How Banal The Sum Of The Last 60 Years Is! Have Solutions, Won't Deploy Them.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

See the context of this article, and then the killer comment about Kenneth Boulding.

RGE: "Anyone paying attention in anthropology-101 or biology-101 would have told you Graeber was right, before he had to document the obvious & well known, for unlearned audiences. [Reality is still ignored by most, no matter how well known by a few. That's why academia is largely academic.]" 

TH: "This is the great weakness of disciplinary education as a model. It breaks the wholeness analytically and never repairs it synthetically.

The world badly needs a meta-disciplinary model based on general systems theory.
This is why Kenneth Boulding switched out of economics and into general systems theory [GST] as one of the co-founders. He was somewhat of a precursor of MMT, btw, and Randy has written about him."

Great point, Tom. Couldn't agree more, though we might have different view on some aspects of deployment timing.

It's not clear that the entire world is ready for GST, any more than Europe is ready for the euro, but economics and several other social sciences certainly are!

Why aren't some disciplines ready, while some are? Simply put, GST became trivially not-helpful to the mass of specific researchers (because vague concepts like aggregate adaptation & macro economics are not ready to be fused with physics), yet something analogous to GST should STILL replace macro economics .... if there is still any intelligent life to be found in that discipline.

GST, stripped of over-promises to physics/chemistry/biology/etc, should be tremendously useful for universities seeking to fuse English/Philosophy/Anthropology/etc into a standardized form of "Liberal Arts" and "Social Sciences."

AMO?  For "adaptively modified academia?"

In fact, SETI should turn it's attention to helping to vet economic faculty & students - not to mention politicians! :)

Further, both GST and MMT absolutely must drop the trailing T as inappropriate. Replace it with an O.

General Systems Operations (or just call it culture).
Modern Monetary Operations (just fold it into general operations).

And where does this lead us? To how banal the sum of the last 60 years is!

All the sturm & drang of politics, policy & academic revolutions comes down to the pathetically slow metamorphoses of human cultural aggregates recombining minor components into new forms for new needs.

Yes, Maude, it really is that mundane.

What does it take to just do the obviously necessary, sooner? Perspective, mostly.

Aggregates fusing academic disciplines (or repurposing entire workforces) is as trivial as an individual combining shoelaces with shoes - or quickly taping 2 things together with duct tape, before rigging more permanent solutions. It could and should happen dynamically and without discussion ... and rapidly! That's what Cultural Adaptive Rate is all about. Adjusting and tuning.

Mostly, it's about redirecting preserved hoarding instincts, from local hoarding of tangible assets ... to distributed hoarding of coordination skills.

Hoarders of institutional momentum are terrified by change, while leaders & evolvers are not. In the end, surviving social species must RAPIDLY scavenge and re-purpose their own Luddites, in order to compete with the other social species that do so.

Nevertheless, we're on the same path as the first social species that evolved. Today we're just traversing trivially different contexts, at yet another scale.

We have met the enemy of autocatalysis, and he is us. "We" are both the sum of all, tangential, institutional [phenotypic] momentum ... and the pending adjustments too. It never ends.

Whatever.

We're now back to this.

  Methods drive results,
    Which demand reassessment of Desired Outcomes,
      Which drive coordinated actions,
        Which drive interactions,
          Which drive awareness,
            Which drive selection of new methods ....

A circle has no start and no end. You can come at this from anywhere and find ways to catalyze it further.

And an aggregate this big has members starting at every possible point, simultaneously & continuously. That's true for all recombinant systems.

So we're back to the obvious ... that we face an arduous, escalating tuning task (return on ever-scaling coordination) that will never end, as far as we can tell. So why isn't that reality the #1, consistent message throughout ALL forms of education & training, at all levels?

Again, don't ask me, ask your mirror.

Propaganda, or, “Poor Methods Get [Apparent] Results” - Bill Black and Gresham May Recognize This ... As A Familiar Analogy

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

“Poor Methods Get [Apparent] Results” - aka, “A Lot Of What Is Published Is Incorrect”

Richard Horton richard.horton@lancet.com

Actually, any honest student of orthodox economics, political science and "government studies" may recognize the same. Not just researchers in biomedical sciences.

The key questions?

1) What is to be done?

2) How long do we have? What's the half-life of feedback-based agility recovery in a network expanding faster than its inter-connects?

Does this remind you of ...

a) Innocent Fraud?

b) Control Fraud?

c) Gresham's Dynamic?

d) Responses to Paradigm Shifts?

There are so many possible outcomes, that we have to focus on methods and emerging perceptions of outomes, not just milestone goals.

Aggregate Methods drive aggregate results.
Aggregate results drive aggregate awareness.
Aggregate awareness demands coordinated action.
Coordinated aggregate actions drive aggregate outcomes.
.....;Aggregate outcomes demand changing aggregate methods.

All this allows us "to make a [continuously] more perfect union" ... among our aggregate parts.

Recombinant Growth Means That There Will Always Be New Ways To Fail, As Well As To Survive

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Why Do Nations Fail? 

[Don't Expect This To Tally All The Ways]

Recombinant growth means that there will always be new ways to fail, as well as infinite ways to survive.

It boils down to a race against one's own half-life clocks. Do we instil methods for circumventing our own Phenotypic Persistence (e.g., institutional/bureaucratic momentum) FAST ENOUGH .... or do we not?

Here's my simple take.

For any aggregate to survive, the half-life of indirect cultural recombinations must remain shorter than the half-life of taboos, old and emerging (i.e., instances of Phenotypic Persistence).

Ta-boo or not ta-boo. The mundane secrets to Adaptive Rate. :)

What On Earth Happened To All Our Ancient Tribal Methods? We Don't Practice Enough To Find What Scales.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Humans have been coordinating on a truly massive scale, for tens of thousands of years ..... without computers, without convertible currency systems, without pencil and paper, and even without agriculture.

How? By constant practice.

And along the way, incredibly useful methods were invented, and practiced, including methods for conflict mediation, among many other applications. Those many tribal methods don't all scale, unadjusted, to fit our current, supra-tribal population densities & mixing rates, but most are necessary but not sufficient steps to practice, while constantly discovering how to organize on an ever greater scale.

Yet here we are today, with nearly everyone acting as though all those finely tuned tribal coordination methods never existed, and that coordinating is a totally new invention. :(

The Theology of Consensus

For Pete's sake! Have we thrown out our cultural methods with the bathwater, not just the baby? Most neighbors today don't even know how to co-run a neighborhood meeting anymore, let alone scale up a supra-tribal democracy. They never get enough practice.

Theologists of all stripes (including the economic theologists) mean well, but they have no prior experience, and near zero practice. Heck, even car salesmen have a personal theology, made up on the spot. That doesn't mean their theology works for their aggregate. Only feedback from group practice determines what does & doesn't work.

Many biologists & anthropologists & ecologists (& other natural scientists) lament the lack of effort to select more critically from our endless list of theologies (and other aggregate habits). Natural selection is eventually coming, of course. We're just not practicing how best to respond, once the hour strikes, or at least not paying much attention to how things are going.

Would we be instantly far better off if we swapped all banksters and orthodox economists for anthropologists and "primitive" tribal leaders? I'd sure vote to give it a try. At least the latter 2 groups have lots of practice and experience at something other than looting and bamboozling.

We Can't Have Our Evolution And Centrally Plan It Too

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

(Too bad financial liquidity isn't included in that plot!)

The image above drives home the ancient lesson that increasing capabilities always rest upon increasingly distributed foundations. That's true for weight in architecture, inter-relationships in resilient networks, and education in human populations.

As evidence, Bill Mitchell recently reiterated an idea that recurs periodically, but never quite often enough.

“A massive boost to public education is required."

Yet clearly, “more” education alone won’t necessarily help. “Different” education is also required.

For example, something along the lines of OBT&E, which is a method, and also a reiteration of Natural Selection.

It's also clear that each and every one of our methods is necessary but not sufficient without ongoing adaptive intent - which becomes a method for coordinating all other methods. The utility of all methods still depends upon slowly molding a human culture with a collective focus on Cultural Adaptive Rate as the common guiding light - for all the milestone, Desired Outcomes we pursue as we continuously muddle on.

We have countless options, and they are usually increasing. Increasing our cultural Adaptive Rate reduces to collectively sensing, on any given day, what permutations of our ongoing choices will actually optimally INCREASE rather than reduce our net options.

That’s a practical math problem. In fact, it's a constantly changing, massively multi-variate, adaptive cultural calculus task which we can only pursue via brute-force group calculation (utilizing massively parallel feedback, i.e., by Democracy). By definition, our survival challenges can never be modeled as fast as they change. We have to calculate them, via distributed, organized trial and error. That, plainly and simply, requires complete focus on re-connecting everyone to everyone, and summarizing all available feedback soon enough to matter.

No predictive power, but seemingly limitless adaptive power.

In other words, you can't have your evolution and Centrally Plan it too.

It seems that the baseline for all evolving organizations - of any sort whatsoever - is to have 80% of the components (whether cells, humans or even whole nations) enslaved & poorly managed by a minority still operating by yesterday's methodologies. Some things are always, briefly, the "keystone" species which both enforce existing structure & constrain Adaptive Change in every ecosystem. There are no clear lines separating phenotypic persistence, Institutional Momentum, and hegemony. Yet we must manage those distinctions as best we can.

That's our burden, as an evolving, growing aggregate. You better embrace & enjoy that task, 'cuz it's not going away.

That's the reality of organic growth. Central Planning is always fighting a staged retreat while racing to stay relevant to the expanding numbers who are escaping their comprehension.

On a personal level, it's not so different from what grandparents observe, as first their kids and then their grandchildren spiral out into the future.

It's up to us to make OUR continuous AND INCREASINGLY DISTRIBUTED transitions either relatively graceful, or rather tumultuous. How? Equally clearly, that depends on how we prepare our future citizens, by managing distributed education.

Cultural embryology, that is.

I’ll liberally paraphrase Joshua Chamberlain, circa 1865. 

“We have zero predictive power, but through training and education, we can determine what aggregate adaptive rate we can generate, when each novel group challenge appears.” 

What's that old saying? If you really love something - even the future for you, your kids and your nation - then set it free? No, not unprepared in the middle of the road, figuratively, but in a somewhat protected practice field, and then make the sacrifices necessary to protect it as it learns how to be free from your constraints.

That seems to be what human evolution is all about. We can't have our aggregate evolution and Centrally Plan it too.

No, 2 + 2 (+ something unexpected) never equals just 4. Yet our electorate has to keep making that calculation on a national level, every day, and adjust to the continuous surprises. Human cultures compete on the basis of their aggregate cultural-CPU designs.

What's that mean for citizens? Probably the following message.

If you can't stand the physical math, get out of the evolution!

The alternative is already apparent.

(Right now, we're not using our brains in any organized way, either.)

Let's Just Start Taxing Economic Policy Lobbying, Instead Of Sales & FICA Taxes?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Damage-Subtracted taxes, instead of Value-Added taxes? DST vs VAT?*

John Cochrane Explains Neo-Fisherism

Really? When is too much too much? Orthodox economics - like Aristocracy - has turned into nothing more than hoarding behavior. First people hoard static goods, then they soon hire academics to train shamans, create political-religions, and finally flood us with "economic" theory - in distracting attempts to hoard public fiat, and cultural perspective itself.

Personally, if I became President, I'd do something to seriously tax all this excessive economic theorizing that somehow accumulates as paid lobbying - unproductively dominated by "savers hoarding" instead of "labor producing" ...

... and get back to actively managing a highly dynamic economy based on more/faster/wider feedback based on better/faster/more cultural instrumentation.

Surely we must stop letting these hoards of Economic Policy beginners continue over-modeling an economy as an adequately described, static machine running at constant load.

A dynamic democracy is not a simple machine, it's an incredibly dynamic, rapidly evolving bio-cultural engine. Just stop trying to constrain our democracy & culture.

I've now read enough economics literature to stop reading it.

What do we need? Funny how those words cheques & balances come back to haunt us. :)

The original checks & balances intended by the Constitution were hacked within 8 years, when we let factions create political parties instead of sticking to our intended practice of finding consensus Desired Outcomes anew, with every year of changing context. The easiest time to betray any revolution is immediately, while rebels are still thinking that they won.

Disorders of hoarding behaviors in defined central nervous systems are continuously studied, yet those individual disorders are trivial compared to the impact of distributed hoarding behaviors in definable cultures, whether the cultural boundaries are defined by markets or nations. We won't address cultural hoarding until we invent new methods for training citizens to acknowledge and study it. By then, we'll have distributed disorders on a supra-cultural scale. Will the quality (including tempo) of our distributed discourse rise to meet that looming challenge, fast enough for humans to survive? Not if we don't start practicing audacious new methods, ASAP.

We need more methods, not models. And more practice, not just theory.


* A sin tax on public practice of economic theorizing, just like on other forms of gambling? Sure. Why is it ok for rich lobbyists to gamble with public policy, while poor people may only gamble their personal options in casinos (owned by rich people)? Yes, political parties are casinos, where naive voters are enticed to roll their dice - while not playing with House options, nor the Senate's. :(

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

What Aspect Of SCALE & Aggregate Degrees of Freedom Don't We Teach To Enough Kids, In All Schools, Everywhere?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



(Photo: walking towards, instead of away from, an impending tsunami of context changes.)

Why is it that group intelligence always seems to recede just before devastating changes in group context? Ordinary humans are clearly talented enough to devise many practical applications for exploring perceived options. There are countless examples, from sublime to mundane, such as this one.

Most Pet Lovers Don't Perceive Equal, Parallel Need To Help A Handicapped Middle Class

Do we have to practice austerity, or can we achieve everything we can imagine, and more?

Application of our talents is clearly gated by the process of recognizing and orienting to local, regional or systemic context. Perceptions & practice then drive us to optimize an increasingly complex combination of actions, so that we can all sail through that thicket of micro-to-macro contexts. Social species work exactly BECAUSE recombinant member interactions provide compounding group resiliency.

Please ask every talented person you know, to design some Automatic Stabilizer policies, for a struggling and starving Middle Class.

We are what we practice, even at a cultural scale. So what triggers do we need, to get more of ourselves to perceive our own, constrained, self-handicapped electorate?

Too few seem to see a MiddleClass limping down the road to oblivion, right into the path of another set of predatory sociopaths, whether "Brits" in India, or an Upper Looting Class that eventually self organizes everywhere.

To avoid these self-inflicted constraints, we need an electorate that practices simultaneously perceiving the full spectrum individual needs, AND team dynamics, AND social interdependencies. To maintain Adaptive Rate, a working culture has to juggle all available input, and keep all it's increasing options available.

What aspect of SCALE don't we teach enough kids, in all schools, everywhere?

Instead of hoarding static assets as rent, why aren't we seeing the value of employing everyone to explore our full range of cultural options, so that we can practice achieving even more than what any individual can currently imagine?

Join a citizen's army? Be all that, together, "we" can be?

Support cultural intelligence? A group mind is a terrible thing to waste?

Why don't more emerging students grasp the scale of the group options to be explored? What methods do we need, in order to change our re-emerging electorate back towards a more adaptive path?

Methods drive results?

  Milestone goals drive methods?

    And Desired Group Outcomes drive milestone goals?

      And interacting imaginations drive Desired Outcomes - aka, Group Imagination?

We can't get there by having everyone wishing to hoard above average amounts of static assets. The reality of the boring outcome actually achieved from that dream has repeatedly been trivial compared to increasing our dynamic assets, an alternate outcome which is available to any organized aggregate - but only if they first recognize it.

If There's A Distributed Will, There's A Crowd-Sourced Way. We Just Have To Find Methods.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)




Someone please tell the 1% to quit trying to micromanage the 99%, by trying to buy all the politicians? It just doesn't work? Jane & Joe Sixpack could tell 'em that, and General Patton could have too, if they'd listen & read.

There are creeping consequences. Here's a prime example.

On the Failures of American Universities

That message holds 10x for failure of public policy institutions too?

Plus, the article doesn't say enough about remedies for this widespread sclerosis.

Do we have to have an aggregate heart-attack to trigger bureaucracy bypass surgery?

What's it take to get this electorate to practice some healthy-policy living?

We need Economic-Illness prevention. Maybe some economic-fitness-gurus would help. Do you know any that aren't one-trick ponies? :(

Never tell 320 million people HOW to do things? Progress for 320 million people means allowing consensus on what BIG challenges to tilt at, and then letting all that diversity amaze ourselves with it's distributed genius?

Yet don't despair. If there's a distributed will, there's a crowd-sourced way. We just have to find methods.

The methods we need are ways to ask people to LET themselves help them achieve. As Einstein and Shewhart suggested, imagination is always more important than context-dependent knowledge. Normally that quickly makes one think of maintaining social agility by right-sizing AND right-distributing our currency supply, a sore subject. Yet even if NeoLiberal Luddites are trying to constrain our fiat-metric supply, today our IT-enabled culture can still explore alternate forms of cultural currency.

It's only a question of how many potshots at our own feet we want to take before right-sizing our cultural imagination and cultural adaptive rate.

"Two capitalist tools for every plutocrat, and 99% holes in every aggregate?" Wotta campaign slogan! Please start suggesting better ones. We need about 320 million alternates to select from.

Orthodox economics is Machiavelli's Economics by any other name?

Is it actually a generally agreed upon cultural taboo, to question the nonsensical axioms of orthodox economics?

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?

The Snowden Saga Heralds A Radical Exposure Of Expanding National Options Worth Exploring, Not Just A Shift In Capitalism

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Pandora's new, virtual box has been open for decades. People are just beginning to grasp a fraction of what that means.

Seems to me that capitalism is not the real point either. We have huge populations creating new methods for group discourse, the basis of Group Intelligence ... and yet national groupings are not yet selecting fittingly audacious Desired Outcomes to achieve, through use of our newly emerging methods.

Our Capabilities Gap is so large, we can't see it.

The Snowden saga heralds a radical shift in capitalism by Evgeny Morozov

1977 European Commission MacDougall Report

   (commentary posted by Roger Erickson)
Bill Mitchell: "If you read [this] Report in detail you will wonder why the Eurozone [currency union] was ever created."

We wonders, my precious, yes, we wonders.

So why was it created, over the objections of all then-rational people? Several of it's early proponents have since issued mea culpas, but not enough to matter. Yet apologies are not needed. Only corrections and fixes.

Yet it all comes down to methods. A common saying posits that any set of methods will work, if you get the right people to run it.

What were and are the Desired Outcomes of the currency union?

Are they being met?

Does the EZ even have a method for assessing whether Outcomes are being met or not?

If they do, have EZ citizens elected the right people to make this system work?

                                          ***

So why was the ECU created, despite rampant warnings? The core answer framework is circular, even before considering the details that Bill Mitchell reviews.

Clearly, many European governments, plus EEU Parliamentarians, were elected that did not represent the interests of European citizens.

Also clearly, that only happened because European citizens did not elect representative who had their citizen's interests in mind.

If citizens don't know where they want to go, all voting options look the same?
Citizens of Europe - and everywhere - only greater distribution of adequate Situational Awareness will save you now, or ever.

If This Is What Gets People Elected To Congress Today, Then We're In Deep Trouble

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Rep. Steve Southerland believes in hard work, finds it.

Hard as this guy works, he'd NEVER be mistaken for one of the Founders who wrote the Constitution.

If this is what gets people elected to Congress today, then we're in deep shit. OCD-constrained savant pops to mind more often than statesman while reading this article. Does that impression reflect the realities of the electorate we've developed?

All may not be lost. To his credit he does come right to the crux eventually, saying that Congress is "a mile wide & an inch deep." Yet he then TURNS AWAY from acknowledging & shaping that reality in the only direction that matters. Not the right guy for the job, so far.

And this is all about one and one issue only, of the thousands Congress is supposed to collectively DELIBERATE and form a more perfect union from. Several hundred one-trick ponies does not agile policy, nor an agile nation make.

A Congress in denial. There's no future in it.

Tribal councils did better, over 500 years ago.

Ours is a well known task, with well known solution guidelines. It's astounding that we've trained ourselves away from scaling up agile extensions of methods already known to work.

Culturington's Hyperchorea, National Dance of Death

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Self-management societies vs anarcho-capitalism: the new global war of ideologies?

Cultural self-management? On what scale? For how long?

Isn't that what we call a society, and a culture?

Both work until they don't. Then they don't work ... until they do.

It's a collective policy choice.

So, how do cultures and/or mobs actually MAKE group assessments? Through their group discourse methods, of course. Those too, are policy choices.

Are enough US citizens turning to sane, group intelligence methods, and thereby to Democracy - to save US from ourselves?

How would 315 million people even know, soon enough? You know, before self-management tolerance limits are relegated to barriers exceeded 10 contexts back?

"Oh, you mean THAT 'Bridge Out' sign! Oops. :) We bad!"
How do 315 million people even assess whether they are or aren't making a cultural policy decision?

Group momentum - stirred up by some Control Fraud - is easily and always causing groups to lurch about, triggering by default group-reflex decisions ... which the group as a whole only becomes aware of later on.

"NSA, can you trace our last 157 Million messages ... and tell us where the hell we are? And where we're going?"

"No? Well, thanks for giving it the too-old, outdated, un-affordable college try ... gramps."

Welcome to the fusion of democratic self-Command & self-Control nightmares with the Fog of Culture!

Ever seen a whole, national culture exhibiting the symptoms of a cultural huntington's-chorea? A Culturington's Hyperchorea? It's not a pretty sight, regardless of what it looks like before symptoms become visible.

Have OUR cultural institutions - no longer suitable for our changed context - already doomed the USA to a cultural Dance of Death?

The good news is that WE CAN ADJUST our flawed cultural-gene methods. The bad news is there's no guarantee that we WILL! Only if we choose to act, before the national dance descends from cultural agility into the national jerk or Middle Class Break dance that triggers excessive head-honcho banging, rampant injuries, lost generations, and loss of cultural life and states.

The National Robot Dance? That's for slow, stiff, Central Planners. The only cultural dance that's ever sustained features cultural agility.

Summary: A Nation Failing To Discriminate And Prioritize Dynamic Over Static, Transient Values

commentary by Roger Erickson

“The only downfall of our beautiful free-enterprise system is profit at all cost,” Billy Mills said. “When you pursue profit at all costs, you’re having to let go of some beautiful strengths you still have within you. You lose sight of virtues and values that ... make all of us." “We all make mistakes — ... it’s the virtues and values that keep us going forward.” ... Billy Mills nodded again. “The greatest degree of freedom ... calls for the greatest degree of discipline.”

It's telling that supposedly advanced statistical and engineering principles are also ancient tribal practices.

Somehow we've fallen way behind on methods to scale distributed discipline as fast as our population and degrees of freedom have grown. What happened to the maxim that methods drive results? Our methods are chasing to catch up to our ongoing outcomes, and barely treading water.

Sure we have to explore options. Yet it's the methods used to approach exponentially increasing options that matter. That's something we call parsing, or critical thinking, or accelerated pattern analysis. Those methods make all the difference in whether our methods drive, chase or diverge from survivable outcomes.

We're no longer a recognizable tribe. We're not even a coherent nation. Our country may fall apart very quickly if we don't quickly find & aggressively use methods for driving adaptive change everywhere. Knowing what to do doesn't matter as much as the universal concept of recruitment methods - knowing how to get enough system components to contribute to doing what's needed.

The very fact that most words in any language require disambiguation drives home the nature of our system management challenges. Most meaning in any language is supplied by context. A distributed democracy simply cannot grow without citizens who are able to think, and who are also deeply practiced in applying that skill.  Without distributed thinking about the ambiguity in every message an electorate hears, every day, we cannot adaptively manage our exponentially growing degrees of freedom.

Answer: Since SCOTUS was Ceded to Scalia

commentary by Roger Erickson

The Question: "Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?" William O. Douglas  Posted at The Long Goodbye

Oh, and delegating the Fed to Greenspan, Geithner & Bernanke helped. May as well have installed Bernie Madoff & Meyer Lansky at the Fed, and Robert Rubin & Henry Paulson at Treasury cum Citibank cum Goldman Sachs. Control Fraud becomes a religion superseding but utilizing all prior affiliations.

That left only the insignificant White House for self-fraud intern, Larry Summers, ex-clerk to Rubin.

It is, of course, easy to rail at the current idiots, but they're simply the latest in a cast of characters in a continuing play. Actors waiting in the wings claim that they can do a "better job" at the same role. Working harder to grease squeaky wheels will only starve us. There's a better way, and we need to find it.

http://www.englisharticles.info/tag/political-corruption-quotes/

Self-delusion used to be simpler, even innocently incompetent. Now it's subtle, and already diversified further.

http://memegenerator.net/instance/9923751

From all our collective history, there's not enough methodological wisdom in the entire pantheon of all religions & all Constitutions to have prevented this from happening - yet again - the last 40 years, right here in the USA of all places. We're still a day late & a dollar short, and find ourselves still needing faster access to a steady stream of new insights.

So we obviously have to start doing some things differently around here. All of us. Suggestions are welcome.

If we're going to explore our growing pantheon of options, we must at least keep them all constantly visible in one continuous spectrum - shared by all. Situational Awareness does not mean having an opinion. It means being ready to perceive NOVEL opportunities in any mix of events, opinions and actions.  Tactical, strategic & policy agility all follow situational awareness.

Since there is always fear of moving too fast, distributing situational awareness is more important than all other needs. How do we overcome our own innocent frauds, neither too soon nor too late, but with precisely the right timing?

First, we need OpenSource ways to instantly plot all existing opinions on any subject, to make it easy & fast to recognize the organizing axis, the average and the tails of every opinion distribution.  We need to share those tools simply because the return-on-coordination trumps all other returns.  Don't settle for hoarding crumbs, when we can make the pie grow faster than we can eat it!  In systems jargon, the diversity of an "opinion cloud" provides us with enough options.  Yet from that opinion cloud, only parsing skills select the unpredictable profile of the given, complex solution to every situation.

Second, therefore, we also need an easily accessible, OpenSource way to track the 1st & 2nd derivative of every opinion plot, so we can recognize and select success options sooner rather than later.

Here's the simple rub.  If the incompetent, the self-deluders and the outright crooks can band together and self organize across prior divisions, why can't we?  And why can't we always adapt faster than they do?   

Crooks & misfits can organize quickly precisely BECAUSE their Luddite goals are outmoded and simple.  It's largely because they're a smaller group than all of us, and have the advantage of smaller group intelligence as well as small minds.  When they always know what their mindless goal is - hoarding - it's quicker & obviously easier to organize.  

It's far harder to constantly scale White Collar Crime immune processes across a larger and constantly growing population. Multiple examples available from other settings suggest what we already know - we need agile, scalable regulatory institutions able to generate astounding rates of mobilizing and demobilizing, at a moment's notice.  To be agile, we need to train ourselves on agile methods.

What on earth makes us think we can't AFFORD to self regulate, tune and accelerate our own adaptive rate? That's what the entire history of the USA demonstrates. Why lose faith now, at this particular time?  We can't afford to NOT scale up our own self control.

So, please send your suggestions for where to start and, if possible, examples of momentum others can coordinate with.

As you make suggestions, remember that things that work at one scale don't necessarily scale successfully as population grows.  The minor devil may be in every given set of details, but the distributed devil grows with the scaling details.

http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/across-countries-where-social-trust-is-high-crime-and-corruption-are-low/