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.

How Does A V330million Cultural Engine TUNE Itself? Cultural Adaptive Rate And Public Discourse Bookkeeping.

A bit of yellow journalism triggered the following tongue-in-cheek discussion with colleagues, which quickly ran into a bigger question. Maybe all discussions do, when we take a moment to actually think?

First, the trigger.

[Russia Says] "It’s now total war against the BRICS"

Maybe. Or maybe this just propaganda meant to counter OUR propaganda against Russian policies, funded by our MICC (indirectly of course). Anything goes, but just don't try bombing or otherwise meddling in any country not called Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria.*

(* note; this list may be altered w/o warning :( )
(** we [& Israel] reserve the right to attack anyone we like, including ourselves)
One response, from a US journalist & engineer: 

"This RT article is so full of half-truths that anyone who read it is now dumber" Steve H

Another recent comment, from a colleague in Lithuania: 

"I'm more worried about the ECB than about Russia."

Follow up, and the immediate question "How could we be smarter?":
Yes, & well said, Steve! :)

If this increases RT's viewer base in the USA ... that'll probably be a maladaptive outcome overall.

Good thing Fox News is so much better! :(

Between our existing media factions, we might well end up with an effectively misinformed electorate.

Who gains then, however transiently (as the parasites slowly kill their host)?

Meanwhile, it's a good thing that adaptive people (mostly youth) are abandoning archaic forms of media, and turning to the increasing diversity of blogs to post & sample bigger samplings of our emerging distribution of public feedback & discourse.

If it weren't for public forums & public blogs, most of us would never have met an increasing proportion of the people we now know. Yes, we as a people are STILL increasingly moving on-line.

Yet there are PhD scientists who loftily proclaim that the internet can never replace academic journals - and that blogs should therefore be outlawed. [Same outlook that once said battle-tanks couldn't replace horses?]

Just because evolution isn't finished yet, that's no reason to not participate in it. 

In fact, we need to focus much more on our own adaptive RATE.

This whole topic of journalistic quality runs immediately into a bigger question:
How can we materially improve the QUALITY (including both participation rate and tempo) of distributed decision-making?

As just two little, suggested points of bookkeeping, wouldn't it be useful to keep a real-time tally of all the newly emerging FUNCTIONS clamoring for our attention - AND, to provide real-time access to notices of said events, to all people?

Let's look at it this way. Biology, business & military thinkers mostly seem to agree that evolution involves a constant, known cascade of events:

1) context always changes;
2) systemic awareness of things WE have to start doing differently;
3) systemic spawning of NEW FUNCTIONS to address new demands;
4) adjusting all OLD/NEW FUNCTIONS (& sometimes eliminating a few), in order to tune all to common task [cultural evolution].

If we're always struggling so much w #2, how the hell is group intelligence ever supposed to accelerate handling of #'s 3 & 4?

No wonder there's so much friction ... and attendant mayhem. 

If distributed feedback on net outcome lags ... then there are distributed frictions, and net tuning lags. That's a given.

To focus more group attention & effort on #'s 3 & 4, surely we need to make #2 a much more Automatic Stabilizer. That's a given. Nothing we didn't know in 1776 (i.e., a more informed electorate). We've been spinning our wheels, for 229 years?

A group brain is a terrible thing to waste, but that's what we're still over-focused on doing - by default.

What defines "cultural health?" How about retention & growth of net Adaptive Rate? Wallace & Darwin pointed that out 150 years ago. Is anyone listening?

How do we maintain & grow Cultural Adaptive Rate, if we don't practice measuring it? Here's one quick suggestion. We may need far more Public Discourse bookkeeping.

Couldn't every person's day start with access to a chart SUMMARIZING the entire spectrum of FEEDBACK on a hierarchy of "Emerging National Options To Explore?"

Not everyone would look every day, but at least everyone would always know that some attempt at hierarchical rankings of that still-cresting river of group options was always there?

That might even restore faith in the utility of having a US Congress. :(

Maybe more of us would periodically dip their toe in that river, & get sucked into participating in #s 3 & 4, on the basis of some hierarchical feedback ranking. That way we'd at least attempt a continuous ranking that systematically reduced frictions, rather than one that constantly increased frictions, via purely random, un-tuned participation?

How else does a V330million cultural engine TUNE itself, if not by seeking a constantly changing, dynamic balance between the full spectrum of enticing new options and the full spectrum of emerging frictions?

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.

The Pattern Of Process Flow

Consider, just as one of many examples, Aviation Disasters Due to Mechanical Failures.

Now please consider this question. Do the following statements NOT sound vaguely familiar, for anyone who's observed multiple screw-ups in any discipline whatsoever?

"visual inspection by crew not required"

[one passenger's visual inspection noticed crack]

[possibility of cracks joining, to exceed limit, "not considered"]

Surely that makes one ponder the PATTERN OF PROCESS FLOW, across any and all examples of adaptive systems making context-specific adjustments.

Yes, for adaptive rate to stay the same across multiple, transient contexts, EVERYTHING must continue to change (at different rates).

Nevertheless, there is a timeless PATTERN always evident in those few systemic changes which are adaptive, vs the many optional changes which are NOT adaptive. If we have to select how to survive, surely there are some basic patterns that define our selection process? Sounds obvious & easy, once stated.

Just let easy happen? The solution to every declared challenge is eventually quite easy, but because we no longer provide ourselves ADEQUATELY DISTRIBUTED PRACTICE at letting easy happen, we quite literally have raised billions of PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT LEARNED TO ACCEPT DISTRIBUTED EASY, and insist on individually working themselves to death doing what's systemically wrong.

In fact, we've come to the insane condition of despising those who resist industriously over-working at doing random wrong. (It usually involves personally, stupidly stockpiling static assets, while ignoring the far more valuable dynamic assets. Take our rampant individual capitalism ... PLEASE!)

Isn't it curious how the causes of disasters ..... are usually obvious in hindsight?

And how the generic solution is usually so insanely simple? They're always a reminder to simply seek, or actually re_sample - AND ACTUALLY LISTEN TO - all emerging feedback?

Is this not a basic part of the 150-year old theory of adaptive evolution?
Shouldn't the default biz-card logo for all humans read:

"HAVE SENSORY INSTRUMENTATION. WILL LEVERAGE IT." ?

The behavior of all adaptive systems always comes down to sampling theory?

(Expressed by all the nested layers of the analog-computing systems that make "us"? Aka, multi-atom molecules, multi-molecule cells, multi-cellular bodies, multi-body cultures and multi-cultural federations?*)

Whichever changing, total sum is appearing ...

... out of all the changing sensory/analytical/testing/ processes that we possess at a given time .... 

... then success simply means arriving at the obvious after we just adequately sample all permutations of "options space" that can be sampled?

What part of routine don't growing populations teach themselves, sooner rather than later?

i.e., TEST ALL BOUNDARIES ... to see which ones have moved?

How simple can this PATTERN OF ADAPTIVE PROCESS FLOW get, in operational practice?**

Isn't that what all humans do naturally as kids - until our various "education" processes beat it out of them?

Somehow, we are trying to make our current bureaucracies enforce Ludditism.

And damned if "WE" are not succeeding!!! (at current failure)

###

* Say, even a multi-cultural federation? :) Even a European 'Union' might work - if it is federated as an agile union of differing parts, rather than a naively rigid union of presumed clones.

Businesses, corporations & institutions are cultural subunits, rather like organs in your body? They don't HAVE to be the same. In fact, they must NOT be. Rather, to create net agility - our required diversity absolutely must be allowed to operate within policy tolerance limits broad enough to allow return on agile coordination.

###

** Several patterns of fully inter-dependent and fully interleaved, adaptive process flows are continuously proceeding in real-time, across all the multiple, nested layers in our national system. Our usual net description of the net process is called net auto-catalysis, and our standard view of the layered, repetitive applications are:

a) Context instrumentation and sampling (that covers constructing and using all means of adequately sampling distributed data, external as well as internal feedback, SOON ENOUGH TO MATTER). 

b) Context modeling (all means of adequately sampling recognizable patterns, "correlatable" to context-options, across all data flows, SOON ENOUGH TO MATTER) 

c) Context exploration (all means of adequately sampling distributed tests of our context-models, i.e., adequately re-exploring the changing range of emerging options, SOON ENOUGH TO MATTER)

d) Context updates (all means of re-assessing a-c, and starting again, WHILE making all suggested, distributed, adjustments, SOON ENOUGH TO MATTER).

Which adjustments? How soon? How?

Which adjustments:

Those dictated as most important, by the sum of distributed feedback. Presuming that there IS enough feedback to identify and construct a clear hierarchy .... in net, systemic benefit .... defined as increasing systemic options. The actual pattern of adjustments will be entirely context dependent, but the METHOD for selecting them will always be net auto-catalysis.

How soon?

As soon as available feedback PLUS available adjustment methods allow. The tempo of distributed adjustments will always vary in different populations, but the METHOD for achieving that speed will always be the sub-methods that support net auto-catalysis.

How?

By ALL emerging means possible? The sustainable glory really does go to those aggregates who find a systemically better way to steer systemic autocatalysis - and KEEP using it. All newly nested layers of auto-catalysis which occur, will always depend on the same a-d cycle, just expressed in the resilient diversity of nested "instrumentation" built into prior, nested, system layers:

- systemic self-instrumentation,
- systemic self-modeling,
- systemic option-exploration, and
- systemic self-assessment. 

Yes, there really is no exact answer, only a call for an adequate, distributed, probability function - of achieving "barely adequate" solutions to each context, while also maintaining adequate reserves - by scavenging & re-purposing all supposed "failures" - to face the next context. 

Do we have too many unemployed? Or ARE WE EXPLORING TOO FEW AGGREGATE, EMERGING OPTIONS? Glass half full, or half empty? It's the same situation, regardless of which perspective you choose to view it from. 

Practice making distributed, systemic adjustments to teamwork, often enough & soon enough that it remains the fall-back habit when surprises occur? And, then also always juggle enough time and resources and practiced staff in reserve, so that novel openings can be quickly & effectively pursued when they are finally recognized? That concept, of keeping adequate reserves, is ancient and uniform, from ant-nests to archaic armies. It's not just uninformed populations which fail. Overly-exhausted individuals or populations can also miss opportunities, and then must endure the agony of helplessly watching them go by (if they even recognize them at all).

We can’t predict what adjustments we'll have to make, to survive future challenges, but we can determine what adaptive kinetics we can generate - AND VIGOROUSLY PURSUE - when unpredictably distributed solutions to novel group challenges are recognized. [paraphrasing Joshua Chamberlain]

So, all cultural evolution boils down to just adequately re-mapping minimal patterns of net, adjustable cultural options .... to continuously changing contexts?

Re-sample context, re-sample optional (& increasingly distributed) adjustments. That's the endless race we're in. 

May the most agile populations stay in the race.