Interesting Things Occurring In Italy, & In Human Cultures Everywhere. A Challenge For Current Artists, In All Medias

What do we have to change in our K-12 education - and in our nation's art - to make most citizens aware of the pattern of process flow, and it's implications for our our own culture and our cultural adaptive rate?

Consider this question.

If your parent culture (and by default EVERY culture) was a developing baby-culture ....

... then what might evolving cultures of tomorrow look like?

This question is so interesting that I'm curious to hear reactions from diverse readers.

Some people are still obsessing over how our brains have already been making memories, for many million of years.

Ho hum. Ancient history.

That history is now recognized nothing more than a trivially necessary but not sufficient lesson for application on a larger scale, to current context.

After all, data is meaningless without context. So are known principles. Further, mass education learning rate is meaningless without reference to Cultural Adaptive Rate.

What matters far more are the details of how our social interactions form human culture ... or not.

Meanwhile, a tiny trickle of people - from Marriner Eccles to Warren Mosler - have been tripping over opportunities to link systems principles to everyday real life, and to our amazingly ignorant processes for setting national policies.

see http://www.retemmt.it/

and http://primaveraeconomica.it/

I remember hearing of a literature professor in the 1960s proposing that a negligible % of individual humans were "self-aware" before the advent of classical Greek literature, ~400 BC, and their "discovery" of grammar. Was he right? There's plenty of behavioral evidence for & against, so it seems to be a statistical question, not an absolute one. Most may recognize that what some of their neurons know is not always what they as an individual actually do. :) Even more telling:

there are vast differences between what key individuals and whole disciplines claim to know ..... and how their electorates actually behave.

In regards to classic Greek culture, it's sobering to consider that it took only a tiny confluence of triggers (perhaps the combination of exposure to vast diversity, plus newfound wealth & leisure?) to unleash a wholesale transfer of attention from trivial to profound interests, in a human population long past capable of doing so.

Such transitions are in general, viewed in systems science as phase shifts in autocatalysis.

Today, 2000 years after the most famous Greeks, we have a vast human population also capable of far more than it is actually doing, or even actively considering. 

It's exciting to think that we are waiting only for some unpredictable set of trivial triggers to unleash yet another transformation in collective human thought. Humanity as a whole may come out of our next transition as predominantly "culturally aware," not just with most people individually "self-aware." Such a transition in "group context awareness" may trigger cultural blossoming far greater than the transitions historically associated with the onset of classical Greek culture.

That aggregate transformation may not be marked by great advances in how much a tiny fraction of humans do know. Rather, it may be marked by great, but subtle, advances in how soon most humans are allowed to and required to know ... what few things most must know in order to produce greater Group Intelligence, and a faster Group Adaptive Rate. Military scientists at War Colleges refer to such "teamwork" adaptive agility as the "[adaptive] quality of distributed decision-making."  I'll call it simply the return-on-coordination.

Exciting times indeed!

I'm long past convinced that such expected advances will depend NOT on adding more to what we already know about simple systems like central nervous systems, but rather, in beginning to more actively disseminate and actually APPLY even slightly larger fractions of what's already known ... about system-coordination ... to our own policy coordination.

The difference between a self-tuning electorate (agile, adaptive democracy) and an un-tuned culture (past baby-cultures) will make the dramatic difference between an untuned vs a tuned V8-engine look like trivial child's play.




How do we visualize our own Evolution of Adaptive Power?

What do we have to change in our K-12 education - and in our nation's art - to make most citizens aware of the pattern of process flow, and it's implications for our our own culture and our cultural adaptive rate?

That's a challenge for current artists, working in all medias, to visualize.

We have to visualize our possible outcomes, before we can select which ones to shoot for. With every consensus national outcome adequately visualized ... we can always impress ourselves with our own, untapped ingenuity.

We know that evolving species, and cultures, constantly increase the amount of information they can process in a unit of time, which is itself relative to Adaptation Space. To speed up our own cultural adaptive rate, we need new methods. But which ones? We continuously need newer methods for increasing and tuning key communication throughput - the key to all development. And to get those methods, we have to first visualize how to select them. In all probability, we already have the required methods ... and just don't yet know what to use them for, nor why to use them.

It turns out that methods too are meaningless without context.

Here's the challenge for poets, musicians, videographers, writers and all other artists. 

Everyone's Looking for a "Better Way" - How Do We As A People Actually Achieve It?

  Visualize many Desired Aggregate Outcomes?

  Recruit more citizens to view that palette?

  Prepare more citizens to participate in SELECTING which aggregate options we want to explore?

If we don't help select where we're going, some collection of nincompoops will ... by sheer default, if nothing else.

That would be a pity, because A Group Brain Is A Terrible Thing To Waste.

More Evidence That The Entirety Of Orthodox Economics Is Simply An Extension Of Class Hegemony - Maintained As A Cultural Habit

Consider the latest missive from the Congressional Budget Office.

The Long-Run Effects of Federal Budget Deficits on National Saving and Private Domestic Investment

After reading this several times over, a simple question has to be posed.

If [someone] starts with a big enough myth, can they get whole populations and disciplines to go along with nonsense? The answer throughout history is .... "sure!"

Yet where does that leave us? Before even considering the CBO's data, please consider the following questions, to establish and orient to context. After all, without context, data is meaningless.

Questions:

1) Is the entirety of orthodox economics simply an extension of class hegemony - maintained as a cultural habit?

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

3) Is orthodox economics inseparable from "court" management theory, used by aristocrats to manage "their" assets?

While pondering that context, consider the reality that there is a gulf between fiat currency operations (e.g., MMT) and orthodox economics, simply because any aggregate, operational approach, by definition, is tuned to SOME stated purpose - aka, group policy.

Orthodox economics, on the other hand, steadfastly refuses to accept national policy as a reference axiom - maintaining that it is merely a set of tools, or methods. Yet no tool users set down their tools at the end of the day without considering what they were using them for, and why.

That claim of being a method divorced from purpose ought to set off warning bells. "Danger Will Robinson. Danger Will Robinson. Control Frauds are running loose in our Policy Staff!"

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

All functional diversions of patterns of tool-use from consensus purpose, constitute - by default - various shades of Control Fraud. Simply because special interests will always fill a policy void left dangling, lacking aggregate purpose.

The result? Innocent Frauds may practice only Innocent Control Fraud (ICF) by default, but it is control fraud nonetheless. The concept holds, even if you prefer to call it incompetence.

Is there any resistance to this widespread lack of aggregate purpose for economic theory? Perhaps. See the following article.

CBO’s scoring system holds U.S. government back on long-term programs

However, this text is so long-winded that it's difficult to fully discern whether the author's Context Awareness is consistently rooted in allegiance to public purpose, fraud or incompetence. Maybe a bewildering mix of all three? :(

Back to the CBO article. Let's now get to their treatment of data.

They soon get right to their beginning myth, then base all economic modeling around this assumption.

'Deficits thus “crowd out” private domestic investment in the long run.'

And how do they get their conclusions to support their premise? With the rudderless tool of "orthodox economic theory" of course! Starting with a definition connected to no context whatsoever:

"The sum S + (T – G) equals national saving"

They're referring to a common, presumed notation. I = S + (T – G) – NFI

Rearranging, we get:  S + (T – G) = I + NFI

So for the CBO, "national saving" = (priv+biz saving) + (taxes - total spending). In other words, "national saving" = (Public Investment) + NetForeignInvestment.

Just as an aside, how does a growing nation "save" Public Initiative? Beats me. For the sake of the CBO's lunatic ramblings, however, let's ignore that functonal sanity test, and go back to considering the form of their policy delusion.

Next, note that I + NFI = trade balance (pos or neg), in econ jargon.

So far, so close.

Yet one implicit point becomes clear, though unstated! Managing the trade deficit is their implied control variable? Their "objective?"

(For Pete's sake! That is gold-std thinking. It's like the CBO office is staffed by blondes listening to a variant of the "breathe-in, breathe-out" tapes.)

First off, they're treating the sum of pub+priv savings as a static asset. There's no presence nor discussion of sinks and sources in their model?

What is the reality? 

* return-on-coordination = a net source of real + nominal dynamic assets;

(which counts more than the possession of any static assets)
(and don't forget compounding; 
some teamwork really is more useful than other teamwork)

* conversely, net stupidity or net ignorance easily produce a net sink of both dynamic and static assets;

We have a key problem in using macro-economic theory to shape national policy. Regardless of all the definitions & rhetoric, there is no formal acknowledgement of Public Purpose in orthodox macro economics!

What is our national objective? Our Public Purpose?

..Which economic model variable TRACKS that objective? 

..Which methods drive variables to push economic models in the direction of that objective?

Orthodox macro economists can't answer those questions because asking them is NOT allowed in the framework of orthodox macro economic modeling! It's a theoretical accounting method that refuses to acknowledge any purpose OTHER than ex post, static asset accounting.

At the same time, economic theory studiously ignores the evolution of banking operations!

You couldn't make this up. A management theory that refuses to consider aggregate purpose and also ignores evolving operations. What could go wrong?

Again, merely for the sake of tempo in this comedy routine, let's continue anyway.

Does anyone see a National Assessment System at work in any of this?

I'm getting the feeling that it's all implicitly biased to make & keep key political constituents rich, no matter what happens to our country. Smells like teenage aristocratic philosophy? The CBO really is advising us to manage currency_issuer finances just like currency_user finances? We need an electorate which knows the difference, so we can maintain a policy staff which knows it.

Let's reconsider something that is implicit in our National Policy Guide: "Assume some myth or propaganda, then see what our macro economic models mean ... relative to that myth." [Alrighty then! Werks fur mi!]

That's no way to run a family, a company, an army, or a nation - all of which set AGGREGATE objectives first, and then explore all options for achieving them.

Our curreny National Policy Guide is, however, how royalty look at the serfs in their various "possessions." If citizens and aggregate don't matter, then of course orthodox macro economics works. Just treat humanity as another variable to manipulate [without their will]. The simple question is "who does it work FOR?"

To me, the CBO's logic is NOT a model for managing national development.

It IS, however, a model for managing who privately owns any and all declared static assets (or thinks they own them).

We need an electorate, Congress & CBO that puts out a yearly report entitled:

"The Long-Run Effects of
Federal Thinking Deficits
on Adaptive Rate Of The USA"

What Do We Do When We Have This Much Contention At The Highest Levels Of System Governance? ALLEVIATE IT!

Last Friday, I was just at a contentious seminar that turned out to be a model for nearly every systemic policy process underway today.

The forum discussed MICC decision-making & how well it aligns vs ignores critical service demands for CAS (close air support) decision-making.

http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/weapons/2013/a-seminar-on-combat-effectiveness.html

see also http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/weapons/2013/air-force-brass-ignores-wars-lessons.html

The whole event was literally riveting, from start to finish!

Why? Ultimately, for what it revealed about our systemic governance processes, beyond even what it meant for those working with the topic at hand.

There is far, far too much to relate about the content of this forum, but here are two key points that cut through all the other details.

1) A retired AF pilot and officer, Chuck Myers, said the whole concept of CAS had been off-track from it's inception (>85 years ago), and should be re-named as MAS (maneuver-air-support) - to direct all discussion of it to the key concept of net, team agility (i.e., Adaptive Rate). Chuck seemed to be the oldest person present, yet seemed to have the most - and an astounding - grasp of system development, or appreciation for a "system," from tactics all the way up to politics. Yet, his story was one of lifelong frustration. Learning much, and passing on cogent warnings about tragic, unsolved systemic issues. Made me think of a drill-down of Eisenhower's MICC speech.

2) Chuck Myers also related a story from post-WWII, involving a legendary AF Gen he once worked with, Elwood Quesada. Quesada had suggested to the highest levels of DoD command, that AF/Army/Navy/USMC coordinate weapons platform development ... and was told by senior generals that they couldn't do that, since the competing service leaders "are the enemy."

    You can't make this stuff up!

As I understood it, that observation of deep, organizational toxicity occurred before even the Korean War! Worse, it has never been remedied, and persists, magnified, in the highest levels of our cultural policy governance, even today.
  Astounding!

(At this point my mind was already silently screaming to myself: "What about our Goddamn 2-party system - that makes an ongoing art out of having whole swaths of citizens name each other, and each other's representatives, as enemies? And all our isolated, narrow-thinking lobbyist processes? What have we descended into? And what are we going to DO about THAT?)

More direct ruminations triggered by the meeting.

The meeting agenda revolved around the immediate furor over the AF removing the A-10 CAS/MAS airplane from service, and leaving a significant needs-gap with only vague promises that it would or could be filled by alternate means. There were deeply moving testimonies from multiple service veterans documenting that morale suffered from such decision processes, starting with a sense of betrayal, progressing to organizational fatigue, and culminating in performance degradation.

Amazingly, the resulting discussion REPEATEDLY drove home the hierarchy - for systemic success - of people(affinity)/practice/equipment - in that order ... YET, the whole meeting concluded with a question rather than a conclusion: "We've nailed the problem, now what do we do about it?"

That conclusion - or lack of it - was astounding, (for an outsider) since they'd all just finished re-documenting and re-agreeing on the classic solution ... at least at THEIR level. Yet, they COULD NOT, for the life of them, see that the systemic solution was simply a process of extending the "people(affinity)" grouping to the larger set of people that every task-team has to coordinate with every year (in every evolving culture) - as both populations and their layers of organization governance expand!

Restate it this way, as a question. What did pre-homo-sapien species do, as their cell-count and physiological complexity kept evolving (from, say, 1/2 Trillion cells in some small mammal, to the 10X Trillion cells, different cell types, and different organs in the current human physiology)?

Answer: First off, all the human cell numbers in our body maintain their total group affinity, above all else, as they grow from one egg cell to the 10X Trillion cells in an adult.

System growth simply cannot outgrow it's methods for maintaining affinity and hence it's motivation for "inter-service coordination" among ALL system components.

It's either a system ... or it's a mob in some grade of civil war.

With system expansion, every (seemingly) intractable system-organization task has a solution, and that solution involves adding yet another layer of indirection - to maintain first affinity, and then coordination? Ya think?

In other words, systems evolve by coordinating on a larger scale. Success is DEFINED as reaping the astounding return-on-coordination.

That dynamic at the meeting was, for a systems scientist, simply astounding to see, and experience, and to see ignored and missed once again!

To me, it seemed to be a system not hearing feedback from it's own new trees, simply because of the increased size of today's forest. They were missing their own, self-evident solution once again, and snatching defeat from their own, migrating, jaws of victory. The bigger problem - overall - seemed to be the task of expanding our electorate's perception - situational awareness - as fast as our own, bureaucratic situations expand.

The pace of the meeting was so quick that I never could get a comment in. There were always too many people with uniforms or urgent testimony to give - all dotting more "i's" and crossing more "t's" in the sympony which the chorus was preaching to itself. That's exactly what made the meeting so riveting, and yet we simply ran out of time to discuss what to do next. But I did get to talk with a few people afterwards, and think I have a follow-up path to try to help this critical effort along.

After all, if this group - who are SO close to perfecting continuously developing methods - can't be helped to take another step, then what hope is there for all our other sectors, who haven't accumulated anywhere near as much experience at actually having to make complex social-systems work? Those would be our other congressional/industry/agency/professional complexes.

That question stuck in my mind all weekend, and I woke up Sunday morning with an epiphany ... that surviving, agile systems are those that select for feedback loops operating with at 3, parallel, time constants (an old observation in biology; that there are always AT LEAST immediate, medium and long-term response mechanisms at work, EVERYWHERE you look, involved in every process).

My epiphany was that, in human-team terms, one can say it this way:

"Leaders" save the butts of adult groups in critical situations - immediate term.

"Teachers" train adolescent groups to handle newly discovered, critical situations - medium term.

"Parents" are always adding subtle new wrinkles, preparing developing groups to avoid getting deep into whole new patterns of critical situations (prevention through early intervention, as an improved form of "steering"). Long term adaptation.

Amazingly, military science has long recognized a parallel observation (but failed to adequately apply it to their own, personnel systems?). Their counterpart of this same observation is called the "3ɪˈs" of contingency management.

That is, deal with impact/interception/instigators[causality]. Military teaching also states that if you don't manage all 3 processes in parallel, that you can't win. Right?

So, an obvious question arises. Can we continuously adapt if we don't apply the same logic to our own, system development processes?

Isn't that how we avoid developing views which lead us to disastrously label our own team members as our enemies? For Kilroy's sake! Why is that NOT our #1 priority?

The "3ɪˈs" of managing the parallel contingency of our own, changing, internal systems ... are:

total team performance (self-leadership), 

total team training,  

total team gestation (cultural development).

What's that old saying?

If war is too important to leave to the generals, then surely EVERY process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners?

That lesson quite obviously holds for owners/managers of whole systems too.

It's fatally erroneous to presume that processes AND WHOLE SYSTEMS (including ourselves and our institutions) are permanent, and not transient.

   *****

ps: Someone also just sent me a reminder of a similar issue, currently in the news.

"The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Committee investigated until 1978 and issued its final report, and concluded that Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_Assassinations

Tactically, it no longer matters whether JFK's death was or wasn't conspiracy by whichever particular people who saw him as "the enemy." It DOES matter that we have no systemic method for dealing with this taboo subject - in a timely manner - at ALL levels of our current culture. The perennial questions are - where can we get to from HERE, where we currently are, and how soon?

The claim is that some of our own people in high-level governance positions came to view Pres. JF Kennedy and Senator RF Kennedy as "the enemy?"

Again. For Kilroy's sake! If we can't quit targeting ourselves, then how can we focus, as a team, on external challenges and explore our own, emerging options? If the return-on-coordination is always the highest return, by far, then how do we keep our eyes on that, instead of lesser, goals?

If the lesser goals are below us, then we really have seen the enemy, and it really is true that "he is us." Therefore, our chief task is selection, and eliminating those process attributes that hinder team coordination. Those friction-generating sub-processes are our biggest enemy. We just have to train ourselves to recognize "them" as we keep spawning their child-processes, in every new thing we add.

It's a process of selectively pruning the high-friction parts of all the new activities which we constantly sow amongst ourselves?  Ya think?

There's no reason why we can't be better "parents" for our evolving culture - as well as leaders and teachers - of our existing electorate. We just have to teach appreciation for our own systems ... and their evolution ... to every student by, say, 5th grade. (Or, make that age 10, if we're already going back to self-directed, Open Source, education.)

That doesn't sound like a difficult task at all. These are simple concepts. We just need to apply them more systemically.

Minimal Planning for Sustainable Organizational Coherence

If anyone thinks any of the discussion raised below is obvious, simple or not needed, one needs only review the ongoing charades over massive financial fraud, political treason, WikiLeaks, Cryptom.org, or Bradley Manning to see how compromised our high level policy processes are.

How does ANY growing organization invent new methods - fast enough - for keeping it's policy staff aligned with "general welfare of a GROWING population" - a task that is increasingly distributed, by definition?

The interests of politicians - or "leaders" of any sort - are FAR too easily diverted by very simplistic, existing methods. Protection & maintenance of their personal needs and pressures are grossly neglected relative to the impact of the national issues they're supposedly shepherding.

We tend to discuss this as personal treason, but a better perspective is that of the group. From a group perspective, leadership treason reflects gross neglect and mal-adaptive group methods which have exposed key people in key positions in key organizations to concentrated pressures. Those are not just stupid mistakes, but ones trivially correctable by groups, given their immense resources.

As an analogy, how does any "immune system" protect it's immune cells from infection by novel agents? How does a commanding CNS protect itself from being hijacked by a virus? How does an organizational culture protect itself from Control Fraud?

The bigger the organization, and the faster the growth, the sooner and easier it is to derail and pervert it from the top.

Ergo, managing organizational risks & uncertainties requires that top-down methods regulation remain top priority, and that such management always use "general welfare of the people" as a constant reference. In all system models of evolutionary Adaptive Rate, maintaining simultaneous diversity and recombinant discovery of options is roughly synonymous with maintaining "general welfare of the people."

If we don't continuously model, test and pay minimal attention to safeguarding the regulatory pressures that "policy-level" staff are subject to ... then we make a mockery of all organizational investments at all subsidiary levels. We may as well invest all national resources in winning an evolutionary race, and then voluntarily give away the victory.

Unfortunately, the following questions are novel for most people. What methods keep emerging, key leaders fully immersed, oriented to and constrained by the general welfare of the people? How do we make policy staff immune to narrow temptations, and instead adequately connected to group, and fully motivated by group outcomes? How do we keep such people from becoming isolated, pressured, misguided, susceptible ... and tempted by things that shouldn't even matter to the group?

More attention to modeling and practicing our own group outcomes-based practice methods?

Practice our own practice methods? You know who's most familiar with that concept? Sports & other team coaches. We really need to discuss running our politics and policy apparatus with the same attention to group outcomes. It obviously matters, more than anything else.