commentary by Roger Erickson
by John Boyd (JB), explained by Chuck Spinney (CS).
Just as the brain of an individual has an "
OODA Loop," so too does the group-brain of a functional culture or nation.
Tempo of individual as well as group decision-making matters. If we can't accelerate the process by which more people consider the difference options available to currency issuers/users .... we may tie our nation in knots long enough to commit national suicide.
It's happened before.
JB/CS goal:
To Understand How the MIND Evolves an Interior Mental Orientation
(or, Changing Constructs of Meaning or what Thomas Kuhn called “Paradigms”)
Sugested goal for USA:
We want our electorate to understand how a GROUP-MIND evolves a Cultural Orientation.
1) The "mind" = persistent patterns of message-passing among trillions of neurons.
2) Clearly "group intelligence" is held in the body of discourse of an electorate.
(Hundreds of Millions of people? Have we, the USA, even achieved a coherent, stable group-mind yet? Even if we have, how long can we sustain it in given contexts?)
Note: Various writers have suggested that humans permanently "captured" individual self-awareness only as recently as 2000 years ago, with the dissemination of written concepts by the Greeks. Others contend that the extent of individual self-awareness tracked the long, slow development of human language and culture, and is at least 150K years old.
Has the group-mind of ANY existing human culture fully captured group-self-awareness - and hence, optimized group agility? Tribal identities, affinity-methods and group agility are very old, but clearly don't scale, as is. No current nation has yet invented methods for permanently capturing methods that preserve group-self-awareness in a continually re-stocking culture. Isn't that our goal?
Implications:
The group-mind of an ad-hoc grouping of people is far more unstable than the laboriously-constructed mind of an individual. Groups can rapidly rise to astonishing levels of group-genius, and fall even faster to incredible depths of group-stupidity. (Lord of the Flies?
Orthodox economics?)
Our cultural embryology is nowhere near as rigorously constrained as our physical embryology is. (Cultural re-invention tracks "selective" cultural recombination.)
Group-minds have far more degrees of freedom, with the rapidly spiraling responsibility to select permutations wisely.
We need far more active practice at our current population levels, before we'll know what cultural-embryological tolerance limits will allow us to scale up to sanely organized populations with an order of magnitude more options (through either population and/or net capabilities).
We want our electorate to know that we need more practice to determine what elements of our cultural-embryology will or won't allow us to scale further.
To know the truth about the current momentum of group-intelligence, it is, as philosophers say, necessary to "ask why, 5 times" (at least).
Ergo, we can't EVER accelerate cultural Adaptive Rate in practice, except by tweaking preparation ~5 levels back in all aspects of cultural or institutional momentum.
Group Agility = Group Adaptive Rate = tempo of re-tuning entire systems. (Whether professions, institutions, or cultures.)
