Can't Every Aggregate Afford To Generate Their Needed Diversity ... And Have It Too?

Can anything be extended past tolerance limits?

Sure. Ever heard of "Count" Victor Lustig? He was an ironic crook.

In 1925, "Count" Lustig allegedly sold the Eiffel Tower to a group of scrap metal tycoons.

Sehr lustig, ja ... auf Deutsch!

Victor's example is from a 2-book series from from 1973, on:

Crimes & Punishment. A Pictorial Encyclopedia of Aberrant Behavior

Obviously, a pictorial encyclopedia of all human cultures would look remarkably analogous. Every culture is aberrant to what will come next .... unless everything stops evolving, adapting and changing. But that's beside the point, right?

The C&P book is clearly dated in some ways, but reveals an already mature literature strongly correlating personality dominance traits with various crime statistics, in addition to all other effects more weakly linking outcomes to contexts.

Is that proposed correlation between intrinsic dominance & crime still considered prominent, or useful, in criminology and for cultural adaptation in general? For example, the authors & editors seem infatuated with the psychologist Maslow, some of whose ideas now seem as anthropomorphic as Freud's were outright arcane.

Nevertheless, it's a fascinating read, for yet another reason. Each description of the background of bizarre criminality also implies a strong correlation with prior isolation, lack of constant feedback, lack of belonging, and overall ... failed social regulation in it's most broadest definition.

From the point of view of distributed prevention, one can't help imagine how cheap it really may be to prevent a larger proportion of all types of crime.

In cancer biology, we constantly discuss how much it actually takes to "transform" a given cell into a cancer clone. It's actually not easy, at all, especially when cells remain in their normal context, literally engulfed in a flood of continuous feedback.

This analogy comes to mind when reviewing how much cultural malaise it actually takes to socially "transform" developing youth to even the low % of overt sociopaths we call criminals, whether blue-collar or white-collar.

And, that actually segues seamlessly to a connected phenomenon. Where's the border between the main body of genetic, personality & cultural "diversity curves," and the long tails of those same curves, which we label as either "rare" diseases or fringes outside of acceptable cultural tolerance limits?

This is a rather neglected question in general biology and cultural evolution, not just cultural practices.

A) We acknowledge the primary importance of diversity, and of methods for actively driving sexual, psychological & cultural recombination.

B) Simultaneously, we still seem to try too hard to arbitrarily label that same needed diversity and recombination-methods as something to be "cured" or excised, instead of something necessary but never sufficient, to be embraced, extended, and gracefully accommodated. When in a hurry, no corner looks too short to cut ... until experience proves it to be so, well after the fact.

This oxymoron is highlighted by well known but usually dismissed differences in how physiological/personal/cultural diversity was & is handled in old vs emerging cultures. Historically, the default handling of diversity was clearly more weighted toward community accommodation of diversity. It's only in emerging cultural mash-ups that frictions build to the point of heightened efforts to cut corners & cull the low % of diversity outliers, from schizophrenia & autism on to sociopathologies and the now more than 7000 uniquely defined rare diseases. Unless, of course, the sociopaths transiently gain prominence. Then things soon get worse, even if it looks briefly attractive. Every new random modification is only another tangent, branching from a totally unpredictable future. If that weren't true, recombination wouldn't be the law of reality.

One implication is that we simply needn't be in a hurry to eradicate everything that surprises us. That's not how evolution got us this far.

So, can't every aggregate afford to generate their needed diversity ... and have it too?

What's the distributed cost of recombination, and utilization too?

Not much, it turns out, when coordination costs and the return on coordination are BOTH amortized & distributed across whole democracies. That's the simple logic of adequately and gracefully provisioning most if not all contributors to cultural diversity, as much as possible - with early accommodation and regulation, NOT expensive and pointless late removal. It's what social species do. It's easily affordable, and well worth it.

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?

What Part Of Distributed Tuning Of Some But Not All Complex Systems Do People Have A Mental Block About?

From CEO 'Takers' To CEO 'Makers': The Great Transformation

This article suggests that capitalism should transition it's key management metric from shareholder value to customer satisfaction. ..... Uhhh, be still my beating heart?

In an email, Casey Haskins states the obvious response by pointing out that for such complex tasks, "no SINGLE measure will work."

You'd think that would be obvious for everyone, but it's not! What is it about tuning of some but not all complex systems do people have a mental block about?

What happened to the concept of distributed solution sets for complex tasks? Don't stop doing nested polynomial N(i), wherever appropriate? That's what we do all the time, but just not consistently.

Ignorant citizens all over the country are quite comfortable using multiple parameters to tune engines, or card games or to "solve" video games. Then they turn around and can't yet apply the same logic to tempering their ideology, politics and policies.

Isn't diversity that what makes democracy so resilient? Cultural recombination is as useful as sexual recombination. What's missing? Just practice? Just practice at managing enough outcomes to know how many variables have to be juggled?

Sure, all people get experience handling a wide spectrum of processes which they presume depend upon one to many control or feedback parameters.

It seems overwhelmingly clear, however, that many of the presumptions people make about MANY of the processes they utilize are, in fact, grossly erroneous. The bulk of humans in a crowd - or mob - are remarkably cavalier about monitoring the variables which co-effect their personal-+-group outcomes.

The concepts of central or distributed CONTROL of experimental variables is ostensibly taught as a fundamental axiom for use of the scientific method ..... but I can tell you by experience that remarkably few supposed "scientists," ever actually learn that axiom in undergrad courses, graduate schools or other training programs. Even fewer citizens, scientists or not, ever get enough practical experience at managing massively parallel "combinatorial" experiments, of the sort faced daily by individuals, electorates, economies, nations and cultures. In combinatorial evolution, there is no control, only accelerating outcomes to surf. And only the agile aggregates survive.
It's ironic that attempted utilization of the scientific method itself has become largely formulized, as more of a ritual than an honest act of exploratory logic.

If formulization of the scientific method itself has become ritualized, why is anyone surprised that faux disciplines like our various policy ideologies are steadily drifting further from common sense or relevant reality?

The big question is what to do about this recognized problem.

Where are the key places to intervene?
What are the key methods for gracefully intervening?
What type of key people are able to use these methods to gracefully intervene at key places?
How do we get the right key people with key skills into key places in key institutions?

For get the Dem and GOP parties. Maybe we need a MACS party - for Multivariate Adaptive Common Sense? Jane and Joe Sixpack might sign up, if the party platform presented a combination of engine tuning, card games and computer games as their political platform. :(

Surviving The Bureaucratic Complexities We Create? That's A Good Way To Describe Our Challenge

At the present, we're repeating an endless debate, and questioning The Folly of [Every System?]

Won't it be better if our grandchildren can have a different debate, rather than repeating one we leave unsolved? So, can we make our debate different than the one OUR grandparents had?

Why not? Let's put it this way. Complex societies disintegrate when they cannot sustain the bureaucratic complexities they've created? So how DO they survive as long as they do, and how DO the components pick up the pieces after failing to escape traps they're not yet ready for?

One answer is abundantly documented throughout evolutionary history. Systems grow by building up methods that work, and when they hit dead-ends, the components dis-associate and start over again, from a regressed state. Then they try again. The interesting part is how long it takes 'em, and how far they back up before taking another run at it.

In short, net survival continuously tracks PARTIAL undoing, redoing, overlaying and repurposing of existing bureaucracies, families, corporations, species, phenotypes, cultures or "systems" - whatever you want to call them. They all have a lot in common, and it's useful to examine those commonalities.

In some instances, we refer to repurposing as "shaping" individual or even small group behavior patterns, through initially indirect paths that use existing momentum to get started, before re-directing it to pursuit of emerging options. The methods used to shape any situation are unique to that situation. Such changing methods have to be lived and practiced, not assumed to be fixed or in "equilibrium."

Now we have the challenge of reshaping our own, entire culture, either gracefully, or by letting it die and be reformed in another guise that allows growth on yet another scale.

This is what we do! It's what we've always done. When young, we all took things apart. Most can never be put back together again - but with enough trial and error, some useful recombination occurs. It used to be clothes, then watches, then cars, then computers. As adults, we mostly settle into bureaucracies, but inventors throughout history have always insisted on "making snowmobiles" from cannibilized components. The biggest "snowmobile" construction challenge is remaking our own, entire democracy more frequently, as Tom Jefferson suggested.

As a guide, the known processes of speciation and embryology offer some very useful, orienting lessons for everything we're going through. They serve as axioms, or basic principles to keep in mind and tie all emerging details to.

First, 3.5 billion years of species differentiation has left traces documenting the slow transformation of new forms from prior ones. Next, it is the incredibly infrequent, adaptive changes in embryology steps that reflect the growing toolkit of methods that drive speciation.

During embryological development, random hints of a historical pattern are observed, namely that some parts of ontogeny always reflect some parts of phylogeny. Parts of a developing fetus clearly START to make structures found in the adult stage of ancestral species, only to halt, undo or re-purpose the budding structures in an astoundingly long sequence of "shaping" steps that (normally, in humans) leads to birth of current humans as we know them. This net, shaping process in embryology is recognizably similar to concepts expressed in military science. All mobilization - of any system - comes down to "staging, linking and sequencing" existing and emerging components and processes on increasingly larger scales.

So, while dabbling in "nation building" elsewhere, why are we struggling to continuously rebuild our own, obviously changing, developing and evolving nation?

What about cultural embryology? Cultural embryology proceeds rather analogously to all other known evolution processes. The details at every new scale are completely different, of course, but the basic challenge remains. How do we continuously "shape" a process that starts more things every year and continuously creates ever more "institutions" that - while integral steps in the core "shaping" process - have to themselves be continuously interrupted, partially or completely undone and ultimately repurposed, bypassed or overlaid with newly emerging institutions? That's a LOT to keep up with, let alone improve. Nevertheless, it will improve, with or without our participation. The only question is whether we in the USA want to step up and lead, or follow, or even cede the path.

We've already been doing such development, of course. The USA is itself the outcome of such a recombinant process, seen in a bigger scale. Even within the USA we've been adding, ending and re-purposing institutions, and amending our Constitution.

So the real question is how to do even more of all that, more quickly? And, do it with less waste of time and resources? In short, how do we help increase the adaptive agility of our own electorate as a whole? It comes back to increasing the Adaptive Rate of the US electorate. Instead of gridlock and shutting down our democracy, how do we "stage, link and sequence" our own bureaucratic complexities faster/better/more-focused? What happened to American ingenuity?

Finally, we know from experience that the vast majority of changes we try simply won't work. Only an incredibly few changes will be adaptive. So we ought to be TRYING new things faster all the time, in small simulations, in controlled settings. Plus, we ought to be incredibly careful in considering what key things to change on a larger scale. Finally, we ought to be even more incredibly careful about assessing what is and isn't adaptive for the whole nation, when we DO test it on a large scale.

Step one is focus? On what? How about accelerated analysis of national self-awareness? That brings us directly to evaluation of what can and can't be pared from a continuous, cultural-embryology process.

At this point, evolutionary hindsight offers only some key principles. How do we actually SELECT which interaction patterns among our current, national culture to keep vs discard? That is an entirely context-dependent, trial and error process which has to be discovered rather than predicted. That means living the details, not describing past outcomes. We have zero predictive power, but seemingly unlimited Selective Power - yet ONLY if we practice selecting fast enough. Other events might easily overtake us, as has been the norm throughout history. Our biggest challenge is to keep making the USA more different, fast enough, so that it CAN survive the bureaucratic complexities which we, ourselves are continuously creating.

So our task comes down to an endlessly iterative process, one only superficially discussed here - as a suggested view for all to consider. One perspective on this is the classic paradigm for describing all "living" species:

Context Goals (or niche; no system evolves in a vacuum),
Sensory System (sampling available feedback),
Interacting Sensory Flows (cross-discipline Pattern Analysis),
Motor System (probing context, exploring options),
Natural Selection (an Assessment System).

Lets call a nation or culture an emerging species, and take another look at ourselves, and what our tasks are.

1) Do we have enough context awareness, and enough group goals? Adequate group awareness of context and challenge. Whoa! To achieve that, don't we need continuously distributed, developmental briefings on where WE as a nation are, and where WE as a nation can be and are going? Do we even have enough platforms where people CAN discuss that? Are we paying ourselves enough to leave enough time to even have those discussions? Recent, "lean" industrial models somehow converged to the idea that 2-3% of net resources should be spent on "M&E" - measurement & evaluation. That flies in the face of historical patterns in RESILIENT systems, where 30-40% of time can easily be spent on analysis of context.  Can we really afford to be lean, i.e., over-adapted to a transient context, rather than resilient and always ready for the next context? Without a sense of options worth exploring, all roads look the same? A modern nation needs awareness of options, and outcome goals, as much as any previously evolved species.*

2) Do we have an adequately diverse, national sensory system? More instrumentation is just the start. Don't we need distributed self-training all on methods for generating diversity, so that citizens are familiar with that core mission, and comfortable deploying it where needed? More civics, so WE as a people can collectively hoard coordination skills, not just personally hoard static assets?
(Has universal pursuit of "lean" gone too far in too many places, thereby reducing resiliency everywhere, including places where we diversity is critically needed?)

3) Do we need more practice generating the actual diversity needed in key places, so that we have more feedback to analyze? Shouldn't we be diversifying deployment of many new sub-methods, thereby generating distributed, bureaucratic diversity to select from?

4) Do we have enough interdisciplinary cross-talk to drive pattern analysis ACROSS disciplines? Do we need MORE cross-instrumentation, information-sharing methods, for sensing and analyzing all bureaucratic diversity? So that we can self model all available feedback patterns? Forget the NSA and idiot savant advertisers, shouldn't our electorate be evaluating ITSELF and where WE are going? How much distributed civics discussion and involvement do we need, just to maintain our current adaptive rate? How much to survive? How about to exceed our own, lagging expectations? “I’ll let you write the substance. ... You let me write the procedure, and I‘ll screw you every time.” Is that anywhere near good enough for us to survive as a nation?

5) Finally, do we need to instill and practice constant re-development of more "net" ASSESSMENT methods and systems? If WE aren't selecting where WE are going, someone else - or outside events - will be doing that selecting? Why cede Natural Selection entirely to others, or to chance? Who's driving this democracy bus anyway, it's citizens, or something less? That boils down to practice using the platforms, instrumentation, information-sharing and analysis mentioned above.

Folks, we as a people have some distributed boundaries to push, before they push us.


* The very concept of speciation is inseparable from the concept of population. All evolving species arise from interactions among a prior confederation, initially built via budding clones, then by increasingly diverse transformation events - including symbiosis, and eventually by some accelerated form of "recombination" between population members, enabled by emerging methods that create new steps, ones that previously didn't occur at all.

It's not clear what view is optimal, nation-states as competing clones, or confederations participating in interleaved "cultural-recombination" events. We still have to find out.

The same question holds within each nation. Can growing "confederations" practicing "Distributed Planning" be kept more agile, and thereby adapt faster, than Central Governments, with their innate tendency to one-size-fits-all "Central Planning?" We still have to find out. It all comes down to the NET agility of the methods that can be deployed, by either, or by some audacious combination of both, or more. The future's so bright that we can't see it. However, that's no reason to look away precisely as it's unfolding.