We Need Professionally Licensed Cultural Engineers, Not Just Fly-By-Night Profiteers Masquerading As Politicians - And Informed Voters.

If teamwork works, why don't we do even more of it ... at all levels?

"It is necessary to have [civil] organization if we are to have effective and efficient government. The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization, and the only difference between a disorganized country and one that has the advantage of a wise and sound government is fundamentally a question of [citizen] organization." Calvin Coolidge

Yet here we are, unnecessarily waging a great civil war worldwide, between business concerns and the people whom merchants serve.

TTIP will outlaw any renationalization, once your power, water, trains etc. get privatized!

When a servant says to his customer: "Restrict your exploration of options, so I may serve you better" - he's forgetting that the horse doesn't direct the cart. Nor does the car direct the driver, or the Public Servant the public.

When servants mis-lead customers, we call it false-advertising. When servants usurp and enslave customers, we call it an evolutionary dead-end, and death spiral.

"Mass demand [for things we don't need] has been created almost entirely through .. advertising." Calvin Coolidge

Yet don't forget that we eventually discard - sometimes quickly - all that we don't need. Don't forget what happened the last time we allowed too much false-advertising to lead us off a cliff, right after Calving Coolidge left office in March, 1929.

Do we the people really need TTIP and other "trade" frameworks, any more than India "needed" the East India Company (EIC)?  Who is the benefactor? Who provides which benefits? And who reaps any claimed benefits, for how long? And finally, at what cost to the aggregate?

"This [TTIP] is a transnational corporate takeover similar to the takeover of India by the East India Company in 1757. That's the Neo-Liberal plan for globalization. 

This effectively shuts down democracy and neuters the nation state. It will lead to revolution unless enforced by police states in which the transnationals control the security forces, as the EIC did in India. 

It's not just a matter of stopping TPP and TTIP but of ending neoliberal globalization. The Right gets this. The Left not so much. So watch for a resurgence of the Right in the EZ."    Tom Hickey

What are YOUR thoughts?

Personally, I suspect that prospects for the feudal approach of right wing fat cats & gangsters - trying to emulate aristocrats - is alive and kicking, but on the tail-end of a 2-thousand year cycle.

Populations everywhere are being SLOWLY transitioning to professionally-run democracies, with hiccoughs.

It'll get a bit worse, but then things have to get better - or else.

This is cultural evolution in action; fascinating!

Imagine how long it took for human physiology to "settle" into a workable package of 40Trillion cells, ~300 Cell Types, and ~65 Organs. That adaptive tuning didn't happen overnight. Nor will cultural evolution at our current population levels.

It takes a super-village of established methods ... to grow an adaptive culture.

The core challenge is establishing AND MAINTAINING key sub-methods, for inventing & installing new cultural methods, as needed. That's way harder than, say, all the refinements made to the internal combustion engine the last 100 years.

We need professionally licensed cultural engineers, not just fly-by-night profiteers masquerading as politicians.

Until then, we're closer to disorganized crime than cultural teamwork.

Meeting Challenges With Logical Institution of Adaptive Change ... or ... Continually Accelerating End Runs Around Institutional Momentum

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection*, except of course for the problem of too many indirections." David Wheeler

More usefully ...

ALL PROBLEMS IN DEMOCRACY CAN BE SOLVED BY ORGANIZING ENOUGH TO LEVERAGE RATHER THAN MERELY SUFFER MORE LEVELS OF INDIRECTION.

These and other statements about indirection are actually concise summaries of the theory of adaptive evolution. Sure we have plenty of old & new challenges, every year, if not every day.  How do we meet and survive them?

Name your problem.

Fiat currency budgets? White Collar Crime and banking? Tax rates? College loans? Unemployment? Military Industrial Congressional Complex? Police Brutality? Blue Collar Crime? Trade Policy? Excessive Regulations? Slow Moving Bureaucracy? Pollution?

All of these can be easily solved, by teamwork and organized teams. Most will acknowledge that organized teams can do amazing things, and have been doing so for ~4.5 Billion years on planet Earth.

What's to stop us now?

If that's the case, how do we actually take arms against a sea of self-generated problems, and by organized opposition, overcome them? Here is an observable framework, which we've already been doing, for millions of years.

Key concepts:

Successive, Transient Contexts.
Toolkits.
Recombination.
"Social" organization

Over-adaptation as Institutional Momentum.

Coordination & coordination rate.
Cost of Coordination.
Return on Coordination.
Communication & communication rate.

Selecting signal from noise or "parsing."

Reducing frictions.
Autocatalysis.
Outcomes vs methods vs perceptions.
Tuning & tuning rate, for components & the whole.
Adaptive Quality (including tempo) of Distributed Decision-Making = Adaptive Rate
Aggregate Interactions & Interaction Rates.
Aggregate Context Awareness.
Perceiving the Sum of [Aggregate Actions + Diverse Component Actions]
Survival = Optimizing the Sum of [Aggregate Actions + Diverse Component Actions].
Sustainability.


1) Successive, Transient Contexts.  People learn, as they grow, that the life of a person, a family, a tribe, a corporation or a nation state involves not just one, but multiple challenges occurring as a succession of transient contexts.

2) Toolkits.  In the long history of planet Earth, we continue to unravel astoundingly diverse examples of how physical aggregates, biological species and whole ecosystems survive succeeding contexts through slow accumulation of increasingly diverse toolkits. The more complex a system is, the more ways it can adjust to changing context (not that it always does). There is a fundamental difference between how most people define efficiency and resilience. Efficiency commonly refers to performance in a given context, while resiliency refers to outcomes across multiple contexts.

3) Recombination. Recombination is the outcome of pursuing another level of indirection. When the sticks used by ancient hominids weren't long enough to make a lean too adequate for their growing band, they started recombining them together in novel forms, to make better, faster, cheaper nests or homes. Once you look, recombination is everywhere, including physiological, chemical, biological, sexual recombination of genes, tools & toolkits (even snowmobiles!), behavioral (dance? music? art? sports?) and on to the cultural recombination we call changing business systems and legal systems. We're now facing demand for supra-cultural recombination among multiple nation states. Don't expect the United Nations to go away. It's what comes next that you should be pondering.

4) Social Organization. It's fundamentally useful to remind all citizens that social species rule because of their ability to scavenge all their diversity, and keep it in their toolkit for recombination and re-purposing ... as succeeding contexts demand. Social species outdo all others, and dominate the Earth, because those characteristics, which confer overwhelming increases in resiliency.


Implications.


5) Over-adaptation as Institutional Momentum. History certainly implies that it is usually death to over-adapt to a transient context. Today's "winner" is always today's Dinosaur and tomorrow's history ... UNLESS ... that entity can unwind and recombine the very institutional momentum that allowed it to be the MOST efficient today. Going too far has implications for your survival statistics, once the direction of the adaptive race changes.

6) Coordination & coordination rate.  If over-adaptation to any one of a series of fleeting contexts is dangerous, what's the fall-back strategy? It's quite obvious, actually. Just like the runners in a multi-lap footrace may or may not be rewarded by "winning" a particular lap, they all share the goal of staying in the race and positioning to lead WHEN NECESSARY. They typically do that by hanging around the leaders, and "staying within striking distance." And what if the race never ends? What if our adaptive race through history keeps changing direction, by changing context? In that case, our survival strategy is to survive and stay in the race. Hence, the ultimate tool in our already complex cultural toolkit is skill at coordination and cooperation.

  Is it better to be biggest? Strongest? Fastest? Not for our purpose. Rather, it's safer and "better" to assume and discard any and all attributes and skills, when & as needed. Grow fur? Humans don & shed clothing instead. Muscle mass? Humans use levers & machines instead. Fangs? Humans use knives instead. Physical speed? Humans use tools, domestic animals, bicycles, cars, boats & planes instead. In short, humans survive via recombination, adaptation and evolution. We're constantly shedding whatever holds us back, and domesticating ourselves to be resilient over time, rather than over-adapted to any particular, transient context.

7) Cost of Coordination.  Yes, there is a cost to coordinating. Just look at the practice & training time any organized team has to put in ... to learn and express aggregate coordination.

  Walter Shewhart famously remarked an obvious truth, that "In all complex systems the biggest [ongoing] cost, by far, is the cost of coordination." Coordination requires an effort, in order to broadcast, receive, sample, analyze and respond to constantly increasing amounts of information from a growing number of teammates doing increasingly diverse things. Can you imagine the challenge for basketball players and coaches if basketball teams went from 5 players to 6 on successive days, then 7, 8, 9, and 10? And what if the rules, court and equipment also all changed? That's life! It's also why sports can be initially useful, but quickly becomes an exercise in form over adaptive function. Ditto for music, choreography and theatre. They don't change as fast as our world does, and hence have become useful to fewer and fewer of our expanding populous.

8) Return on Coordination.  The most immediate corollary is so obvious that Shewhart left it unstated. In all complex systems, the highest return, by far, is the return-on-coordination. In fact, the return on coordination is the only return that exceeds the cost of coordination. If evolution occurs among others who are coordinating, then we have only one choice, to die out, or keep coordinating on a bigger/faster scale, so that our team outcompetes and absorbs, all other teams. What then? What if there is one day a United States of Earth? Long before that, our own complacency and un-directed personal habits and Institutional Momentum will become our greatest competitor. How do we compete with ourselves, and thereby maintain our adaptive rate? Obviously, just by staying alive. Our current challenge is to change everything and adapt fast enough to survive ourselves. A hundred years after Wallace & Darwin, even some literature majors eventually recognized that. "Everything needs to change, so everything can [appear to] stay the same."


More Implications.


9) Communication & communication rate.  How do social, coordinating species invest in coordination, so that the return always exceeds the cost? Despite what a sitting US President foolishly claimed, evolving species do "Nuance."
Those social species (and nations, and democracies) that survive:
  Exchange more information, faster and more widely.
  Practice more, and perceive more.
  Parse more context from the expanding sea of data they generate.
  Recognize and explore more aggregate options ... faster.


10) Selecting signal from noise or "parsing."  What does an adaptive signal look like, for an aggregate constantly re-orienting to a context that is changing yet again? Basically, one that allows a 2-stage optimization task.
S = Sum[A+B], and not Sum[A] + Sum[B].

  That's how a whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It's also how the USA wrote a Constitution and set out to "form a more perfect union."

  Both "A" and "B" have many parts, but they're used here to mean "keep the components alive AND adequately provisioned" (A) plus "grow the system" (B). Neither citizen component nor nation can sacrifice too much, nor gain excessively, if the whole is to exceed the sum of its parts. Yet between those tolerance limits we have tremendous freedom to operate and express distributed plus collective ingenuity.

11) Reducing frictions. This is both trivial and sublime. Any mechanic or race car tuner knows that reducing friction between moving parts is key to enhancing performance of a system. That's why we have oil, grease, ball bearings and precision carving or machining. Yet how many realize that the same thing applies to all the human moving parts in a social system? Much of successful military science and Officer Training comes down to systematically finding ways to reduce frictions among teammates, and making it hard for people to work at cross purposes. That's how social species allow themselves to leverage their increasingly diverse talents.

12) Autocatalysis.  How do social species actually do all these things? How do they simultaneously increase diversity, increase options and decrease frictions, so that they can explore their emerging options, and do so faster than others? The whole package is called autocatalysis, when each component catalyzes all other components to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. That's the same way the combination of an egg cell and sperm cell catalyze the rapid growth resulting in a new, unique human, in a self-driving cascade of reinforcing triggers.
  First, everything has to be connected to everything, so everyone can see - or be frequently reminded - of dangling tasks. Then all data streams have to interact or discuss, so that analysis preserves the 2-stage optimization mentioned above. Finally, a bias to ADAPTIVE action must be present, which both triggers activity AND tempers it per the preserved connectivity. "Do no harm" gets to be a longer and longer list, as your number of co-citizens grows.

  The result is a massively-parallel calculation that is always impossible for participants to predict, in part because so many of the terms keep changing before the calculation can be completed. As an aggregate, we have zero predictive power, yet unlimited adaptive power, so far. It's up to us to figure out how to adapt, through continuous indirection.


Keys to adaptive autocatalysis.


13) Outcomes vs methods vs perceptions.  How do we keep our eyes on the prize, when the context never stops changing and the "prize" is continuously redefined? Answer, by trial and error discovery of unpredictably subtle adjustments. We redefine the "prize" as ability to survive and thrive, and we keep our eyes on that drifting outcome, whatever it takes. That means maintaining a determination to break any abandon or modify any tradition or break any taboo, as necessary, aka, practice Cultural Recombination.

14) Tuning & tuning rate, for components & the whole.  Our proverbial mechanics and racing enthusiasts understand the concept of tuning. If they're involved in automotive decathlons or fleet management, they also understand the concept of tuning for resiliency rather than breaking down before completing a multiple-race circuit. However, it's a comical commentary on narrow thinking that there are so many teams of expert "tuners" who stubbornly fight for years on end, and insist on tuning everything except their own interactions. Biology is chock full of examples of molecular, cellular, endocrine, muscular and behavioral functions that are systematically tuned to create a marvelously flexible whole, with the tuning based upon long lists of subtle, "if-then" variations on a basic theme. Just think of how many ways you can tap your finger, or move your tongue, just to start with trivial examples, before moving on to more complex examples such as speech, multiple languages and teamwork. Our survival depends on how fast we can readjust countless processes, and re-adapt them in novel ways, for novel purposes when and as needed. That means adding nuance, not avoiding it.

15) Adaptive Quality (including tempo) of Distributed Decision-Making = Adaptive Rate.   The reality of social tuning is that aggregate success follows the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision making. The tempo of trial & error learning is what biologists call Adaptive Rate. Those aggregates that can make adjustments faster, will outlast those that can't. Further, not that those who perceive possible outcomes earlier, and identify emerging options, can start making changes and reducing frictions sooner.

16) Aggregate Interactions & Interaction Rates.  In practice, this all feeds together in a constant, self-catalyzing or autocatalytic social loop.

Interactions drive awareness (personal + aggregate).
 Awareness exposes options.
  Options demand coordinated actions.
   Coordinated actions drive further interactions (restarting the autocatalysis).

Note that this reinforcing cycle occurs only IF:

Interactions remain diverse, and
 Feedback remains diverse, sent and received.
  Tempo remains high-energy.

17) Aggregate Context Awareness.  Note that an alert, aware and responsive aggregate occurs only if new components (kids & grandchildren) are quickly aware of the latest challenges motivating their nation, not just the old ones.

18) Perceiving & Exploring Aggregate (& local) Options.  All of the above only KEEPS happening if kids and grandkids remain aware that yet another context WILL inevitably appear, requiring yet a a bigger perspective to master. That way they will fully expect that challenge to appear, & will go looking for it. In the process, they will also keep building bigger perspectives on where they are and what new options are appearing, & will consider HOW to generate utilize ever more diversity (a bigger toolkit). All this will, quite coincidentally, lead them to practice coordinated use of their social+technical toolkit on an even greater scale. This is, incidentally, what humans have always done. We've just grown so quickly that we've temporarily forgotten the most fundamental lessons that our ancestors knew. Quite literally, we can't see our context for our details, precisely because there are so many of us and we're not staying as connected as we could and should be.

19) Survival is the Sum of [Aggregate Actions + Diverse Component Actions].  We can now reiterate an old truism. Making a whole greater than the sum of its parts involves a cascade of cooperative adjustments in order to achieve a shared, Desired Outcome. That's what coordination means.

20) Sustainability.  What has kept the universe, Earth, biology and humanity going all this time? It is common to say that adjustments occur only after challenges. Yet it is also true that those that survive challenges are those that had already started or continued preparing to make even more adjustments. If we are going to survive by continuously expanding our adaptive rate, then we need to make accumulation of coordination skills become our primary Desired Outcome. Ultimately, that's the best way to ensure that we'll be able to go anywhere and become anything .... regardless of the challenge.

  How do we achieve sustainability? Don't stop doing #'s 1-20, above. Add #21. 

If America only knew what Americans know ... we wouldn't have to worry about our sustainability, or the prospects for the 7th generation yet unborn.

   ###############

* Indirection, an alternate route to the same place; i.e., if the front door is locked, crawl in through a basement window in the back of the house. There are multiple paths for bypassing every obstacle.

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.

None Of Us Can Select As Well As All Of Us ... IF ... All Of Us Adequately Participate In Selecting Where We're Going

Paul Meli raised a key concern yesterday.

Why Has Our US Media Come To Function As A State Sponsored Institution?

There's a particularly interesting implication in the video at the above link.

"you can have journalism, or you can have empire"

I've long wondered how an entire press corp became so complicit.  Patrick Smith indicates that it's the same creeping momentum that drives citizen complicity in the excesses of empire. It's an unregulated bug baked into our narrow approach to "capitalism."

That reminds me of a saying attributed to some Roman statesman, 2000 yrs ago:

"No law withstands the will of the people."

One nuanced translation: 

"No reality withstands the temptations of an electorate." 

So periodically, we can easily be our own Control Frauds? Defrauding ourselves of some part of our own options?

Whole aggregates, not just individuals, can succumb to rash temptations, if they feel that not enough people are either watching or willing to condemn their actions. In other words, if there are no significant consequences.

Once you know that you can act with impunity, your behavior WILL gradually start to change, and your moment of adaptation will move towards those processes shaping your own, local self-regulation, and away from distributed, aggregate adaptation (e.g., looking out for your grandchildren). Feedback? Pattern recognition? Both effect your ability to perceive the spectrum of immediate-to-sequential outcomes.

Somewhat analogously, once our nation feels that it can act with complete impunity, OUR national behavior also begins to change, also inevitably, and our moment of aggregate adaptation moves to or away from our methods for maintaining distributed national vs international feedback, which alters how we set aggregate Desired Outcomes - which in turn drive all our efforts and methods for aggregate self-regulation.

There's a deep implication in these observations. When whole nations - not just individuals - begin to condone actions they themselves wouldn't willingly submit to, it always involves the conscious conclusion that the people being acted upon DO NOT MATTER AS MUCH AS WE DO.

Overwhelming evidence, historical and current, indicates that this is a highly conserved behavior in humans, not just in other species. So it's a feature of reality that we must acknowledge and deal with, not try to ignore.

Whenever a feature is highly conserved throughout an evolutionary sequence, it has some strong adaptive value, even if it's not immediately obvious.

In this case, when aggregate experiments fail, and revert to meanness, not just any mean, it may usually have helped human cultures dissolve and shift wholesale direction, faster than they would have otherwise. Think of NeoCons and NeoLiberals as our safety valve, in case everything goes wrong. In that case, returning to stone-age thinking sooner rather than later may actually help. We may be homo sapiens, but it pays to keep a remnant of our ape ancestors around.

Note that that doesn't mean that we should put our lowest common denominator in charge BEFORE we find ourselves in grand dead ends! We still have insanely interesting options to explore. Many of those options are not possible anytime soon, if we restrict ourselves to use of our NeoLiberal monkey brains alone.

"In order to make a more perfect union" is an ideal long endorsed - in one form or another - by the majority of humans.

When and how to make selective inclusions is one corollary of that ideal, as are two other corollaries.

Whom to exclude from our union - and when?

And also, who, when and HOW to exile from our union? And, for what reasons, and to satisfy which emerging Desired Outcomes for the remainder of our union?

There are well known methods for exploring and estimating answers to these questions. We merely need to be fearless and honest enough to face them quickly, rather than just letting those feared ills occur anyway, through our inaction. For example, given sexual and cultural recombination, physical culling is rarely necessary. We just have to stop making more of or reinforcing a mal-adaptive human, habit or method, and let its representation in our aggregate repertoire rapidly dwindle. 

As always, we as a people face overwhelming pressure to make rapid decisions based on insufficient data - but not too rapidly. That's the business of nations and cultures, not just the business of individuals. Our job - individually as well as collectively - is to choose well.

There's no evolution for the detached. Success follows the depth and quality of participation, not just blind complicity. Since our aggregate selections drive all national adaptations and national outcomes, we must admit that none of us can select as well as all of us - IF we maintain enough distributed participation to add adaptive value.

Aggregate intelligence means aggregate uncertainty. Only fools, and foolish nations, are cocksure and recklessly bent on being number one, which is historically a mistake in a marathon. Staying in an unending race means positioning ourselves in THIS TRANSIENT CONTEXT to be ready for subsequent, entirely unpredictable, contexts.

What is YOUR definition of success?

Finding a better way, NOW? That's efficiency (which is meaningless without present context).

Finding ways to keep finding adequate ways to get by? That's resiliency.

As soon as we as the people can juggle two method-sets simultaneously, we can move on to juggling yet another. And another after that, someday. Even though we can't imagine what that might someday be.

The biggest question is always "HOW" to achieve more participation, from more people, more of the time.

There's no human population in history that could compete with the one we have today. Would they have stopped fighting if they knew about us and our capabilities today? Would we, if WE knew about future achievements?

Cultural Development at 31st Week of Democracy

9 Democrats who are selling out on Social Security cuts

  (Hat tip, Al_the_Electrician ‏@aldaelectrician)

So, as usual, things have to get worse before they can get better?

In health science, we'd call that a neuropathy ... a degraded ability to sense pain (until it does significant damage), which is essentially a failure to KEEP rebuilding systemic instrumentation to fit changing contexts.

You can picture that outcome, and even how it occurs, in both human physiology and human culture.

Which Trisequester is YOUR democracy in?

Is there a term for aggregate-neuropathy or even "Cultural-Neuropathy" ?

Organizational degradation?

A slowing ability to detect, parse & adaptively respond to increasing levels of useful feedback?

A constant struggle to see the signals for all the noise?

That describes all human aggregates, all the time? Ya think?

Unless, that is, we take up thoughtful arms against an always rising sea of emerging interdependencies.

I keep coming back to the analogy of adolescent growth spurts. All growing aggregates have to get clumsier before they can regain or increase aggregate agility.

With growth comes a corollary challenge. We always need newer, more refined methods for solving the task of HOW to grow, gracefully. Why? So we can have our growth, and be it too.

It's not a challenge we can ignore ... unless we choose to abort our future.

This was the America we all knew post 1776.

 
Will there be another cultural growth spurt? Here? In the USA?

If so, what will it look like?

Investing In Aggregate SELECTION MARKETS. Not Just Financial Capital Markets

How? Just keep doing what we've been doing, when we bother. What, exactly, you ask? Answer: practicing molecular, sexual & cultural recombination AND selection, of course. Everything else is just noise in the system.

Can we do it? Of course we can. Someone or something always does, eventually. Why not us?

Let me explain. Someone just wrote to me, saying that the Supreme Court shares blame for Wall Street’s (and Congress') drastic descent into pervasive fraud.

Yes, but the roots of Judicial corruption go back to politics of appellate appointments, which goes back to campaigning, which goes back to ethics & education ... which has it's own roots & control functions, in regional & local culture.

The best place to fix any outcome is at the prevention stage. Repairs are affordable only briefly, as stop-gap emergency efforts.

If you fix fundamentals, the fix soon sweeps through all symptoms, at all levels.

Yet without top-down support, it takes much martyrdom to slowly recruit momentum in whole aggregates. The bigger the aggregate, the more - & more protracted - the distributed, self-martyrdom.

If we're LUCKY, another Hoover-FDR or Marshall-Patton will come along & quickly, temporarily patch things up without our aggregate fully understanding how or why. Yet that would most likely be short term lucky & long term unlucky, because we just put ourselves at greater risk, while still not understanding how to manage mounting risks.

If we're not even short-term lucky? Then it's civil war, between classes, until our own governance is more permanently reconquered, and reshaped into less obsolete forms. Isn't that what the American Revolution was all about? Didn't the founders advise is to keep up continuous revolution, or at least continuous cultural evolution? There's nothing going on now that didn't occur in the lead-up to 1776, or to the Magna Carta, or to Athens first citizens revolt, 2300 years ago - or in any tribal council throughout the last 60,000 years.

The most fundamental change is the scale of our aggregate, which we are NOT handling well.

It's a pity that across the entire sub-discipline of exception-handling, we're loathe to handle our own aggregate growth as the most constant "exception" to be continuously handled! Go figure!

For our evolutionary path to extend, EVERYTHING has to undergo recombination and subsequent selection. Even literature majors eventually grasp that timeless reality.

What evolving, adapting cultures always need are rapid, enabling adaptations to SELECTION MARKETS. Not just capital markets.

What is a Selection Market? So far, our most common term for it is "evolution," but only because the process is so infrequently discussed.

What things are bartered, recombined & selected in Selection Markets? A widening range of disappearing, existing & emerging sub-components, components and super-aggregates of existing aggregates (e.g., colonial "states" transitioning to the United States of America, or, more pathetically so far, European States TRYING to transition to the United States of Europe).

Are capital markets robust enough to mediate the SELECTION already going on within ad hoc Selection Markets? Of course not. Just start listing for yourself the things which we normally don't (or, for some things, ever) try to list for sale or purchase on capital markets. For example, dynamic & intangible essentials, from trust, motivation, affinity (love) & spouses to understanding ... and on to generalized forms of return-on-coordination, like family, friendship, tribes & supra-tribal culture (aka, teamwork & solidarity & democracy).

Yet Selection-Markets for all those things DO exist, and exert a far more dominant effect on our personal, national and cultural outcomes than mere capital markets do.

So why aren't we more actively investing our human & social & cultural capital in improving what matters most, our real Selection Markets? We clearly possess the native intelligence, since we've been discussing the elements of Selection Markets since before recorded human history - just never quite pervasively enough to keep up with escalating demand, by right-sizing our selection efforts.*

Is that lag simply for lack of putting our heads together, and trying? In our recent feudalism/"economics" textbooks, "capitalists" demean historical natives for trading away lands & other resources for "blankets & beads," and yet here we are, hundreds of years later, trading our own aggregate future for our own trinkets. It's as though we've traded lazing about with a jug of wine & a loaf of bread .... for lazing about with designer drugs and video games.

Really, should not every discipline include practice in contributing to evolution of national strategy & net, cultural outcomes. ow to be relevant, not just specialized.

Most of us here in the USA may think that nothing's changed, but that just means that another aggregate less distracted with designer drugs & video games is about to loot our resources, en route to exploring insanely great new aggregate options, a future whole which will literally leave the sum of our personal options behind, in the dustbin of history.

Are we that easily distracted? So far, yes. We're raising yet another generation of students beaten into hoarding data and ignoring the changing context that applies meaning to data.

Aunt Samantha says it's up to YOU to either start re-inventing American ingenuity, or jump ship with the other rats.

The only other choice is to head back where we came from, with the other Luddites, who never see either direction of causality coming down the pike.

* How to right-size selection efforts? The efforts involved in architecture, molecular biology & engineering in general are good examples. More is always different, and with more of anything, then some previously negligible inter-dependencies always become critically important, requiring feedback-triggered catalysts to separate tuned from un-tuned system-engines. In short, to invest in Selection Markets, invest in right-sizing aggregate regulation, neither too much, nor too little, but always just enough, just as needed and just in time to respond to changing context. This is a drop-dead fundamental corollary of all system logic. It's amazing that so many capitalists want their bodies and bankers to be agile, while simultaneously missing the overriding need to keep their aggregate culture agile.
  Not too long ago, this was simply called providing citizens with a "Liberal Education" - as in a broad education. That term has proven to be too amorphous. New terms are always needed, as tools helping aggregates self-recruit, in order to tune their growing selves with tempo adequate to the accelerating demands of context_times_"more."

Scientific Form Over Function: Co-Opting From The Start, vs Bridging The "Context Gap" Using Cultural Hybridization.

UK State of the State session in Parliament:

‘On all sides barely an honest word will be ­spoken.’

You mean politics is the same everywhere?  Why?

You know, reading this article, the obvious finally hit me about why indirection and active misdirection and outright lies & propaganda are still universally tolerated in aggregate politics. It's not a bug ... it's still a feature.

"Policy formation for aggregates will forever require the active pursuit of short-cuts and active mis-direction (lies), in a never-ending struggle to ... gracefully ... accelerate the always-emerging steps of re-organization in rapidly evolving aggregates."  Me.

One aggregate step forwards, one staggeringly long polynomial series of adjustments ... just to maintain - let alone increase - agility, in an aggregate that is always expanding as well as evolving.

It's funny how trivial this is ..... and not funny how deeply such an obvious topic is skirted in the training programs for all "system-science" disciplines.

All data is meaningless without context.  

Going further, most data is meaningless even TO context.

Plus, some data relevant to last context is irrelevant to the next, and vice versa.

Hence, over time, progressively greater amounts of extant data are INCREASINGLY MEANINGLESS to the subsequent cascade of contexts.

So what IS the actual relevance of the scientific method? What is its adaptive PURPOSE?

To continuously coax the most coordinated relevance from the excess of data we already have, and continue stockpiling!

We rarely need more data about existing components, and in fact, we spend most of our time actively ignoring already relevant bits of data.

So-called "advancement" in every discipline is actually a stubborn exercise in form over function, ...

... even as the overwhelming majority of aggregate "value" comes from making & tweaking frankenstein hybrids from already existing data & components. 

Snowmobiles? New species? New cultures? By statistics alone, re-combination explores more options than discipline-specific invention does. Hybridization is not limited to plant species. Human cultures hybridize too.

The most important question in every science field - in fact in every human discipline - from day 1, may well be: 

"how do we coordinate current & emerging knowledge in each discipline, with current & emerging knowledge in all disciplines?"

Without such continuous re-modeling of changing FULL context, we continue accumulating meaningless data - minus changing context!  Forget our economic Output Gap, our Cultural Context Gap represents a far deeper gap between us and our potential Adaptive Rate.

Our Cultural Context Gap represents the greatest gap between us and our potential Adaptive Rate.

Why isn't FACING all this social angst - and all our social taboos - a key axiom in all Science-X01 courses at undergraduate and graduate level training programs? Is it a lack of honesty, a lack of courage, a lagging intelligence, simply a lack of distributed involvement ... or all of the above?

Perhaps because most faculty couldn't survive doing as poor a job as they presently do? 

Science Faculty: "Students, our honored task is to examine every phenomenon except the recombinant elephant in the room. To this axiom, we shall forever hold true. Honesty shall be our guide." [Doh!]

WTF? If students actually used their heads coming in, they wouldn't stand for existing education, from day one.

It seems that the Erbles are in secret league with all sheltered Luddites, in all disciplines. How do you say "guanxi" in every discipline-specific jargon, in every language? 

And to think that in the past several years I've been deluding myself, actually thinking that economics was unique in this depth of self-fraud. Today's "stain" of orthodox macro-economists may briefly lead in the application, but they're not as uniquely exceptional as they may think they are (if they truly "think" at all). There are new vistas of baffling bullshit to explore, in all fields. The pie in the sky's the limit.

"Science which is not taught naked of all taboos is the greatest fraud of all. For then the very application of reason is hidden - from day 1- behind the recombinant taboo of the day. That is a mockery of the scientific method at it's most fundamental core ... when we pretend to practice science, while lying to ourselves from the start, about net adaptive relevance." Me.

Scientific form over function. Selling out from the start. Usually by systematically ignoring dynamic or "recombinant value" while over-valuing static value. That's just phenotypic persistence writ large.

Every day, every generation and every context, we can't see our novel, emerging aggregate for the current components!

Nor our expanding, aggregate options worth exploring.

Our social parasites don't need to even try to baffle people with bullshit, when aggregates willingly co-opt themselves coming out of the gate.

Does anyone think that even autocatalysis is immune to Natural Selection? Not all that auto-catalyzes is equally adaptive across local, regional or national scales, nor are all hybrids. Gresham's Dynamic is one proverbial (mal-adaptive) exception, and Gresham's dynamic is always hiding, by default, in all the various sub-disciplines practiced by members of all aggregates - always in plain sight for those who won't look.

Continuously Re-Distribute Ounces Of Cheap Cultural Preparation ... Or Pound Ourselves With Expensive Cultural Rehab?

If you've ever wondered how natural selection can proceed, if we don't always produce enough diversity beforehand to select from after the fact ... then read on. In the end, this should also remind any thinking person of the need to provision culture with distributed spending first ... and clawing back (capitalism) later. In fact, both those examples illustrate one, singular logic. Sow widely, to reap adequately.

Now let's diverge, so we can find some new circuits leading back to the same path.

Do you like puzzles? How about this one?

What links '60s rock music, parallel Roger Ericksons, Korzybski & Wittgenstein, LSD, network logic and capitalism?

Why, with a few extra links, this does! You'll laugh when you see how.

This is actually fascinating, not just comical.

A QUEST FOR PURE SANITY - THE PSYCHEDELIC POETRY OF TOMMY HALL (13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS)

"Science And Sanity", by the Polish-born mathematician Alfred Korzybski

5th edition (Institute Of General Semantics, New Jersey)

All this rehashed in a 1967 acid-rock album - written by a chem-engineer student! :)

"Since Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically", the famous liner notes differ markedly from the juvenile poetry/hype that made up the average 1966 rock LP back covers. Written, though uncredited, by Tommy Hall, the liner notes go on to observe that our language has been used primarily to identify - and consequently distinguish between - objects, rather than to focus on the relationship between them. Such a way of thinking, Hall states, is keeping man from enjoying the perfect sanity which comes from being able to deal with life in its entirety. 

The terminology is Korzybskian, but the implementation is brand new. It definitely wasn't something they would teach you at alcohol drug rehab.

Hilarious! Who knew what acid-rock was really all about!

"The goal is to resystematize our knowledge so that it would all be related horizontally."

Ironically, they may have missed the point, and been wrong all along, by assuming the solution was to go too far in either direction.

Why? This story makes you wonder if the supposed appearance of dialectic mainly in Indo-European cultures was an accident of the discovery - or wide-spread use - of certain psychedelic drugs.

After all, many other tribal languages never embodied the distinction of simplified summary mappings and classifications vs coordinating ALL objects, and hence didn't NEED dialectic. :) 

The two strategies impose different amounts of complicated overhead, at different scales. 

How and why? Consider this. The process of sensory system evolution is always to reduce sensory-receptor bandwidth to that minimal range allowing adequate navigation. Humans, for example, didn't need ultraviolet or infrared vision, or ultra-sonic hearing or echo location to survive. We forsook those individual skills and instead invested in a more complex neocortex allowing more post-processing of limited-frequency sensory input.

If we apply that analogy to human language and human culture, not just human physiology, then a similar conclusion is apparent. The key to navigating increasingly complex cultural contexts with lean linguistics may be to limit group-discourse bandwidth & focus cultural-cognition on that skeletal backbone of context which is adequately vs totally relevant. 

To scale up any system, some micro-level features have to be sacrificed, as useless burdens on macro agility. No system scales unchanged.

The evolutionary advantage of aggressively "classifying" languages & cultures may be their ability to focus on what does vs doesn't scale, and hence allow accelerated evolution.

For those unfamiliar with these analogies, try using another, more similar one. There are advantages of delegating some aspects of micro vs macro context management to dedicated specialists, such as human genders - where "males" cannot possibly master the details of pregnancy & neonatal care, while "females" cannot as deeply grasp the details of large territory management - not to mention the many segments in the spectrum between those and other arbitrary behavior sets.

If nothing else, visualizing those system anomalies as necessary features, and not unwanted bugs, points out that arguing for either paternalistic or maternalistic cultures misses the bigger context. Rather, all human cultures feature interleaved as well as interdependent maternal & paternal subcultures, as well as all the intermediate variants demanded for retaining resiliency, via biological diversity.

Meanwhile, back to our Texas pyscho-rockers.

"In an intellectual quantum leap he suggested a modern and tangible way to effectuate the non-Aristotelian lifestyle that remains painfully abstract in Korzybski - psychedelic drugs."

Too bad that didn't work out for them. Being narrowly educated, they weren't aware of the different mental health dangers of disrupting basic neural-reward systems vs the more diffuse psychedelic (peripheral neural-ordering?) drugs.*

Intellectual quantum leap? Or tragic, juvenile generalization?

Their mistake - mixing heroin & LSD- was as fundamental as not appreciating the differing repercussions from tampering with foundation/plumbing/electrical building codes vs experimenting with interior design. Sad, but true.

Pity we can't get back to simply providing all students with:

1) awareness of infinitely changing & fleeting contexts;

2) familiarity & comfort with navigating change, as Context Nomads, and

3) joy in surfing accelerating change with boundless curiosity & fascination, PLUS

4) enough early feedback to appreciate the difference between foundations, and frontiers of exploration.
Why is it proving so difficult to have our growing culture and keep it too?

That observation holds for group brains as well as groups of neurons, i.e., an individual brain. Does that vaguely remind you of our two political parties? Even if in different ways at different times.

Perhaps the core purpose of cultural politics is to keep a population in the survival zone within the closed circle spanning passive-aggressive belief and anarchic-repressive cynicism?



* However, being at an early stage of cultural-dialectic, it might well be useful to imagine what the cultural equivalent of cultural-psychedelic drugs are. Diversity in student travel during their critical periods of cognitive development, their formative years?

Summary Fusion of OBT&E, OBCE, Credit, Currency, Criminology & Policy

OBCE distilled to 4 points:

1) Aggregate progress means local habits have to give way to emerging, aggregate habits.
2) The habit of coordinating Cultural Recombination is mightier than competition.
3) Public Discourse defines Desired Outcomes and drives coordination.
4) Practice drives agile Public Discourse.
[Any comments? Feedback is absolutely required, as you'll see, below. :) ]

Let's start with a challenging axiom.

There is no distinction between leading, policy, economics, and operations ... there is only staging, linking & sequencing of distributed actions, to explore emerging options.

Next, let's jump right in by noting that aggregate success, and Output Gaps are gated primarily by outmoded, persistent local habits of dominance & subjugation, ... with no aggregate goal in mind.

The real kicker here is that the vast majority of self-defrauding behaviors, from Innocent Frauds to Control Frauds, are expressed as insufficiently examined habits, among people who are not are not getting enough practice at thinking anywhere hard enough to sense the aggregate outcome of their personal compulsions.

In short, frictions and output gaps are manifestations of lagging coordination.

And the frauds that supposedly sap coordination? Frauds are just random agents following random actions - SANS ADEQUATE PATTERNS OF AGGREGATE FEEDBACK!!!

There is a better way. We can call it Evolution, and it's core methods are coordinating on a greater scale.

How does coordination grow? Via inevitable autocatalysis. If it can, it eventually will, simply due to statistics. So if it can happen, why not sooner rather than later ... which may be too late?

How does a human aggregate catalyze it's own coordination? First, by adequate preparation. Group Intelligence is always held in the BODY OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE. We have to generate an adequate sampling of aggregate discourse, before we can tune and leverage it to fit a given context (aggregate regulation). So the key, underlying process always requires practiced familiarity at changing methods for continuously generating & re-shaping adequate patterns of distributed feedback. That requires agile Public Discourse in it's broadest sense.

That's what Walter Shewhart, 80 years ago, called the "Cost of Coordination." Any biologist, ecologist, physicist, chemist or statistician would agree with Shewhart's statement.

"In all .. systems, the highest cost, by far, is the cost of coordination." W. Shewhart

Shewhart, and later students of his PDSA cycle, such as Deming & Boyd, considered the immediate corollary so obvious that they never bothered to state it in print. However it's useful to state it for beginners, simply to prime their learning curve. "The highest return, therefore, is always the return-on-coordination."

Jumping ahead, one can readily see from this that It really does ALWAYS come down to saving aggregates (not just frauds) from themselves. And saving our nation along the way. How? By indirectly tricking any and every size aggregate into actually exploring coordination on a larger scale. Humans are inherently exquisitely cooperative, but coordinating their constantly emerging diversity creates a continuously growing need for NEW coordination triggers, moderators and practice methods.

Call it Cultural Recombination, or something else, depending upon who's listening, and why. :)

Cultural Recombination is an extension of the same process that occurs during Sexual Recombination and embryology. We need social catalysts that drive and shape Cultural Recombination as much as we need the proteins and nucleic acids that catalyze sexual recombination.

Just adequately reconnect everything to everything to master context, and then - for resiliency - relax to what's minimally needed for a given context. Aggregate resiliency means actually keeping enough in adequately distributed reserve, to enable re-mobilization for changing contexts.

Cultures just do that continuously, in interleaved, asynchronous patterns. That always makes me think of Combinatorial Chemistry. In "Combinatorial Culturary," we're throwing more stuff together all the time, whether we will or won't. Our task is to select an aggregate adaptive signal from the changing aggregate noise. Luckily, that's all we have to do, and we're very good at it, when we bother to try.

Have analog computing system, must use it.

The only analog computing system more massively parallel than the human CNS is the human culture. Both are terrible things to waste.

ps: There's also one, undeniably inevitable "economic" corollary to all this. Growing aggregates must devote higher proportions of their time to aggregate coordination. The ratio of "dedicated work" to "dedicated coordination" is a function of aggregate size. Simply put, that means that the AVERAGE hourly work week should be continuously declining variable, co-yoked to population size and aggregate agility. If we're to maintain a functioning democracy, then our hours of work per week absolutely cannot be a fixed constant. To reap the insane return on coordination, we have to dedicate increasing proportions of our time to distributing, analyzing and testing the implications of our own, distributed feedback - instead of just working harder at what we're already doing wrong. It's that simple. Less work, more discussion & coordination.

How Would A Biologist View White Collar Crime And "Control Fraud" ... And Suggest How To Handle Them?

Why ask this question, and many more like it?

Control Fraud and White Collar Crime, as coined by sociologists and criminologists, are useful yet neglected concepts.

What if there are diverse concepts from many other systemic disciplines that are of equal or greater value, yet even more neglected?

If all citizens periodically hear a bit more of what all other citizens know, we'd never have to worry about our democracy?

To get that benefit which history has promised, we first have to condition ourselves to want to know what more of our co-citizens know.

So in case YOU want to know, let's compare some views across disciplines, and see what pops out.

For non-criminologists, what is White Collar Crime ... especially "Control Fraud?"

It's useful to google both terms, and see the variety of illuminating examples illustrating both terms.

"The persons who control a seemingly legitimate entity (private, non-profit, or governmental) can cause unique damage [to the aggregate] if they engage in fraud because the CEO can direct the corporation and cause it to make the firm’s internal and external environment vastly more criminogenic." 

"... the CEO’s interests are frequently contrary to the interests of the corporation" 

"The elegant solution for the fraudulent CEO is not to defeat controls but rather to suborn them and pervert them into the most valuable fraud allies. This explains why sophisticated frauds almost invariably retain top tier auditors to “bless” the financial statements."

These quotes are taken from Bill Black's essay,

75th Anniversary of Edwin Sutherland Naming 'White-Collar Crime'

So, what might all this mean, systemically, to all 315million members of our democracy? Is this cross-discipline sharing of terms and concepts useful for all?

These concept of White Collar and Control Fraud crimes are not only a rehash of ancient tyrant/civil conflict, and not just a review of Marxist/aristocracy conflicts.

To biologists, these concepts are also the real-time noise of host/parasite interactions, where some of the emerging elements in a deeply nested system are always harming rather than helping the system that spawns them. Yes, in the course of spawning their own diversity, biological systems spawn internal parasites, and must constantly invent completely novel methods to regulate and/or cull the mal-adaptive processes, as part of selecting the adaptive fraction.

In short, to any system scientist, "parasitic" members of an internal characteristic-spectrum are those system components NOT YET REGULATED or tuned to adaptive system purpose.

When citizens and criminologists discuss fraud & crime in specific industries, they're talking about diverse expression of similar, not-yet-regulated behavioral excesses. Those behavioral excesses are just applied in different segments of our vast, cultural INTERACTOME, precisely because more adaptive tolerance limits are not yet hemmed in by more evolved regulatory interactions.

How are optimal tolerance limits developed sooner rather than later? By practice at sampling all available feedback and getting good at adaptive_signal/system_noise discrimination. We know that no system ever knows best/worst utilization of emerging resources beforehand, since that utilization is always entirely context-specific. So how does a growing human culture figure that out, as it simultaneously spawns new components capable of harnessing new resources?

Not just by totally naive trial and error, but by applying BEST PRACTICES to the timeless methods for parsing adaptive_signal from context_noise.

Best practices are historically shaped by the rule of system extension, i.e., species, culture or national survival. 

That history automatically pre-defines best practice as configuring ourselves to maintain the most degrees of freedom or highest adaptive potential (DOF/HAP) in the existing system or culture, while retaining all that culture's historical momentum and baggage as a foundation stock of diversity to continue using. Short of sterilizing the planet and starting from scratch, we're stuck with extending the biological infrastructure we have, until we prove it as a dead end and get replaced by something else. Basically, we need to do anything to keep triggering a state of mobilization at regular intervals, instead of staying too relaxed for too long.

In species evolution, we call name such self-motivation tricks as "play behavior" among the so-called, more advanced species. Advanced cultures need cultural-play-behavior too, not just personal play behavior.

This train of thought suggests that we can actually confirm Joshua Chamberlain's thesis, and generalize from it. Yes, we cannot predict specific challenges, but we can determine what kind of adaptive rate our culture can spawn when the challenge strikes, by maintaining a high level of play & practice at both spawning diversity and then regulating it upon demand. Chamberlain didn't say how, but we can. By being prepared, through initially playful and then serious practice.

How to be prepared? By being practiced at assessing & optimizing our net adaptive potential (DOF/HAP; degrees of freedom = highest Adaptive Potential).

How to optimize & fine-tune adaptive potential (DOF/HAP)? History mandates optimal quality of distributed decision-making as the key to system extension or survival. That, in turn, mandates optimally distributed degrees of freedom, which mandates optimal distribution of BOTH static and dynamic assets.

Optimal distribution of both static and dynamic assets is rarely discussed, but historically boils down to "force-readiness." Translation: a median living wage AND mandatory requirements for lifelong education, training and industry, including regular practice at system perspective, not just component practice? In the end, culture is a dynamic asset which, like everything else, is something we either use or lose. It cannot be physically hoarded, only maintained through practice.

There are always important portions of system performance which cannot be appreciated through participation alone. Rather, the perspective from the edge or from a distance - as observer, coordinator or coach - is required, to recognize some system patterns which are much more difficult to recognize from within.

In practical terms, this advises us to regularly practice listening to diverse viewpoints, observing our own processes from the outside, and practicing dialectic modeling of everything, to trigger emergence of new regulatory checks & balances. Functionally, dialectic modeling reduces to early practice at examining emerging interdependencies.

What is the fastest way for supra-tribal populations to re-constitute the extreme agility & adaptive rate of tribal pass-through, tribal economies? Simply mandate it. Then practice it's features, by keeping ourselves prepared, by challenging ourselves with a steady spectrum of cultural-play behaviors.  Some of those play behaviors will always transition to serious work options. Self-challenge keeps us on our toes, while waiting for unpredictable outside challenges.

Pursuit of adaptation is a selected conditioning bias, not an inescapable certainty. Every new level of system expansion must not only be spawned, it must start from scratch and thereafter develop yet another set of tools and methods which instil a bias to pursue further adaptation (optimizing DOF/HAP). Such a bias can occur ONLY from the statistics of selection bias! There is no other way to discriminate best/worst resource allocation models.

No wonder systems ONLY advance during crisis, and always decline systemically without systemic selection pressure - reverting to component competition rather than coordinated cooperation.

What does that say about how our electorate orients to our present context?

The quick answer is "horribly" or "barely at all." So let's apply a bandage to our fractured, cultural orientation process.

Making a jump, let's put it this way, and start from scratch.

Tribal systems evolved to the point of running out of room to operate independently, and are still adjusting to all the resulting inter-dependencies. The former, tribal functions, however, maintained a highly selected system of distributed decision-making, which preserved & maximized net degrees of freedom. You can say that a "social" species is one that practices "pass-through" economics to optimize system maneuverability.

Where did "capitalism" come from? One view is that it arose from the onset of supra-tribal politics, where permanent inter-tribal frictions gradually transitioned "temporary" tribal war chiefs into "permanent" aristocracy with the habit of acquiring static assets across formerly tribal boundaries, instead of optimizing tribal capabilities. 

Capitalism is inherently the distributed practice of Control Fraud? 

Because of that view, early attempts to regulate White Collar & Control Fraud crime have focused on keeping it's practice distributed within tolerance limits, rather than reconstituting ancient Public Purpose and formally co-optimizing static as well as dynamic assets simultaneously. To optimize cultural Adaptive Potential, we might want to re-explore civic practice and preparation at agile utilization of all civic resources, aka, mobilization skills or force-readiness.

(You could also argue that allowing extreme wealth and income disparity is just another way of returning to a restrictive gold standard, where excessive amounts of access to public fiat is constrained in the hands of a few. That constitutes Central Planning, by any other name. Any method whatsoever of constraining or slowing, rather than more speedily distributing use of public fiat, is a severe, mal-adaptive constraint on both Policy Space and Policy Agility.)

From that perspective, capitalism is simply an off shoot of an arbitrary approach to acquiring static assets ACROSS system boundaries, while newly supra-tribal aggregates try to figure out how to organize dynamic assets on a new scale. For an aggregate, organizing dynamic assets as fast as it acquires static assets is the key to Adaptive Rate. Only by co-organizing static/dynamic assets can aggregates better discriminate best/worst options for aggregate resource allocation.

Capitalists are routinely taught that adaptation is merely static asset allocation, or simply distributed hoarding. Optimal adaptive "use" of resources is considered separately and transiently, if at all. It is typically viewed by most avowed capitalists as too difficult to do, and is therefore considered both presumptuous and something to be neglected. Unless absolutely necessary. The frequency of war indicates how frequently absolute necessity actually occurs.

The worst application of this new practice of "capitalism?" Instilling the habit of NOT practicing optimization of dynamic assets, and instead settling for an obsessive focus on distributed hoarding of static assets. In short, business capitalism is self defeating, by neglecting the return-on-coordination from it's own INTERACTOME, while progressively seeking to uselessly hoard static assets. That constitutes a transient, unstable, net loss of Adaptive Potential (a growing Output Gap), while components reflexively hoard under-utilized static assets. Capitalism is, in short, a group failure to orient to the far higher return-on-coordination.

We're looking at 2 settings for humans, long familiar to ecologists. 

1) Overgrowth of one species, waiting for some new sub-clone to out-compete all the rest ... simply because it can.

2) Climax ecology, where a stable mix of species co-exist, until unpredictable events clear fractions of the environment & allow a cascade of marginally preserved elements to build toward a new climax "cover crop" mix.

Our only challenge is to more quickly determine how prepared we are to respond, to whatever is going to happen next, no matter when it occurs. The only way to assess our national force readiness, is to practice on invented or "cultural-play" processes. Call them Public Works if you will, but whatever you call them, please just practice?

As we ponder this task, it should occur to all that humans may not be suffering from future shock at all. Rather, compared to our ancestors, humans may be suffering only from FutureBoredom, and need to get busy doing something about it, by first playing en mass, and then turning some fraction of competitive play into real evolution. The alternative is to sit around becoming progressively un-practiced, and thereby becoming less rather than more prepared for unpredictable challenges.