Sam Machkovech — The CIA uses board games to train officers—and I got to play them

If you design a game right, you’ll see a lot of complexity organically emerge. That’s what you want."

Are Technica
The CIA uses board games to train officers—and I got to play them
Sam Machkovech

Daniel Little — Expectations and performance

There is a growing accumulation of evidence suggesting that individuals' performance in a wide range of activities is powerfully and insidiously affected by the expectations that are subtly conveyed to them by the people around them. If the people around a child or adult believe the individual will have particular difficulty with an upcoming task, this doubt is conveyed through cues the individual is able to sense. And, through cognitive mechanisms not fully understood, the subject's performance is affected, with results that are lower than otherwise possible.

Understanding Society

Expectations and performance

Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

James Madison on Education and Democracy

The liberal appropriations made by the Legislature of Kentucky for a general system of Education cannot be too much applauded. A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives....  

If provision were not made at the same time for every part, the objection would be a natural one. But, besides the consideration when the higher Seminaries belong to a plan of general education, that it is better for the poorer classes to have the aid of the richer by a general tax on property, than that every parent should provide at his own expence for the education of his children, it is certain that every Class is interested in establishments which give to the human mind its highest improvements, and to every Country its truest and most durable celebrity.

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty....

Without such Institutions, the more costly of which can scarcely be provided by individual means, none but the few whose wealth enables them to support their sons abroad can give them the fullest education; and in proportion as this is done, the influence is monopolized which superior information every where possesses. At cheaper & nearer seats of Learning parents with slender incomes may place their sons in a course of education putting them on a level with the sons of the Richest. Whilst those who are without property, or with but little, must be peculiarly interested in a System which unites with the more Learned Institutions, a provision for diffusing through the entire Society the education needed for the common purposes of life. A system comprizing the Learned Institutions may be still further recommended to the more indigent class of Citizens by such an arrangement as was reported to the General Assembly of Virginia, in the year 1779, by a Committee1 appointed to revise laws in order to adapt them to the genius of Republican Government. It made part of a "Bill for the more general diffusion of knowledge" that wherever a youth was ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents could not afford, he should be carried forward at the public expence, from seminary to seminary, to the completion of his studies at the highest.

James Madison to W. T. Barry
4 Aug. 1822Writings 9:103--9

If We Let Kids Play At Democracy More Often, Surely They'd Get The Idea Of tuning More Performance Out Of That Too?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Here's are 2 excellent summaries of what we're up against.

https://twitter.com/ARob7125/status/435819120110874624/photo/1

https://twitter.com/Politics_PR/status/435835189743214592/photo/1

Russ Huntley: "Amazing how deceptive numbers can be."

Exactly! If you string together the compounding error that accumulates from semantics x numbers x ideology x practice x background .... it's amazing that humans can get anything done at all

We're obviously pretty good at navigating through this fog of context. The point is that, with a little care, we could be a whole lot better.

One challenge is to encapsulate how to package and sell that "just a little care" program to all the people that don't yet know it, among those already here & those coming down the pike.

Paul Meli: "I've come to the conclusion that statistically speaking, Conventional Wisdom™ is a contrary indicator…it's most likely wrong.

What is the probability of a majority of citizens, on the average uninformed about anything not part of their core training, would converge on an accurate view of reality as a group?

I think the odds are vanishingly small."

Yes, exactly. It's only a matter of time.

That's mathematically proven by various theorems in set theory, Analog Network theory, General Systems Theory, AI and robotics.

And it's a key conjecture in the Theory of Evolution, too, not to mention peasant common sense.

Any system dependent upon incident data to navigate changing context will:

a) at best, only chase reality; 

    next question is the lag, & whether it's increasing or decreasing; as

b) a function of the cascade of new data & inter-dependency re-programming that is flowing through the nested layers of that system ..... as incident data constantly changes. 

We call that "learning," in people and teams. Cultures can learn too, and some cultures faster than others. And all cultures can learn faster in some conditions than during other times and/or other settings.

At this size and rate of population growth, is the USA becoming more or less agile at cultural learning?

What is perhaps the most simultaneously amazing and impressive feature of our group culture and our personal physiology?

It's how QUICKLY we can mobilize such deeply nested systems to do anything at all! Making agile adjustments in a cascade of millions of inter-dependencies is incredibly complicated! It requires a lot or practice.

To get this far, we obviously have the machinery. How much we get out of - and add to - our cultural machinery, is largely a matter of training and practice.

With just a little care, we can always get a lot more out of the physiological and/or cultural machinery which we have.

Recruiting enough people, fast enough, to that simple realization?  That is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, for our cultural evolution. :)

How do advanced cultures such as ours ever get enough practice? Actually, the answer is very well known & documented. It is largely through the play behavior of our youth, plus the more serious "play" of adult aggregates.

Youth always want to squeeze more performance out of whatever they're allowed to tinker with or play at. When many of us were kids it was often choreography, music, cars and/or wars.

If we let kids play at actual, functioning Democracy more often, maybe they'd get the idea of tuning more performance out of that too?

How May We Permit Ourselves To Scale Up The Product of GROUP_LEARNING X GROUP_CREATING?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



We've all learned a lot, since bumping into Warren Mosler, branching out of other fields, and having to learn what we didn't want to have to know about ... namely the difference between sane and insane aggregate economic policy.

Yet it's not at all clear what that knowledge gets us, if we don't know how to leverage what we all now know.

There's a famous, very old quote (dubiously attributed to Caesar), that triggered a still evolving thought process.

"It's better to create than to learn. Creating is the essence of life." JC, ~50BC

Yet where would individuals or electorates be, if they hadn't LEARNED that insight? :( [They'd be roughly where WE are?]

2000 yrs later, we've only slightly restated that train of thought.

“If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive." then-CEO Lew Platt, of HP

Platt's quote is touted as key to the explosively growing field of knowledge management or "KM", proving that all humanity can, will and does miss it's own, prior points.

What IS the obvious point? If we marry together the lessons attributed to Caesar, Darwin & Shewhart//Deming, we get: 

"If we all continuously learned & shared just how little we all need to share, in real time, in order for our nation to CREATE faster/leaner/better culture ... then we'd never have to worry about our Democracy." RGE :)

It seems obvious that we can't separate learning & creating ... except by dying. 

Our REAL, not just nominal, question is how to scale up the product of GROUP_LEARNING x GROUP_CREATING.

Any ideas about new methods that would allow us to create more of that "product?" 

We are NOT constrained by a net lack of knowledge.

Rather, we're lacking methods for letting ourselves sample enough KNOWN options. Worse, we have known option-exploring methods, but lack methods for allowing ourselves to apply distributed use of those subclasses of known methods, whether little or widely known. 

The outcome is that our population is in the same situation as HP's staff was 20 years ago. The US electorate is overflowing with knowledge and practiced methods ... and lacks only a few extra submethods for triggering exploration of national options. Those options can be better explored WITH an ongoing cascade of parsing methods, from best known methods (if they still apply to a non-recognizable pattern, or new context), to desparately_random trial & error.

The more I ponder this, the more our current Democracy reminds me of a patient with Parkinson's disease. Those patients can initially DO most things if prompted by triggering cues, but progressively suffer from declining ability to self-trigger their own voluntary actions. Their symptoms start with difficulty triggering physical movements, and progress to inability to trigger voluntary thoughts, and eventually even autonomic impulses such as breathing.

The evolved operations of vertebrate behavior-motor physiology reveal sub-parts of the basal ganglia as critical brain structures which "gate" all the inter-dependency circuits allowing conditional behavior of individuals.

The factors gating the more distributed functions of a human culture are not specific cultural ganglia. Rather, they are the distributed checks & balances we attempt to maintain, and the sub-methods we employ for creating, KEEPING and extending necessary cultural checks and balances.

We always need NEW METHODS, for tuning and adding to our repertoire of checks and balances, the operations we depend upon in order to explore our emerging options.

The only thing we know for sure about choosing the policy-formation methods we need is that they must help us steer - faster/leaner/better - through the unpredictable obstacle course that we loosely call "succeeding contexts."

Does that help? What core methods can we employ MORE of, in order to create, KEEP and extend the distributed checks and balances which we continuously need MORE of?

Precisely Managing Nonsense, With Double-Entry Accounting

Commentary by Roger Erickson

John Maynard Keynes once wrote of Hayek’s book Prices and Production:

“The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 … It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam.” (Keynes 1931: 394).

The Horror of Rothbardian Natural Rights

One has to be aware of the purpose of evolving aggregates before assuming definitions for natural flows, and managing them with double-entry accounting. Otherwise, you end up rigorously managing nonsense.

Sense vs non-sense comes ONLY by the selection pressure of combining feedback from all channels, existing and emerging. There is no adaptive path in the natural world that isn't bounded by dynamic equilibria between locally conflicting forces, and local perspectives.

In the end, you can't square double-entry accounting with quantum mechanics. That should remind us to never lose track of the fact that it's accounting that has to yield to reality, not the other way around.

This reminds me of three, simple, ancient truths.
* Data is meaningless without context.
* The difference between [operations] & theory is greater in practice than in theory.
* Theory soon becomes meaningless if not constantly serving actual aggregate [not sub-group] operations.

The definition of logic itself is looking for consistency in explaining unpredictable reality. Logic simply maps theory to discovered operations, and in the process selects sense from nonsense.

Interestingly, that seemed to be recognized by members of the Brain Trust who advise the FDR administrations through the astounding number of pragmatic experiments which they utilized, even though it was clear that they, themselves couldn't adequately model a completely new paradigm from the methods which context forced them to adopt, by trial and error. That had to wait for the operational summary called MMT.

STUART CHASE: SEMANTICIST EXTRAORDINARY

Chase, Stuart - Tyranny Of Words [pdf; $9 fee in USA]
  (Ironically, available here too, from Germany, free.)

One lesson is that we always need a survivable ratio of leaders and experimenters in policy offices responsible for our survival, and that we soon die if we instead fill those leadership offices with risk managers. We're always executing experiments on ourselves, no matter what we do. So we may as well have as leaders people able to rapidly learn from many mistakes, rather than those opposed to any change whatsoever, and terrified of making a mistake. The ultimate mistake is to not generate survivable ones as a survivable rate!