a mirror, repurposing them will be incidental ... but only if they're forced to actually use our social mirror.
There is, actually, a simple, concluding question to draw attention to.
It's not just continuously right-sizing fiat currency supply that matters to a dynamically changing population.
How does any aggregate Right-Size Aggregate Context-Awareness?
And then continuously KEEP it right-sized, despite unpredictable changes?
