Someone one who publishes random articles about what a given individual naively thinks whole aggregates "could" and "should" do?
If an academic tweets in the world, after NEVER having worked on Main Street, and there are too few people around with relevant experience to instantly give 'em sanity checks .... are acdemics still statistically irrelevant?
For example, the presumption that there is a Longevity Dividend is so naive that it's embarrassing.
These guys don't seem to know the 1st thing about biology-101, i.e., that species lifetimes are very actively programmed, precisely to get prior generations OUT OF THE WAY of their recombinant offspring.
For Wallace's sake! We do physical, chemical, biological, sexual, behavioral & cultural recombination FOR A REASON. That reason is precisely to counteract & regulate blind, Institutional Momentum, aka, Phenotypic Persistence! If you extend the lifetime of any component in any system, the first consequence is augmented Institutional Momentum.
Here's an excerpt on augmented human longevity, from a hypothetical "Recombinant Systems for Dummies" book: "Dude, that's not always a good thing."
Increased interaction and distributed involvement I can see, but if Institutional Momentum is a problem now, extending it will help? That seems like another, very fundamental, fallacy of composition for a constantly expanding whole.
In fact, I'm constantly wondering how to titrate just what % of discourse in every discipline is completely off the aggregate adaptive path, from the onset of that discipline. I'm guessing it's far higher than most would ever imagine. It may vary from 80% to 98% for all we know. You'd have to be an outside observer with the benefit of hindsight to easily determine that. By definition, no sub-aggregate Institution is as adaptive as all of us, so that the momentum of any sub-aggregate Institution is alwyays closer to a tangent to the unpredictably meandering Adaptive Path of a whole aggregate.
Yet there must be some way for aggregates come to slowly approach aggregate-self-awareness of that ongoing challenge. How to have their Institutions (phenotypes) and use them too?
How? Surely it starts with systemic Cultural Instrumentation. In general, the more instrumented a system is, the faster it can tune distributed adjustments to ongoing variance in that system's component features.
Some have argued that few humans were individually "self-aware" until the documented self-discovery of grammar by the Greeks, circa 300-400 BC dramatically increased the numbers displaying that feature.
So when will whole electorates be aggregate-self-aware? Circa 3000 AD? Let's hope it's even sooner. The internet, and mobile phones, are exciting milestones, yet when it comes to Cultural Instrumentation, things like Facebook are still analogous to Neanderthals pounding rocks, oblivious to the approach of subtly but significantly new species.
Finally, what do we DO with our proliferating number of system components (humans) broadcasting naive views? Instrument them? That's a start. Then, how do we achieve increasingly distributed aggregate analysis of increasing proportions of prior/current/emerging data?
If aggregate success tracks the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision-making, then accelerated or continued success (resiliency) may track the quality (including tempo) of selected combinations of [Prior Distributed-Instrumentation PLUS Distributed-Analysis PLUS Distributed-Practice], not just their algebraic sum.
If none of us is as smart as all of us, that's still only useful if we can quickly INVOLVE all of us in demonstrating aggregate smarts.
That's what Natural Selection means. Selecting, by survival, that progressing combination of existing component features which is best able to survive the slings & arrows of outrageous fortune (including tempo).
Every new task has a solution, and that solution will involve another level of indirection ... by adding sub-components able to build new interfaces between existing as well as emerging components.
Here's my advice to all "Technoprogressive Public Intellectuals." Less talk, more do. Within tolerance limits, of course.
Curiously, the best way to further improve the resiliency of any recombinant system, is to add subtle methods for reducing frictions and improving the tempo of coordination among existing components, rather than adding novel component variants or even markedly altering the characteristics of existing components.
Every new task has a solution, and that solution will involve another level of indirection ... by adding sub-components able to build new interfaces between existing as well as emerging components.
Here's my advice to all "Technoprogressive Public Intellectuals." Less talk, more do. Within tolerance limits, of course.
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