Peter Turchin — Science versus Ideology: Readers Comment on Ultrasociety

It’s amazing how the landscape of book publishing has been transformed in the last ten (or even five) years. Not only it’s now possible for authors to reach readers directly, as I did with Ultrasociety, without the intermediaries of literary agents, publishers, and printers, but the reverse communication channel is also wide open. And fast—I started getting feedback from readers within a week of publication.….

Cliodynamica — A Blog about the Evolution of Civilizations
Science versus Ideology: Readers Comment on Ultrasociety
Peter Turchin | Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, Research Associate in the School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, and Vice-President of the Evolution Institute

The Deeper Meaning Of Entrepreneurism ... Aggregate-Entrepreurism

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)






If a collection of cells (you) can act entrepreneurially, why can't a collection of 330 million citizens act as a team? They can? How? How often WILL they? And why not all of the time, or at least more often than we have been cooperating recently?

How do we get our nation to explore it's aggregate options?

First, recruit an electorate to recognize and explore their BIGGEST options? Please tell me, if you know where to start, and how to do that. Clearly, there are many options. How do we most productively explore those aggregate options?

Now THAT is an interesting topic!

How can a RAIDLY EXPANDING auto-catalytic aggregate continuously reform both its internal-feedback sensing AND external-scouting strategies to constantly re-extract adaptive, aggregate context modeling from its (exponentially expanding? factorially expanding?) "option space?" (More plainly, simply explore its rapidly expanding options.)

Why, that would make us an Entrepreneurial Aggregate! That would be a whole far greater than just the sum of our individual entrepreneurs, "entrepreneurially" sequestering resources back and forth FROM one another! :(

This is truly the "Evolving Aggregate's Task." In fact, it's quite obviously every aggregate's #1 task, by far.

Making aggregate option explorations a snap? Now that would be exciting. Much more so than just trivial tactical tasks.

That's obviously what happens when agile teams explore contexts. It's the most important task facing national aggregates, and probably the most neglected. That's what Context Nomads do, and we are all Context Nomads, all the time, whether we know it or not.

The deeper meaning of entrepreneurism is to occasionally turn away from frictions and sequestering existing resources FROM one another, to the rarely practiced activity of exploring aggregate options for creating not just more resources ... but actually creating a pool of resources another order of magnitude larger than what we could previously access. Total teamwork? What a mundane, but ignored, concept! :(

The simple truth is that we as an aggregate are always capable of creating more wealth than any of us can currently imagine. Yet instead, for spurious reasons, we spend most of our time hoarding what we've already got ... FROM one another, instead of optimally provisioning our most valuable asset, our aggregate teammates! That is embarrassingly dumb, and the opposite of being entrepreneurs.

How much of available aggregate information do we need, in order to perceive emerging, aggregate context? Not as much as we initially imagine. It's clearly a matter of data-sampling methods and context-modeling methods and option-exploration methods. Surely that's not to hard to practice, aka, between wars, not just during world wars?

A method to simplify pictures makes chemistry calculations a snap

We actually have mathematicians patenting algorithms for extracting data images from complex data sets.

Why patent? Exactly so we can constrain the adoption rate of the application of the advanced method just invented, for narrow vs aggregate gain. And thereby slow our aggregate adaptive rate? Do tell! When is too much of one method (patent protection) too much to bother with as an aggregate? When it's time to adjust, can we DISCERN when to make aggregate adjustments fast enough to keep from harming our aggregate selves? Do we have ways to even sense that, soon enough to matter? Or only long after the damage has been done?

And why slow the population penetration of new inventions at all? Do we really know what we are doing? Is too soon ever too soon?

Since those two tolerance limits change, how do we stay safely between them, and pursue that moving target?

Our application of our emerging knowledge parsing methodology is too timid.

Our emerging methods are too useful to be limited ONLY to compartively trivial applications such as medical imaging or molecular modeling.

What about modeling our own cultural context, and our our aggregate adaptive rate?





Really? What if we tried being an effective NATION? What would motivate us to try that? I mean, something other than another war?

No one person can supply adequate answers, but we can start asking more challenging questions of one another.

Human Aggregates Everywhere Are Constrained Primarily By Confusing Derived Numerals With Real Feedback Signals

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)


Human Aggregates Everywhere Are Constrained Primarily By Confusing Derived Numerals With Real Feedback Signals

So why DID the moronic population start pounding it's aggregate head on it's aggregate fiat? :(

More to the point, how will we stop, and then keep future generations from starting it up yet again?

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?

Is Economics, As Well As Most Other Policy Management Theory, Tragically, Comically Overrated?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Ya think? :(




Is there a recipe cookbook for cultural and economic policy evolution? :)

Just Do The Little Things That Make It Harder For All Citizens, Everywhere, To Work At Cross-Purposes?

The Roots Of Political Gridlock? A Foolish Population & Their Options Are Soon Parted

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Definition of a foolish population? One that doesn't listen well enough - or often enough - to enough of it's own, growing spectrum of feedback ..... to know what it knows!

You want yet another perspective?

Control Fraud:

"voters will not get angry ..if they don’t know that money is being stolen in the first place."

(?? And if they don't realize that national outcomes are being diverted, regardless of how much "money" does or doesn't seem to change hands?)

This is an incredibly long and detailed essay, above, by Francis Fukuyama ..... and yet he goes to all that trouble without making any suggestions for what to do about the challenges he lists!

I find the straightforward approach of OBT&E - or OSCE - to be much more productive.

Quit separating the endlessly emerging challenges from the early and continuous adjustments?

Forget Combinatorial Chemistry. We're undergoing Combinatorial Culture - and have to parse the simultaneous changes the best we can. That ALWAYS means forcing early decisions with insufficient data, but not TOO MANY! We've been doing this for 4.5 billion years, so don't panic. In fact, we've gotten really good at it, and now practice the refined approach called "social species."  No matter the context, social species solve emerging challenges by ... "being social" - i.e., by exchanging, analyzing and quickly (& continuously) acting upon ENOUGH of their own, available feedback to surf unpredictable reality.

Do we have to do that on a larger scale every year, by inventing & testing entirely new and more scalable methods?

Sure. That doesn't mean it's not doable.

What happened to American ingenuity?

We seem to be trying our best to tax it out of existence, with FICA, Medicare and other income taxes on what's left of Jane and Joe Sixpack of the former Middle Class.

We now use the hyper-efficient NSA to detect any sign of public feedback.



Yet if they detect any ... do they just call in the newly weaponized SWAT teams? What's next? Diverting the imaginary Social Security Trust In Fiat Fund to support drones for neighborhood police?

There is a better way, obviously - but we have to select it from current options. We can invest in developing reasonable, reasoning, free citizens ... or we can invest in imprisoning them in their own faux security.





Yes, there's an app for that. We're still working on bullet proof apps for the unborn, all the way to their source ... ovaries and testes. Support the RIGHT TO STRIFE fund! Since that obviously won't be enough, will we encase our brains in impenetrable shielding too? Or just our institutions and their momentum, since that's always tangential to our culture's unpredictable Adaptive Path.

If a shrinking Policy Space and declining Policy Agility is what we think we want, then we're doing a good job. Unfortunately, those goals are incompatible with what we all say we want for ourselves, our kids, our grandchildren, and our 7th generation yet unborn.

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their [methods] cannot change anything." - George Bernard Shaw

Wrong Response, Too Late ..... Story Of The Last 70 Years?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)




Vietnam War




Iraq


Is this our story of the last 70 years?
Too little feedback is gathered - or listened to - too late,
.. so what little we hear is mis-analyzed, too late, by too few Central Planners,
.... so our policy acts are too late, and mal-adaptive?

So what do WE the people DO about this state of the disunion?

Not enough voters are hearing that question, often enough.

Why is it so difficult to listen equally to all of us ..... all of the time?

We've trained most intelligent people to pursue small personal gains from systemic inefficiencies ... instead of just fixing them and benefitting indirectly from the awesome returns on coordination.

That is NOT how social species thrive. What we're doing now is a historical aberration. I sincerely hope we survive our present selves. Why even bother putting ourselves through this?

Iraq crisis: John Kerry's search for moderates is five years late (hat tip Chuck Spinney)

The US Secretary of State talks of 'pushing back' against Isis – but who will do this pushing? 

[Just the MICC? And more business as usual?]

MacroEconomics Is Driving Decline In Policy Agility ... Largely Because It Is Still Rife With Illogical Fallacies Of Scale?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

A culture that no longer listens to the pain of its distributed aggregate .... can not stand.

Bill Mitchell's long review of most documents related to the evolution of the euro currency - and ECB policy - is truly astonishing reading. Most people even vaguely aware of context agree that euro-currency policy has been an unmitigated, self-imposed disaster for citizens of Europe, but the details of how it occurred are fully known to few.

Bill's exhaustive review of those widely distributed details is a lesson in humility, for it clearly shows that none of us is as smart as all of us, and that there is no apparent limit to the idiocy produced by small operators, committees or whole agencies when they are allowed to become isolated from aggregate feedback.

It can be difficult to quickly orient citizens to the magnitude of this catastrophe and its pathetically mundane origins, but I'll try.

The whole story of euro-policy reminds me of the rare cases of humans where those parts of their sensory systems which mediate pain signals become entirely dysfunctional, and they consequently suffer total loss of all pain feedback.

 At first blush, feeling no pain may sound enticing (or even briefly feel that way). Closer review, however, reveals the condition to be a total catastrophe for the "macro" physiology. Without the distributed feedback - minute to minute - of signals across the pain spectrum, from minor to major, every distributed malady goes undetected and uncorrected, and the consequences therefore rapidly compound. Stubbed toes and burned fingers pile up in alarming frequency, strained ligaments, bone bruises and even minor issues such as sun burn fail to trigger the most rudimentary cautions and timely, corrective actions. Then it gets worse. Rapidly! Without the ability to sense distributed pain, much of seemingly rote, programmed reflex & habit has to be left to conscious planning, which never keeps up. Historically, people with this thankfully rare malady usually suffer much and die very young, from their compounding injuries and infections.

Perhaps readers can grasp the analogy to a culture which allows its distributed feedback mechanisms to decline, and thus lets its policy agility also lag. Minus the ability to keep track of the economic pain of all citizens in real-time, cultural devastation can rapidly compound, while the isolated "Central Planners" go blithely on with their "let them eat cake" policy processes.

We know how loss of sensory feedback can occur in physiologies, but how do seemingly increasingly intelligent human aggregates allow cultural feedback to decline so catastrophically? That is one of the themes exposed in Bill Mitchell's latest review installment, where he returns to the - unfortunately quite common - phenomenal examples of a particular bit of illogic known as the Fallacy of Composition. That is itself an unfortunate name, given for the thinking process of the author expressing the illogic. Fallacy of Scale seems much more appropriate, since it refers to the impact on the recipients.

In a cultural fallacy of scale, individuals naturally START OUT thinking mostly of what works locally for them, and they then - IF NOT TAUGHT BETTER - tend to initially presume that what works for them individually works for everyone, no matter how many people accumulate in a growing aggregate. That's how aggregates with flawed educational practices may quickly accumulate illogical oddities such as excessive Libertarianism, or the classic example of sports. "If I stand up at a sport stadium, I'll get a better view. THEREFORE, if we all stand up, we'll ALL get better views." And all this despite truly phenomenal advances in nearly every single, isolated specialty!

In the case of macro-economic policy, Bill Mitchell uncovers repeated examples of idiotic policy errors directly exhibiting the Fallacy of Scale. We already know that perseverance of that fallacy directly correlates with lagging feedback, isolation and/or outright Control Fraud. Of course, those conditions all feed upon themselves, in a maladaptive example of autocatalysis known as Gresham's Dynamic.

The question is what to do about all this cultural and policy pathology, which has persisted for 80 years DESPITE being graphically exposed and thoroughly documented in the 1930s. At least a few lessons seem clear. First, never assume that YOUR feedback isn't necessary for preservation of functional democracy. Second, never send ONLY politicians and lobbyists-for-the-1% to a democracy fight. Those two messages embody the same concept. A house that no longer listens to the pain of its distributed occupants .... can not stand.

One remedy? Always change horses in the middle of a bad dream.*

*Note that that does NOT mean simply switching endlessly between two, equally unresponsive horses. It's past time for "neither of the former," but rather many new, unencumbered faces.

If War Is Too Important To Be Left To The Generals, Surely EVERY Single Process - Including Reserve Banking - Is Too Important To Be Left To The Presumed Process Owners?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




Warren Mosler:

Comments on Stanlely Fisher’s ‘Lessons from Crises, 1985-2014′

This is where Mosler really shines. He knows the functional details of reserve-banking OPERATIONS like the back of his hand, and can make it simple.

WHICH IT IS!

I read these comments and conclude what any biologist would. Why such a tempest in a straw man teapot? With the shrinking breadth of operational knowledge in today's orthodox economics ranks, the best we can muster is an intellectual, purely theoretical Teapot Gnome scandal? The cause is underwhelming, while the aftermath is worse - as we voluntarily constrain response to reality, based on pure theory alone, without the benefit of timely feedback.

Stanley Fisher "notices" that every aggregate selectively shields SOME it's components - somewhat - from their distributed folly. Wow! Where have he and his profession been all these millenia?

There's a simple logic revealed in that ancient observation, involving distributed exploration and feedback-based imposition of incrementally learned, aggregate policy.

Well Duh! We've known that for ~3.5 Billion years? Here on planet earth alone? It's like modern economists & bankers never heard of autocatalytic-aggregates or even social species, despite being part of one! Did they all go to school in a barn?

You couldn't make this up.

Bankers & economists are GROSSLY under-educated and isolated, to the point of being an insult to their own electorate.

If war is too important to be left to the generals, surely EVERY freaking process imaginable is too important to be left to it's naively presumed process owners?

Ya freaking THINK? Isn't that the very definition of "teamwork?"

This is exactly WHY aggregates share data, use widely distributed feedback, and leverage flexible inter-dependencies with constantly INCREASING aggregate agility. Social species succeed for a reason. This is NOT rocket science ... and it is NOT new!!!

Yet with orthodox economics and banking, we've been steadily shrinking and constraining and trying to ignore even the minimally required distribution of feedback, interactions & inter-dependencies. It's like sending Catholic Priests along with the soon Greenland Vikings, to constrain their adaptations to changing conditions.

There's nothing wrong with economics & banking that a slightly more liberal education wouldn't have prevented. US citizens used to absorb the key lessons of their own history - and ability to recognize obviously changing context - by the time they graduated from high school - or sooner. Not anymore.

Now you can apparently get a PhD & Nobel Prize in economics while never having even discussed biology 101, or looked up the definition of a @#$%^&! Social Species, let alone grasped even the most superficial implications of distributed teamwork, democracy & the shared, coordinated, rights of citizens.

And we send OUR youth to die in foreign lands, to preserve the narrow interests of bankers hiding behind "economic" policy advice? Are you #$%^& KIDDING me?

@#$%^&! ... ON A @#$%^ ... +*@^%~#$$!!! Auuuuuggghhhh! It should be primal scream time for the US electorate. Yet for whatever reasons, they're still waiting to inhale, let alone waiting to let loose & exhale.

Note to electorate: Please send some people OTHER than functional illiterates into politics at all levels. Perhaps people who can scout aggregate context, AND sample ALL available feedback, AND then simply do what's easy & obvious for an aggregate - QUICKLY? In short, stop trying to kill your own, distributed Golden Goose (the resilient Middle Class of a functioning Democracy), and instead, just let it feed itself? This is NOT difficult. Just stay the hell out of your own way, and demand that your public servants stop asking you to over-tax and under-fund YOURSELF!

Note to politicians "representing" their electorate: Appoint some damn Fed & Treasury political appointees who are NOT functional illiterates. Maybe a few who understand net reality, and aren't restricted to the fantasies of the orthodox economic religion? Out of 320 million citizens, surely there's SOMEONE like Marriner Eccles floating around today - who is not restricted to being just an economist, but an actual thinker and innovator? You have thousands of professions to select from! Just start leveraging a wider spectrum of available feedback, interactions and inter-dependencies? It might save your country.

Excuse me while I go pound my head on a local wall, to alleviate all the distributed stress triggered by living downwind from Teapot Gnomes Fishering into the wind.

The Zen Of Policy Evolution Is Right In Front Of Us, Being Vigorously And Actively Ignored. Just Listen To All, And Then Select The Resulting Obvious.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Why do our schools churn out increasingly useless specialists, blind to an ancient lesson, about the paralyzing effect of partisan squabbling?

Or, what biologists simply call "failure to adequately sample the available spectrum of feedback."

Of course autocatalysis doesn't work so well .. when some random ideologues arbitrarily decide to use only 5% of available catalysts.

If none of us is as smart as all of us ..... why not simply ALWAYS listen, to ALL of us, SOON enough to matter? Those parameters reflect the simplest coordinate system for navigating Options Space: namely SAMPLING, SAMPLING FREQUENCY, and TEMPO.

That's the simple message implicit in all example of how to make growth, not war. 

The 1st step is to acknowledge that there is always an even better way ... to do anything and everything. Then make sure that all citizens learn that, by age 10.

The Zen of evolution is right in front of us, being vigorously and actively ignored. Just listen to all, and select the resulting obvious.

Consider the following, refreshingly frank commentary, then ask yourself if over half the data discussed as fiscal, tax and monetary policy is equally stale and irrelevant? Minus enough connections, adequately sampled ... how would you even know?

message from: Chuck Spinney, forwarded with permission 

This essay (also attached below, argues that Syrian civil war places the contradictions in US/UK foreign policy into sharp relief.

While the author, Peter Oborn, does not say so, the proximate cause of these contradictions is a fatally-flawed grand strategic appreciation of the threats and interests implicit in the Syrian civil war (the criteria for evolving a sensible GS are explained here).

Clearly, this particular self-inflicted grand-strategic wound is a direct consequence of ignoring the basic advice of Sun Tzu (i.e., "know your enemy and know yourself" -- or what Robert Asprey, one of the great historians of guerrilla war, called "the arrogance of ignorance").

The predictable result, in a general sense, is equally clear: the emergence the paralyzing effects of what the late American strategist Col. John R. Boyd called "noncooperative centers of gravity" as the messiness of the real world intrudes to displace the neat ideological virtual world of decision makers. Once again, the problem is one of Orientation hijacking Observations in the collective decision-making OODA loops that shape behaviour in Versailles on the Potomac (and, in this case, America's faithful poodles in Whitehall (for new readers interested in how the hijacking takes place -- see "Inside the Decider's Head.") 

The author ends on an off-tone upbeat note by suggesting there are incipient indications that President Obama senses the problem and is struggling to find a way out of the cul de sac. If past is prologue, his approach will be a messy one of cutting and shaving the same domestic politics that got him into this mess -- but then foreign policy never really goes beyond the water's edge. 

Chuck Spinney, The Blaster

[The following essay is both short and very illuminating, so it's included in it's entirety - to accelerate discussion. Note the correlation between "maintaining contact" and "being right." It's called listening. If the Telegraph complains, we'll have to remove the quoted text, and show only the link.]

We can get rid of Assad or fight al-Qaeda, but we can’t do both 

To get a proper picture of the Syrian conflict, the West needs to listen to its enemies 

By Peter Oborne, Telegraph [UK] 9:24PM GMT 26 Feb 2014 

For the past three years, when seeking enlightenment about the Syrian crisis, I have often talked to Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 officer. Mr Crooke, who left government service a decade ago after a long career, now runs a think tank called Conflicts Forum, which maintains contact with organisations such as Hizbollah and governments such as Iran, when official contact has been broken off. 

I have learnt to respect and trust Mr Crooke, who has the invaluable habit of being right. When the British and American governments both claimed that President Assad of Syria would fall within weeks, he told me this was wishful thinking. When Western governments hailed the Syrian rebels as a democratic movement of national liberation, he said: hang on a moment. At the heart of the rebellion, he pointed out, was a group of armed gangs funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, dedicated to the establishment of a militant Sunni caliphate across the Middle East. He uttered this warning right at the start of the Syrian conflict, and at last the penny is (ever so painfully) beginning to drop in Whitehall and Washington. 

So when Conflicts Forum invited me to a seminar in Beirut, I accepted with alacrity. It was over the weekend in an otherwise deserted seaside hotel. Lebanon, so prosperous and thriving when I was here four years ago, now conveys an air of desolate menace, as the country struggles to accommodate more than a million Syrian refugees. Parts of the country, including the second city of Tripoli, are increasingly dominated by jihadists. 

At the seminar, there was a different world view to the one normally presented in the British media, and a more exotic cast of characters. Mr Crooke had assembled an adviser to President Putin, several Iranian diplomats, as well as representatives from Hizbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad – all three organisations labelled as terrorists by Western governments. 

To many Telegraph readers, this might sound like a rogues’ gallery. But what they had to say was very interesting. Everyone there took for granted that President Assad has won the war, though they admitted that there may be some time to go before it ends. In the north, they said, the rebels have turned on each other. A crucial battle is now being fought at Qalamoun, in the west. The Syrian army and rebel forces are engaged in a ferocious battle for this strategic ridge, which controls the all-important supply line between Lebanon and rebel territory. We were told that the Battle of Qalamoun was all over bar the shouting, and that it will fall to Assad’s forces quite soon. 

The second message was that by far the greatest threat to stability in the Middle East is not Iran, as so often claimed, but Saudi Arabia. This may seem surprising: the Saudis remain among Britain’s closest allies, and only last week Prince Charles paid a happy visit to the kingdom. Yet they have been far and away the most important and deadly sponsor of global terrorism – a fact very well understood by all intelligence agencies, even if the British and American governments cannot bring themselves to admit it, let alone to come to terms with the consequences. 

Several participants drew attention to the haunting parallel between Pakistan during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, and Saudi Arabia today. Back then, the Pakistan intelligence services, urged on by the CIA, channelled money and arms to rebel forces. But they catastrophically failed to foresee that these very groups would create mayhem back home when the war ended. 

This is the danger that faces Saudi Arabia today. The kingdom has been providing – indirectly – a vast amount of cash and resources to extremist groups advocating the takfiri mutation of Islam, an orientation that brands other Muslims as targets for killing. These takfiris deny the legitimacy of any state or secular power – including King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. A comparable problem is starting to emerge in Britain, where M15 is fretting about what British jihadists fighting in Syria might do on their return. This concern has created a potential conflict with the more gung-ho SIS, which has effectively been egging on these very same jihadists. 

It was the third message from the seminar, however, that continues to haunt me. The international sponsors of Assad’s Syria – Iran and Russia – see eye to eye: they have been consistent in their support, whatever the consequences. But some of the rebels’ backers – Saudi Arabia, the United States, Britain and Israel – are in bitter conflict with one another, and share no coherence of vision or common purpose. 

The British Government has consistently rejected the analysis I have recorded above, and I would not expect many people to agree. But I was impressed by the power of the views I have heard over the past few days, especially when contrasted with the contradictions, emotionalism and wishful thinking from so many Western experts and policy-makers. At the very least, these voices are worth listening to. Yet British officials are forbidden from even speaking to Hizbollah. No wonder thinking in Whitehall has been so stale and misguided – even though the United Nations, South Africa and several European countries were all represented at the seminar at senior level, and all paying attention. 

Yet there have been interesting indications over the course of the past few days, although not widely reported, that Western leaders are starting to change course. The first concerns the mysterious disappearance of Bandar bin Sultan. Two years ago, prompted by the United States, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia gave Prince Bandar the task of destroying President Assad. Since then, the prince has poured the Saudi kingdom’s unlimited resources into his mission, backing a wide range of rebel groups, from the so-called moderates to the takfiris who now cause increasing anxiety within the House of Saud. Prince Bandar seems to retain his official title of National Security Adviser and Intelligence Director. But he was missing from a secret meeting of intelligence chiefs recently held in Washington to discuss Syria. He is out of action. 

Meanwhile, Robert Ford, the American diplomat who has been the chief US organiser for the Syrian rebels – herding them in and out of negotiations during the failed Geneva talks two weeks ago – has also got the chop. These changes of personnel come amid reports that the Obama administration has confronted the Saudis with a file full of evidence of their involvement in terrorism in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. This report can be found in Al-Akhbar English, a Lebanese newspaper seen as close to Hizbollah. The newspaper hints at the possibility that Saudi could yet be formally classified by the UN security council as a state sponsor of global terrorism. That sounds fanciful, but President Obama’s visit to Riyadh next month now looks pregnant with significance. 

As the Beirut meeting closed, I asked Mr Crooke, who wears a tweed jacket and might at first appearance be a country solicitor or land agent, whether President Assad would survive. He said there was no doubt. The United States and Britain are, nevertheless, still pressing for his removal. But the signs are mounting that the Western powers are beginning to understand that they have a choice. They can get rid of Assad, or they can fight al-Qaeda. But they can’t do both. That option was never really there.

Data-Wise And Context-Foolish, On A Scale More Epic Than Ever Before. The Task of RIGHT-SIZING AGGREGATE CONTEXT-AWARENESS

   (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?

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.

Dirk Ehnts and Miguel Carrion Alvarez — The Theory of Reflexivity – A Non-Stochastic Randomness Theory for Business Schools Only?

Abstract:

According to George Soros (1987) – the author of “The Alchemy of Finance”, a book on the workings of financial markets -
“has found a place in the reading lists of business schools as distinct from economics departments. (2003, 4)"

The theory of reflexivity, which is at the center of the book, states that interdependence exists between the cognitive and manipulative functions of market participants. While Soros claims that imperfect knowledge rules on financial markets, academic orthodoxy assumes perfect knowledge and hence displays – in the absence of external shocks – financial markets as efficient.

Reviewing the published work of George Soros on both reflexivity and the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) we find that his theory can be interpreted as a rough theoretical edifice not too different from the (Post-)Keynesian perspective. Using the GFC as a background we explore the explanatory power of the theory of reflexivity. In our conclusion we make the argument that economic theories build on non-stochastic randomness should form the basis of a new discipline that should be taught at both business schools and economics departments.

Global Economic Intersection
The Theory of Reflexivity – A Non-Stochastic Randomness Theory for Business Schools Only?
Dirk Ehnts, Berlin School of Economics and Law, and Miguel Carrion Alvarez, Miguel Carrion Alvarez, Senior Risk Analyst, Grupo Santander (Math PhD)

Important. Basically, perfect knowledge that is time-dependent is impossible when feedback influences the future. Open complex systems are non-ergodic. Conventional economists pretend (assume) this is not the case in creating ergodic models as a methodological convenience. Alvarez is an expert in complex systems. This article is not wonkish however.

Organized "Systems" Cannot Grow by Decreasing Use of Their Own Liquidity Tools

commentary by Roger Erickson

Consider the "Austerity Now" drumbeat still rising in Europe, and then think outside isolated perspective of any one speciality blindly groping an elephantine context.

Do the specialists calling for austerity even know that there their calls produce contradictory signals in the perspectives of other, invaluable segments of their own population?

"Two less steel factories in every country, and two less chickens in every pot! Yeah!!"

Cameron tells EU leaders to stop budget 'tinkering' and instead impose big cuts

Cameron digs in to protect UK rebate [rebate? freeze the rebate from a shrinking budget?  dead-on-arrival negotiating ploy?]

Tata Steel is to axe 900 jobs and shut a dozen plants in the UK in a bid to cut costs after it revealed it had tumbled into the red earlier this month.

It's already evident that when perspectives from inseparable system processes become isolated, their inevitable re-collision invariably sounds much like a script from Alice in Blunderland, especially the paragraph on things sometimes done twice before lunch.

Fuel for poets, comedians and cynics also result. What's the inverse of building the British Empire? Self-degradation? Dismantling, and taking others down with you? Burning the furniture in hovels below Camelot? A burning sewer beneath a hill?

Humor aside, let's imagine stepping back far enough to get a full view of the entire group of blind specialists groping this context and shouting out their blindly local advice.

The first, obvious lesson from our encompassing view is that continuous growth of an organized "system" cannot occur by decreasing use of it's liquidity metrics. That's logic 101.

In the isolated sub-context seen by most economists and politicians, disuse of liquidity metrics equates to hoarding fiat currency, aka sequestering 'profit' margins. Yet in the perspective of all system analysts, liquidity as a concept is inseparable from quality (including tempo) of feedback distribution, which is what greases the quality of distributed decision-making in supposedly organized systems.

Astute readers may immediately jump to the conclusion that Political Economics is too important to be left to the combination of politicians and academic economists? Ya think? The isolated views of politicians and economists are meaningless unless shaped by the full range of operational feedback (aka, context models), from all other sub-processes existing in a given economy and culture. A context model = the full body of group feedback, it's that simple.  We have no higher authority available to appeal to.  Just ourselves.

By now it should also be blindingly obvious that every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners, especially in any group growing by either diversity or population. That's a truism precisely because liquidity for decision-making in such groups is mediated by increasingly context-specific re-use of the same language signals. Given that data is meaningless without context, no specialist part of a complex system can ever - by definition - access or wield the inter-dependency data required for full-group tuning, aka policy agility - unless they receive adequate samplings of full-group feedback, in real-time.

Just as unlimited fiat currency supplies accurate records of transaction liquidity, "unlimited cross feedback" in group discourse constitutes "awareness liquidity," and supplies accurate instantiation of Situational Agility. That's why optimal organization =  OpenSource.  To be blunt, agile group actions track our rate of updating group-wide Situational Awareness (aka, NOT isolating process management from timely group feedback). Distributed Situational Awareness only occurs with adequate feedback liquidity, constantly cutting across all sub-context-specific wording, taxonomies and semantic triggers to continuously rebuild and drive just-adequate Group Agility.

The very act of restricting semantic liquidity - aka, leaving sub-processes to presumed process owners - precludes system tuning. Leaving political economics to politicians and economists was not only doomed from the start, it was always an act of outright imbecility. Without scalability of council interactions, every culture quickly degrades to action patterns driven only by mob ignorance.

Every collection of highly organized tribes fusing into a super-culture must, by definition, get collectively dumber before new methods allow them to regain and then actually grow group smarts. Re-growing expanded group intelligence always starts with complete redesign of feedback channels, bandwidth, and methods for relaxing information flow patterns to states first to deliver just-adequate Adaptive Rate performance.  [After all, adequate Situational Awareness today is better than perfect historical awareness next year.]

Survival depends on developing distributed methods for doing all of the above faster every year. In human cultures, one small part of that involves methods for adjusting lean, coherent language taxonomies and managing local variance of semantic triggers.

In a population as large and dynamic as ours, we cannot survive unless an informed electorate is aware of different patterns of things every year, is acutely responsive to the moment to moment demand to alter it's Situational Awareness, and is also aware of tools and methods for tuning and leveraging it's own, distributed awareness.

Having said all that, a simple question results. Has anyone ever seen a single taxonomic model providing rapid, population-wide visualization of Public Policy Perceptions? Without models for increasingly rapid tracking of degenerate use of terms by diverse sub-audiences, we will, with absolute certainty, grow into an unstable mob, not a growing nation.

John Michael Greer — The Cussedness of Whole Systems

There’s an interesting divergence between the extreme complexity of the predicament that besets contemporary industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the remarkable simplicity of the failures of reasoning that have sent us hurtling face first into that predicament, on the other. Nearly all of those failures share a common root, which is the inability—or at least the unwillingness—of most people in the modern world to pay attention to the natural cussedness of whole systems.

Read it at The Archdruid Report
The Cussedness of Whole Systems

by John Michael Greer | Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America

This is post is about infinite demand for scarce resources and how human affect the system of which they are a part through their impact on real resources such as energy and food. Greer also looks at the non-financial implications of this in increasing financialization.

Whether one agrees with Greer's analysis or conclusions, this is the holistic approach that is needed for global logistics, with which the global economy and global economics is intimately involved. 

Back when, Bucky Fuller devised the World Game for the purpose as applying design science to the developing challenges.