Sunday, March 29, 2015

Can't Every Aggregate Afford To Generate Their Needed Diversity ... And Have It Too?

Can anything be extended past tolerance limits?

Sure. Ever heard of "Count" Victor Lustig? He was an ironic crook.

In 1925, "Count" Lustig allegedly sold the Eiffel Tower to a group of scrap metal tycoons.

Sehr lustig, ja ... auf Deutsch!


Victor's example is from a 2-book series from from 1973, on:


Crimes & Punishment. A Pictorial Encyclopedia of Aberrant Behavior

Obviously, a pictorial encyclopedia of all human cultures would look remarkably analogous. Every culture is aberrant to what will come next .... unless everything stops evolving, adapting and changing. But that's beside the point, right?

The C&P book is clearly dated in some ways, but reveals an already mature literature strongly correlating personality dominance traits with various crime statistics, in addition to all other effects more weakly linking outcomes to contexts.

Is that proposed correlation between intrinsic dominance & crime still considered prominent, or useful, in criminology and for cultural adaptation in general? For example, the authors & editors seem infatuated with the psychologist Maslow, some of whose ideas now seem as anthropomorphic as Freud's were outright arcane.

Nevertheless, it's a fascinating read, for yet another reason. Each description of the background of bizarre criminality also implies a strong correlation with prior isolation, lack of constant feedback, lack of belonging, and overall ... failed social regulation in it's most broadest definition.

From the point of view of distributed prevention, one can't help imagine how cheap it really may be to prevent a larger proportion of all types of crime.

In cancer biology, we constantly discuss how much it actually takes to "transform" a given cell into a cancer clone. It's actually not easy, at all, especially when cells remain in their normal context, literally engulfed in a flood of continuous feedback.

This analogy comes to mind when reviewing how much cultural malaise it actually takes to socially "transform" developing youth to even the low % of overt sociopaths we call criminals, whether blue-collar or white-collar.

And, that actually segues seamlessly to a connected phenomenon. Where's the border between the main body of genetic, personality & cultural "diversity curves," and the long tails of those same curves, which we label as either "rare" diseases or fringes outside of acceptable cultural tolerance limits?

This is a rather neglected question in general biology and cultural evolution, not just cultural practices.

A) We acknowledge the primary importance of diversity, and of methods for actively driving sexual, psychological & cultural recombination.

B) Simultaneously, we still seem to try too hard to arbitrarily label that same needed diversity and recombination-methods as something to be "cured" or excised, instead of something necessary but never sufficient, to be embraced, extended, and gracefully accommodated. When in a hurry, no corner looks too short to cut ... until experience proves it to be so, well after the fact.

This oxymoron is highlighted by well known but usually dismissed differences in how physiological/personal/cultural diversity was & is handled in old vs emerging cultures. Historically, the default handling of diversity was clearly more weighted toward community accommodation of diversity. It's only in emerging cultural mash-ups that frictions build to the point of heightened efforts to cut corners & cull the low % of diversity outliers, from schizophrenia & autism on to sociopathologies and the now more than 7000 uniquely defined rare diseases. Unless, of course, the sociopaths transiently gain prominence. Then things soon get worse, even if it looks briefly attractive. Every new random modification is only another tangent, branching from a totally unpredictable future. If that weren't true, recombination wouldn't be the law of reality.

One implication is that we simply needn't be in a hurry to eradicate everything that surprises us. That's not how evolution got us this far.

So, can't every aggregate afford to generate their needed diversity ... and have it too?

What's the distributed cost of recombination, and utilization too?

Not much, it turns out, when coordination costs and the return on coordination are BOTH amortized & distributed across whole democracies. That's the simple logic of adequately and gracefully provisioning most if not all contributors to cultural diversity, as much as possible - with early accommodation and regulation, NOT expensive and pointless late removal. It's what social species do. It's easily affordable, and well worth it.

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