(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)
Here's are 2 excellent summaries of what we're up against.
https://twitter.com/ARob7125/status/435819120110874624/photo/1https://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?
