There's A Very Simple Lesson In All This. Tuning Our Envelope Of All Known Tolerance Limits

Take our embarrassing example of Greece & EuroZone Policy, PLEASE! Before more citizens get lost in the fog of fiscal war.

In other words, how the eurozone helped lead to Greece's crisis.

These are the same people who built CERN?

How did they NOT see this coming? Why aren't Europeans probing the fundamental structure of their own cultural aggregates?

And why are they taking it out on the citizens and plebes of Greece, instead of on their own reckless lenders & profit seekers? And why are citizens & plebes across Europe egging on their own feckless leaders, and encouraging them to flog the neighboring serfs all the harder?

This is the usual plight of people who know more & more about less & less, until they know everything about nothing (especially their own context)

Lissencephalic policy apparatus, convoluted cultural outcome paths.

Or, how flat-earth level, slow witted ideologues produce criminal politics, when allowed to, by citizens acting like innocent bystanders, & pretending not to be active accomplices.

It's only when policy-forming processes are nuanced enough to be adaptive, that culture evolves.

Right now, with so few paying attention to the most simplistic fundamentals of inter-dependencies, our vast stockpile of detailed data sits unattended, as everyone assumes that policy is unimportant enough to leave to the presumed process owners. Whom everyone privately agrees are idiot politicians! Go figure. Denial is perhaps most rampant among PhDs begging the excuse of being "specialists," and thereby absolved from involvement in evolving democracy. You couldn't make this up.

Have data, won't use it to drive aggregate selection. Only nitpicking.

There's a very simple lesson in this.

Recombinant aggregates can't adapt if emerging components don't get emerging feedback & then practice contributing to aggregate selection, early and often enough. There has to be overall tolerance limits for the variance allowed across the entire envelope of tolerance limits (including time constants*) for all aggregate processes.

That's the essence of system tuning, and that's how autocatalysis slowly occurs.

For those who don't understand that paragraph .... here's:

Human Systems for Dummies

1) Recombi-NATION. A human culture or nation is a massively parallel recombinant system (even more so than a forming nervous system or a whole organism growing from an embryo). Well Duh!


2) What is a recombinant system? Recombinant systems "connect everything to everything" and then relax briefly to a selected form, before doing it all again. Again, Duh!
Evolution of species illustrates a steady progression of recombination occurring less stochastically, and more smoothly & continuously. Human culture now recombines by continuous production & education of children, in pre-k & K-12 learning systems, plus a proliferating array of adult "disciplines."


3) Connecting everything to everything, before selecting what form of relaxation is briefly safe. To be blunt, if kids don't get exposed to the entire range of human thought, soon enough & often enough, then aggregate knowledge (context awareness) cannot grow smoothly, and we instead just stockpile data-minus-context in inaccessible journals & other archives.


4) Practicing Aggregate Selection is a group exercise. Our cultures & economies can't meet the challenges of selective pressure if we can't generate adequate adaptive tempo. That only comes with early & frequent practice at addressing whatever the moment-of-selective-pressure is, i.e., our biggest policy challenges. It just never helps enough, to have students tied up for decades paying attention ONLY to trivial errata that rarely, if ever, helps extract context from excessive amounts of data.


5) Tuning our whole system, not just the components. Our culture & economies also can't generate enough adaptive tempo unless we actively involve a threshold level of multi-generational involvement in pressing policy issues. If success means surviving an endless succession of unpredictable challenges in unpredictably transient contexts, then our #1 goal is not to optimize current skills, but to develop education & training systems that maintains adaptive recombination skills and doesn't let them wax & wain with too much variance. We want to survive the hour (or the business quarter, or the budget year), but we want every new ripple of graduates to be able to solve tomorrow's challenges, and we want every new generation to be able to handle the challenges that will come 2 decades out.

Zero predictive power? Seemingly unlimited adaptive power? What would you do? Try to do too much (of the wrong thing) until you're gone? Or, prepare your kids to take over AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, and then ALSO train them to have kids soon enough ... & know how to train the grandchildren to again take over in their turn, as soon as possible? That's how to keep our species ship afloat, and our culture growing.

Term Limits is not enough, by far. We always need an annotated package of Adaptive Limits that includes:

term limits, plus ...
early education minima (mis-education limits),
lifelong exposure to aggregate challenges (mis-exposure limits),
lifelong training & education & work (human mis-allocation limits),
lifelong involvement in policy formation (mis-recombination limits).

This is simple biology-101 and anthropology-101. Every recombinant process on this planet meets that entire envelope of challenges ... or soon disappears from the stage.

Data is meaningless without context. It doesn't matter what we know, only what we know how, and why, to use ... to survive ... in the future, as well as today. We won't get there by knowing more about less, any more than we will by knowing less. Nor by arbitrarily paying attention to less of everything.

Above all else, we need to be agile about what and how we contribute to aggregate selection, and how we train to help our aggregate survive natural selection.

 * A "Hamiltonian" is the presumed equation describing some aspects of a hypothetical system. Similarly, members of any human team or aggregate eventually come to appreciate the critical interplay between the time constants of multiple processes. For some outcome to occur, many different, interacting processes have to occur with some minimal tempo, and deliver local outcomes within some critical period, i.e., with a maximum time constant. This is the basis of orchestral or band music, for example. It would be useful for students to formally grasp this as a named concept and ponder it, from pre-k onwards. The Grumbletonian? :)  Timing of cooperation is an inherent part of cooperation, and something that humans are geniuses at, even as babies - if that talent is developed, rather than neglected. Aggregate tuning is all about reducing NET frictions. Managing that begs for a consensus definition, and delivery of the summary data to track it.

The Best Asset To Accumulate Is A Toolkit Of Aggregate Coordination Skills

How do we fool ourselves? Let me start counting the ways, including a new way every year ... by default, since "Past performance does not predict future results."

A Science Perspective On The Decline Of Innovation

(restricted; precursors may be viewed here)

As another bit of next-epoch or supposedly "long-term" investment advice, this recent pdf contains some helpful perspectives and commentary, although the author sounds as though he's squarely within the NeoLiberal camp (see "Living the Lie" - or why they think that Social Democracy is to blame for current G7 economic & cultural ills).

This line caught my eye as the author's central premise.

"... the next revolution will be based on understanding and developing quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry and quantum biology and all that it entails."

That's a credible hypothesis to test, yet many will either disagree, right off the bat or just chuckle. The author is not specifically wrong in his comments, it's rather that he's missing the bigger context, and therefore missing the overall point. Here are just 3 counter-indicators.

1) Biology has been harvesting quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry and quantum biology for ~3.5 billion years, just on planet earth. It's called photo-synthesis, and other forms of energy-transfer. As you will see, we're not doing anything new, although some things are subtly different.

2) The author's initial premise - that occupying many possible ecological niches is indicative of an "efficient" pass-through ecology or economy - is highly subject to local conditions. As Walter Shewhart famously said, "data is meaningless without context."
(Pick 40 islands or other micro-habitats around the world, and you can find ecologies ranging from near mono-cultures to the dense, pass-through ecologies/economies the author seems to expect. Location, location, location - or context, context, context.)

3) IF one's hypothesis is that increased energy handling (efficiency) equates to evolutionary adaptive strength, then it would seem logical to expect the next stages of human evolution to reliably follow where we can go from here, energy-handling-wise. Yet there are already many well-known flaws in that argument. Even if it were true, we'd still expect surprises. In 1870, the same author might have predicted expanded development of hydro-carbon chemistry, which would have missed the expansion of all forms of telecommunications, including the internet, not to mention quantum mechanics itself. :) Don't presume it's over.

a) Energy-handling efficiency has not reliably predicted survival across niches. In fact, the opposite is exhaustively documented. The most "efficient" (i.e., "successful") species in all archeological contexts invariably disappear from subsequent or later contexts, and are labeled as species that over-adapted to transient contexts. Ditto for corporate history. Proverbial dinosaurs go belly up. Quite literally, over-investing in efficiency has been the death of most species and investors. 

b) In contrast, the recurring lead in both ancient biological as well as current economic evolutionary races are overwhelmingly documented to go to the most agile, and NOT the most efficient. Time after time.

That discrepancy between a) and b), is amply discussed in biology, ecology, military doctrine, and systems theory.

Aggregate Adaptive Rate soon trumps efficiency, every single time. Some barely-adequate mix of efficiency plus resiliency always wins. It's just a question of when.

Which calls our attention to some subtler questions.

If it's not energy efficiency, then what is it that we ought to be smart enough to be looking for? One pat answer is "survival paths," no matter how unpredictable. Next, how do we keep ourselves on unpredictable survival paths, or at least within striking distance?

If there's a unending race, in all disciplines and all economic or cultural wars, to RAPIDLY explore emerging options, based on insufficient data, then survival follows some well-known rules of thumb, and the main competition seems to be executing these principles on increasingly larger scales, which brings up unending "problems of scale."


[As members of a social species, we're now well aware that Aggregate Agility (teamwork) trumps individual agility (contrary to NeoLiberal economic doctrine). Aggregate size matters, and the scale of aggregate-agility represents the Golden Fleece. :) ]

c) pattern recognition trumps energy-handling (the minute you know what NEW signal you're looking for, it's a race to briefly ignore the noise; agile focus beats raw power, every time) ... 

d) then adaptive "recruiting efficiency" trumps energy-handling, and that combination [c & d] determines aggregate response agility (from motor-neuron pools to military "maneuver warfare" to business marketing to cultural mobilization). Serial survival of the fittest. Or, as it's termed in education theory and military doctrine, "Outcomes-Oriented Training & Education" or OBT&E.

It's remarkable how much of military doctrine consists of concise restatements of the theory of evolution. See "Return On Coordination."

Yet so-called socialists and capitalists seem to have scared each other with irrelevant details, and keep uselessly throwing their own baby out with their own, shared bathwater.

The more I think about these issues, all roads lead to a consistent answer.

How do we invest in a democracy that ensures the highest National Adaptive Rate,

... not just energy or military or business efficiency?

Remarkably, that same question is central to the history of biology, military doctrine, democracy and the onset of the US Constitution. Our consistent goal is seemingly to "make a more perfect union."

If that goal is kept in mind, then most economic issues become incidental. There seems to be a simple, 2-step optimization occurring in all surviving aggregates. Sum(i+j), while looking for those combinations that are greater than the sum of the parts.

Where i+j are respectively:

i) Keep the components alive, and adequately provisioned (it's not a functional army if the generals hoard all the weapons)

PLUS

j) Grow the Aggregate (by expanding Net or Aggregate Agility, not just agility of some sectors, nor merely aggregate size alone)

This easily falls under the category of Group Capitalism, with tolerance limits separating it from narrow Personal Capitalism (i.e., NeoLiberal orthodoxy). I predict that the intelligence to see the difference will trump efficiency at pursuing the latter, even though the latter forms of parasitism will always follow, in unpredictable patterns. Part of survival agility includes being able to harvest what's necessary, when necessary, while also leaving tools unused in expanding toolkits when not specifically needed.

We can't provide for our grandchildren by sequestering more resources. That is, quite simply, a naive idea. Few want the heirlooms passed on by their grandparents, except as mementos, because they're hopelessly obsolete.

The best assets to accumulate are Coordination Skills. If you don't believe me, ask a Neanderthal ... if you can find a survivor. Yet instead of investing in Democracy, we're killing the Golden Goose, by hoarding current fiat instead of future options.

Here's my investment advice.

The next evolutionary leap in human culture is more likely to be based on understanding and developing "quantum perspective" on our own, aggregate context, and all that that entails.

If you can help more precisely define "quantum" - i.e., subtle - aspects of human cultural or aggregate perspective, you'll not only be rich and have a busy, fulfilling life, you may well save the human species.

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.

Statistically Significant Practice Of Democracy: The Adaptive Culture Cup Challenge For Context Nomads, and Teaching Citizens To Think.

This essay was prompted by yet another advertisement that both cracked me up, and also unleashed the stream of reform. Here's raising a cup to those who pave the way.

Consider the following ad.

"Live well, Live Green [buy a printed book]"
For 200K years, the answer has been "talk to people," right?

For 3.5 Billion years, the answer has been "interact," right?

So what is this ad really referring to, in what context? For what reason?

Living? That's a life-process, for individuals and groups.

Green? That's a sustainability-through-extended-maintenance efficiency concept - about extended life.

Printed book? That's a static repository of fixed observations, usually raw data plus notes about a few data-interdependencies.

Yet what are the real boundaries and substance of the data "store & hold" matrix that these concepts reveal? When presented with such ads, all kids face the same dilemma, and eventually ask the same questions, in fumbling ways, depending on age and background.

Basically, as soon as all concepts being discussed are wrapped in a single matrix - i.e., a recognized situation or context, then kids can't help sensing - and maybe voicing - questions about the matrix itself.

Where did we come from, and why?

Where ARE we, anyway?

And where are we going next?

And why. Why? Why? Why? Why? [SETA: search for extraterrestrial answers to kids questions. The genesis of all religions?]

Even some adults retain this natural inclination, if it hasn't been "successfully" trained out of them, in their typical dinosaur race to become uselessly over-adapted to one, transient context.

When considering the questions that kids ask (when protected and left to their own, imagination, especially if it's actually nurtured, and not beaten, "educated" or otherwise "trained" into arbitrary prejudices and biases) - several answer patterns frequently appear.

A large % of the stuff implicitly described/learned/used ... is never explicitly written down! (usually more than 70%?)

Another large % of the stuff written down ... is written down by people who never use it anyway. [Go figure!]

Most of the stuff that actually, unpredictably gets done ... is done by people who do a little of everything, while "everything" keeps changing?

But where does that leave us? In a system that no member can fully understand?

There obviously is a "way," since we're here, after 3.5 Billion years ... but it can NOT be written down as a static message that most people can use, regardless of how many rules-based systems we cycle through when trying to describe change.

Sisyphus pushing Budda up a Tao finally learned that no static rules are Sufi_cient? :)

How do we finally discern the "sufi" in what's "transiently necessary" as opposed to what's "enduringly sufficient?" By neural tuning of repeated, sensory-triggered patterns? Upon reflection, every reactive or agile system ideally requires every supposedly static component to in actuality be an agile, reactive unit displaying degeneracy.

Like system components, system interdependencies (aka, "rules") in an agile system must also display degeneracy if that system is to "stay in the race" for very long. In short, the necessarily tuned rule is not an absolute rule, only a dependent probability function. Again, go figure!

Systems, pre-human and human, have obviously evolved, and aren't stopping yet. So we ALWAYS have a challenge: to quickly & simple describe the source, the current state and the next-steps of our developing population.

Selecting which of many aggregate, composite steps is THE next systemically adaptive aggregate step, from any given state, is the fun part of existing.

How do we prepare and encourage kids to solve that challenge, and enjoy every part of it?

There are no easy answers, but here are a few observations and thoughts.

Observation. A growing system's net operation can only be described in terms of past/present/emerging dimensions that 99.9% of people never get anywhere near enough practice describing, thinking about or manipulating - in every day activities. Unless, that is, they stay proportionally involved in personal, regional and national policy - and thereby maintain statistically significant practice of democracy.

Observation. A growing human system can only evolve through maintenance of full-group practice/observation/discourse as a navigation process?

Yet what moving target are we chasing, and what changing obstacle course dimensions are we navigating through?

If target-location and obstacle-course-dimensions are both constantly changing ... then there's nothing we can write down fast enough to solve everything.

Therefore our navigation process has to be constantly weighted towards discovery of emerging dimensions of obstacles to navigate or steer past.

Individual organisms initially evolve through natural selection from prior, diverse sets of individuals. Social species also evolve, through natural selection from diverse models, known as cultures, presently organized into nation states.

Ongoing development of each human cultural evolution model is aided by constantly referring to and updating an evolving navigation guide, i.e., from a given culture's net body of cultural knowledge, practices and discourse. To remain relevant, that navigation guide requires continuously interleaved stages of discovery/editing/re-writing - reinitiated in roughly that order. Obviously, the proportion of net group and individual time applied to each interleaved stage must float, as fleeting situations dictate?

Surely that reference model can be absorbed by all ten year old humans. In fact, we can do even better, and it's long past time to do so.

Walter Shewhart famously said (80 years ago!) that "Data is meaningless without context."

Really, Walt didn't go far enough! Our conceptual hole is actually deeper than that.

"Data - and paradigms too - have no enduring relevance, without context path!"

In the end, even redneck stock car racers realize that no one gets brownie points for being #1 in every process that may or may not even be needed in each pit stop. There's a bigger goal - one that requires staging, linking and sequencing of multiple contexts for some longer term purpose.

Our cultural race never ends, and every context is simply a pit stop.

So why do so many preening capitalists strut around bragging about their quarterly results? They're stupid for taking their eyes off our moving, cultural prize. And we're just as stupid, for pausing to watch current capitalists in their mindless action.

Their entire paradigm is only randomly connected to our long term requirements! That's an inescapable corollary to the observation of evolution itself. The unassailable reality is that we are charged with navigating through a "context path" where the details of each and every successive context, as well as their rate of arrival, are entirely unpredictable. We want dynamic cultural options, not just instantaneous, static results! The two vary independently, but one always serves the other.

Results are simply the dimensionless "currency" which we denominate our increasing options with. Today's results are yesterdays loose change, most are soon discarded, and all are soon just incidental to new options.

Results are meaningless without option paths. 

Where can we go from these results?

For every year and every generation of humans, data, paradigms and results will always be meaningless without not only context awareness - or Situational Awareness, if you prefer - but context path.

In short, we remain Context Nomads, migrating between transient contexts. All that's changed is that context change is - for now - no longer dominated by geography, at least not here on planet Earth. Yet the progressions of unpredictable contexts certainly didn't stop. Rather, our awareness of the dimensions of the personal and aggregate context changes we're experiencing have simply lagged.

So what is actually relevant and enduring about all this? Is there anything here that we can use to update and refine our Cultural Navigation Manuals for all 10 year olds?

How about this notion. There is a 3-step challenge that every ten-year old can easily grasp, with only minimal practice, without even bother to call it Set Theory.

Kids in ancient nomad cultures absorbed this lesson effortlessly, before learning to walk. 

You can still quickly demonstrate this to kids in a wide variety of past/present/future, simple card games, to drive the point home.

Challenge Level 1: Gather data and recognize patterns of data that reveal interdependencies in a given context (end of your nose, here & now). Local Survival Navigation in Dimension Level N.

Challenge Level 2: Gather data-pattern harmonics and recognize patterns that reveal process interdependencies (end of your nose, over extended context). Local Survival Navigation In Families of Dimensions.

Challenge Level 3: Gather data-sub-pattern harmonics and recognize sub-patterns that reveal multi-process interdependencies beyond end of your nose, over multiple, successive contexts). Agile, Navigation-Upon-Demand, Through a multi-Context Obstacle Course.

How does complexity of that obstacle course vary? It gets more complex, simply as an exponential function of our own numbers and characteristics AND our own rate of change! Not to mention any outside sources of change. We have to constantly practice, just to stay in the Cultural Game. That's why play behavior is literally EVERYTHING!!! That discussion, however, is for another time.

In the meantime, if those simple challenges can be consolidated into a Culture Cup Challenge that student's can aspire to continuously vie for, surely it would provide a better outlet for growing individual and group intellects than does our present spectrum of competitions for static assets, sex, drugs and rock&roll?

Screw the Sprint Cup, Davis Cup and even the America's Cup! We have bigger cups for our group intellects to pursue! The Adaptive Culture Cup.