Resiliency Tracks The Quality (including tempo) Of Distributed-Instrumentation PLUS Distributed-Analysis PLUS Distributed-Practice

What Is A "Technoprogressive Public Intellectual" ?

Someone one who publishes random articles about what a given individual naively thinks whole aggregates "could" and "should" do?

If an academic tweets in the world, after NEVER having worked on Main Street, and there are too few people around with relevant experience to instantly give 'em sanity checks .... are acdemics still statistically irrelevant?

For example, the presumption that there is a Longevity Dividend is so naive that it's embarrassing.

These guys don't seem to know the 1st thing about biology-101, i.e., that species lifetimes are very actively programmed, precisely to get prior generations OUT OF THE WAY of their recombinant offspring.

For Wallace's sake! We do physical, chemical, biological, sexual, behavioral & cultural recombination FOR A REASON. That reason is precisely to counteract & regulate blind, Institutional Momentum, aka, Phenotypic Persistence! If you extend the lifetime of any component in any system, the first consequence is augmented Institutional Momentum.

Here's an excerpt on augmented human longevity, from a hypothetical "Recombinant Systems for Dummies" book: "Dude, that's not always a good thing."

Increased interaction and distributed involvement I can see, but if Institutional Momentum is a problem now, extending it will help? That seems like another, very fundamental, fallacy of composition for a constantly expanding whole.

In fact, I'm constantly wondering how to titrate just what % of discourse in every discipline is completely off the aggregate adaptive path, from the onset of that discipline. I'm guessing it's far higher than most would ever imagine. It may vary from 80% to 98% for all we know. You'd have to be an outside observer with the benefit of hindsight to easily determine that. By definition, no sub-aggregate Institution is as adaptive as all of us, so that the momentum of any sub-aggregate Institution is alwyays closer to a tangent to the unpredictably meandering Adaptive Path of a whole aggregate.

Yet there must be some way for aggregates come to slowly approach aggregate-self-awareness of that ongoing challenge. How to have their Institutions (phenotypes) and use them too?

How? Surely it starts with systemic Cultural Instrumentation. In general, the more instrumented a system is, the faster it can tune distributed adjustments to ongoing variance in that system's component features.

Some have argued that few humans were individually "self-aware" until the documented self-discovery of grammar by the Greeks, circa 300-400 BC dramatically increased the numbers displaying that feature.

So when will whole electorates be aggregate-self-aware? Circa 3000 AD? Let's hope it's even sooner. The internet, and mobile phones, are exciting milestones, yet when it comes to Cultural Instrumentation, things like Facebook are still analogous to Neanderthals pounding rocks, oblivious to the approach of subtly but significantly new species.

Finally, what do we DO with our proliferating number of system components (humans) broadcasting naive views? Instrument them? That's a start. Then, how do we achieve increasingly distributed aggregate analysis of increasing proportions of prior/current/emerging data?

If aggregate success tracks the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision-making, then accelerated or continued success (resiliency) may track the quality (including tempo) of selected combinations of [Prior Distributed-Instrumentation PLUS Distributed-Analysis PLUS Distributed-Practice], not just their algebraic sum.

If none of us is as smart as all of us, that's still only useful if we can quickly INVOLVE all of us in demonstrating aggregate smarts.

That's what Natural Selection means. Selecting, by survival, that progressing combination of existing component features which is best able to survive the slings & arrows of outrageous fortune (including tempo).

Curiously, the best way to further improve the resiliency of any recombinant system, is to add subtle methods for reducing frictions and improving the tempo of coordination among existing components, rather than adding novel component variants or even markedly altering the characteristics of existing components.

Every new task has a solution, and that solution will involve another level of indirection ... by adding sub-components able to build new interfaces between existing as well as emerging components.

Here's my advice to all "Technoprogressive Public Intellectuals." Less talk, more do. Within tolerance limits, of course.

Has It Happened? Is This A Call For A Dictator? "Temporary" Of Course!

Two recent articles seem to have passed under the radar screen of most mass media in the USA. Yet they're the kind of "calls to action" that Wall St. financiers can get behind. Like the early support from foreign investors for, say, Mao, Tojo, Hitler, Stalin and Lenin, just to name a few. We could add a long list of smaller actors too, from Pinochet to Quisling, all supported by "business interests" interested more in business than in the general welfare of the people of their respective countries.

Should we worry about the following calls for action? Should we at least discuss them widely, and ensure that more than just the input from "investors" is represented? What is - for us - different this time is that it is the USA itself that is the target of the latest call to action and "intervention."

You can read these articles for yourself.

Strengthen the Presidency?

The Decay of American Political Institutions

David Brooks and FRANCIS FUKUYAMA seem to be in agreement that we have a problem.

“So we have a problem.”

Do we, though? Or are we the problem?

If it's us, then making one of us a temporary dictator seems to be grasping at straws.

James Madison and the other Framers of the US Constitution thought long and hard about what had been written about the fall of all prior republics and democracies. They foresaw what we're now facing, called it "factionalism" and said that the best way to forestall it's development was to form a more unique form of government than had come before, one with MORE, not fewer, checks and balances.

Fukuyama calls that a "vetocracy." Greater minds, 200 years ago, called it what it was precisely intended to be, institutional checks and balances.

In addition, the framers of the Constitution also explicitly cautioned us that it will always be the character of our people, not the peculiar form of our government institutions that get us through national challenges.

So my suggestion would be to revise the character of our people first, and be more selective about whom we send as representatives to our national Congress ... before we consider weakening the checks and balances that got us this far.

If Ben Franklin were here today, he might scoff at calls for more power, and repeat his famous "table talk" about shaving something from all planks in order to join the parts together into a enduring piece of furniture. He might then go on to ridicule calls for a sledgehammer to smash the furniture, if one faction felt it was taking too long to produce something in their narrow interest.

It'll take a bigger intellect with a more reasoned argument than calls for unlimited emergency powers to make me acquiesce to temporary dictatorships, one faction at a time. That sounds more like a return to the old thinking that held sway before the US Constitution was written, when government of the people, by the people and for the people hadn't yet taken hold, and the ancient device of despots calling for more power was recognized as leading to national insanity.

Fukuyama argues that "We need stronger mechanisms to force collective decisions." Surely he jests? By definition, a collective decision is not one that is forced. As Walter Shewhart and W.E. Deming lamented for decades, an ounce of prevention and preparation speed the quality, not just the tempo, of distributed decision-making - far more than any attempt to repair the process after the development of the actors.

If dictatorships were so valuable, surely the USMC would also be calling for them on the battlefield, rather than going the opposite direction, and also acknowledging the enduring superiority of improving the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision-making. That kind of quality comes only from preparing and developing the character of the people involved, not in trying to force unqualified people through chattle-chutes of imaginary quality. The path that Brooks and Fukuyama dream of has led only to collective disaster, albeit temporary gain for individual looters.

Fukuyama goes on to mention multiple points of personal frustration, in a manner reminiscent of all people who have yearned for simple dictatorships. He wraps it all up with what is itself a peculiar claim.

"Whatever the reasons, the American state has always been weaker and less capable than its European or Asian counterparts."

Personally, I predict that that particular statement will produce more surprise, laughter and outright indignation than agreement from Americans. If not, then I truly don't know my country.

Predictably, Fukuyama then trots out the bogeyman of regulation, both it's absolute magnitude, various distributions, and methods of development. Having built several premises, i.e., that there IS a problem, that said problem is embedded in our very institutions, he now asks credible readers to wrap those presumptions around what "everybody knows," i.e., that there's too much regulation. Of Wall St, presumably?

At this point, I sincerely do hope that most credible readers are, indeed, laughing. Yet what Fukuyama is toying with is not a laughing matter. Tojo would have approved of his underlying message, even if he chafed at the slow, political correctness of it's delivery. If nothing else, you have to credit Brooks and Fukuyama for working so hard at what is, at heart, an incredibly simple and ancient message. "Give us the Goddamn Power! NOW!"

Finally, Fukuyama unravels his own case by making the mistake of exposing a simpler solution to his entire thesis.

"Thus, conflicts that in Sweden or Japan would be solved through quiet consultations between interested parties through the bureaucracy, are fought out through formal litigation in the American court system."

Fine. Delegate more of the tactics and strategies that now masquerade in Congress as National Policy, and get Congress, SCOTUS and the POTUS the heck out of tactics, and back in matters of true policy, national goals and Desired Outcomes for the nation ... where they belong.

For that, you don't need a dictator. Shoot. You don't even have to strengthen the Presidency. Just improve the quality of distributed decision-making, by investing more in the character development of all citizens? What a concept! Again, Fukuyama shoots his own argument in the foot, by overdeveloping it's lopsided armaments.

[PS: Note that Fukayama conveniently does NOT review all the failures of every other form of government worldwide, during the time course of the events he laments in the USA. Japan? Right. Nothing has happened in the last 70 years of THEIR government's history. His oratorical arguments lack the barest of required statistical controls. His arguments wouldn't receive any attention at all in any scientific debate. Indeed, they receive attention only for the dangers they present to an electorate challenged with responsibility for reasoned and logical discourse.]

Nevertheless, Fukuyama drones on and on about various cases, each time imaging tactical issues that he's presumably conditioned readers to see a Strengthened POTUS as the solution to. He even mentions the current mess of financial regulation, but not how elegantly the same issue - and effective responses - were developed back in the 1930s. We didn't bother strengthening the Presidency back then. Why now?

While it's unstated, the underlying, fantastical premise is that the ONLY rational solution for a Congress filled with micro-managers is to have a POTUS free to veto each and every inappropriately micro-managed Congressional gambit?

That's not the way the Framers of the Constitution saw it. Even though Fukuyama's essay mentions and discards James Madison's comments, there is nothing of substance in Fukuyama's essay that wasn't more fully developed by James Madison et al, first in the Virginia Plan, then in the Congressional Convention leading to the actual signing of the Constitution, and on to it's initial amendments. [Madison's actual notes on this process are fascinating, and little read by our 320 million citizens of today.]

The solution that the Framers saw as a better way, was to maintain the quality of the American electorate, and charge THEM with preventing the development of an incompetent class of politicians in all three branches of the newly designed government.

I see no further use in belaboring all the remaining points Fukuyama or Brooks trot out in their call to action. Rather, I'll close with a simple point.

The easiest way to form a vetocracy of the type they fear, is to populate ANY form of government with irresponsible people unfit for the task at hand.

Rather than trying to create a fool-proof formula for protecting ourselves from the Idiocracy they fear, isn't the simpler, and more scalable solution to instead invest in the quality of people we send as representatives to any form of government? And to do that by developing an electorate capable of selecting better quality representatives for themselves.

No Child Left Behind? How about no Democracy left behind, by leaving no citizens behind?

Personally, I don't see any other way. If Fukayama and Brooks are right, then we could engineer institutions so idiot proof that we could populate them with the proverbial 500 monkeys with typewriters, and then just sit back to wait for the guaranteed results.

There is a better way.

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
- James Madison to W. T. Barry, 1822