Human Aggregates Everywhere Are Constrained Primarily By Confusing Derived Numerals With Real Feedback Signals

What kind of aggregate is afraid of it's own shadows? Essentially, a moronic one.

We desperately need growing populations to grasp - by mathematics alone - that aggregate capabilities and options are NOT constrained by derived accounting metrics.

"Let's look at the substance, and not the shadow." Marriner Eccles, Fed Chief, 1938

All currencies, by definition, are simply the data thrown off by interacting citizens, not the inverse.

"The substance of our wealth is the production of our [citizens]. The shadow is our money."

Now, as in 1938, the heads of our banks and banking organizations are the LEAST systemically educated of our citizens, and it remains for us to explain to them the difference between shadow and substance, between nominal and real.

Human aggregates everywhere are constrained primarily by confusing derived with real feedback signals. It is up to all of us to systemically educate our many specialists, so that they may keep sight of growing context, and not get lost entirely within their various data streams which are producing as many incidental shadows as relevant feedback signals.

Any naive or isolated person can be easily impressed by big numbers. It requires education, training and practice to keep track of what those mean for real contexts.

Imagine how good it will feel when the moronic aggregate stops pounding it's head against it's own fiat!

Let's look at some real examples.

Scary Numbers, example #1.

Soon after you started as a single egg cell, if someone had told you that your "Inter-cellular Signalling Debt" would soon be overwhelmed with the responsibility for 40 Trillion new cells, would you have stopped growing, and laid off all your cells?

In what order? Red blood cells first, then all the other 300 subtypes, in some imagined order of aggregate value? Some humans saw this dis-unity problem coming long before we were even aware of cells to count but never quite enough to assuage our aggregate fear of aggregate shadows.


Scary Numbers, example #2.

Currency supply.

How does a currency supply work? It "denominates" all the transactions citizens can and will muster. Hence, currency supply has to grow, as a derived "shadow" (record keeping) for real citizen transactions. When any & all desired transactions can be denominated without spurious constraints, then the return on coordination is truly stupendous, as Benjamin Franklin noticed early on. OVERLY constraining a currency supply has, of course, dire consequences, then and now.

Given simple realities, what currency supply might we need today, with the many types of our 330million residents? The answer clearly depends entirely upon:

1) the rate of transactions,

2) the number of transaction types, and

3) the unconstrained distribution of transactions (so that any novel transaction chain can be created, upon demand).

As a start, just imagine that every citizen did execute just ONE sort of $1 transaction with every other citizen - per year. In that case, the year-to-year currency supply REQUIRED for rapidly denominating aggregate transaction completions would be N-factorial dollars (i.e., each citizen does a transaction with 3.9 million others in 1790, or 330 million others in 2015).

Population N-factorial in 1790 would be 3.9million factorial, (a truly big number).

Population N-factorial in 2015 would be 330million factorial, an even far larger number.





What would 330million factorial be? Awfully big. So big we don't even have everyday jargon for naming numbers that large, which are way past the $10-to-$75 trillion commonly described as circulating dollar-denominated assets (M2 + debt).

A fiat currency system addresses this scalability task by continuously & asynchronously creating & destroying "dollars" (denomination units), in multiple, dynamic ways, including loan creation, loan-repayment, fiscal spending, and taxes, while (supposedly, pending national policy) placing no control over the absolute number of transaction units available to denominate transactions.

The only thing we have to fear is fear of the number of accounting numerals we use? Seriously?

In fiat currency, we have found a way to make our IOUs, and count them too!

That final task, accounting, is essentially all that a banking system is required to do. It's very simple, actually. Bankers & economists are the only ones who can't seem to see their function for their imagined complexity!

Yet we clearly are not growing our currency supply anywhere as fast as we could, if we removed all constraints on citizen interactions and transactions. That's a problem.

We are holding ourselves back, essentially withholding fiat (public initiative). What are we afraid of? Our aggregate shadow? Afraid of what our kids may invent next? (If we LET them, anyway.)

What kind of fool tries to save (too much) initiative, aka, fiat, aka, fiat currency?

That's like accumulating energy, or fat, unused, in the hope that you can make better use of it later. As with all things, there are rather tight tolerance limits on the utility of hoarding initiative. The more of a resource you hoard, the less agile you are in wielding it's use. Yet if you have none, you're also not agile. 

It's the dynamic tolerance limits, stupid!

Our aggregate limitations are organizational limitations, imposed by lagging technical capabilities and aggregate training and practice, but NOT by the size of the numbers used to count the ongoing interaction messages, or "currency" units we use.

So, in 1790, what if someone had pointed out the colossal number of dollar bills we'd be responsible for managing one day, once our population reached 330 million, today? Should we have panicked at the sheer size of that fiat number, laid off all workers, and decided to stop all population growth (or cultural evolution) right then and there, at 3.9 million?

Lay off workers? Isn't that what we routinely do? In which order? We have thousands of types to choose from. All necessary but not sufficient, and all must be adequately provisioned if we're to increase national resiliency as well as agility. Is laying off workers a sign of aggregate intelligence?

Not if, like the proverbial egg cell, we wanted our culture to keep growing.

If there's one thing that defines American Exceptionalism, it is our historical ability to almost maintain an understanding of the power of fiat currency, and return on coordination.

Note that maintaining that perspective was a constant battle, waged largely as class war. The US currency supply was highly politicized from the onset, in two key developments, notably championed by Alexander Hamilton and the largely British Banking Lobby. The politics of money is, in reality, inseparable from class war, clan competition and frictions between individuals.

Whatever the class politics, in 1790, ~4 million citizens started our post-war currency system, printed and circulated, out of thin air, what we can call (for the sake of argument) the first $80MILLION dollars of IOU notes for prior debts alone, ignoring everyday transactions. Today, we're afraid of denominating another trillion dollars of transactions? So afraid that we're instead limiting our real interactions and NOT exploring our emerging aggregate options?

What should we be more afraid of?

Such people are a threat to themselves, as well as to their own aggregate. To evolve, we have to save them from themselves, as part of saving ourselves.

After all, what's more valuable, current fiat, or future options? Isn't the point to optimally combine the two? It boils down to what your definition of "value" is. Possessions here & now, or future survival of your lineage.

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?

Just Do The Little Things That Make It Harder For All Citizens, Everywhere, To Work At Cross-Purposes?

Periodically, we can't help seeing all the way through.

When that happens, it's always a bit deflating to see even revered elites revealed as logically challenged at times. Yet even that shouldn't scare us. We need our audacity as much as our security.

What are we seeing through this time? Several items, through the eyes of one man, as well as his known history. It's a compelling, revealing snap-shot, with multiple elements of partial truths compromised by a history of countermanding errors - by many people.

See the photo and URL. This approach sees part of the problem, but misses the point.

There is a better way.

"Just do the little things that make it harder for citizens to work at cross-purposes." Col. Casey Haskins (US Army, Retired)

That's what evolution, aka Natural SELECTION, aka OBT&E is all about.

It is NOT about kicking anybody out.

(A portion of all people everywhere, at all times - even a portion of ourselves & our own kids - are always misbehaving, and misguided. Do we kick them all out, and swap 'em for those that other countries kick out? No matter WHAT we do, we'll just recreate a similar range of challenges and options, in one generation. That's the penalty for enjoying the benefit of massively parallel recombination, cultural or sexual.)

Instead, it's about listening to our own logic, instead of to pea-brains, and practicing forbearance while exploring - and selecting - better options. How? We always need even newer methods to do just that, & can discover them ONLY by initiating enough distributed trial & error. It's not about having insights, or being partially right. It's about seeing all the way through, to even better options, plus better methods for achieving those Desired Outcomes.

"One day after I am long gone, you will remember me and say, we should have stopped the nuclear program of Israel, abolished the Federal Reserve and kicked all secret societies, occultists, usurpers and Zionists out of our wonderful country, to keep it that way, but it is never too late, just remember that." 

[I don't know who that's from, but it's not from JFK, as some have claimed. It doesn't matter, since it misses the deeper point altogether.]

Trading Royalty for Banksters for Racists for Trusts for Nazis for Zionists for Banksters for Neo-Liberals? Is that the national process history of the USA, and what our electorate argues itself to a standstill over?

Isn't there a better way than just enduring a cyclical trap of orienting to create, then combat, then re-create successive Innocent Frauds & overt Control Frauds? We're afraid of our own shadows, and panicking, instead of just managing our constant combination of fears and options.

Which approach do we choose?

Passive NonCompliance - after ceding tempo?

     Or

Active Outcomes-Based Practice - while seizing & maintaining initiative?

Why are a tiny # of sociopathic pea-brains usually able to keep 90% of humanity confused, divided & conquered?

Only because we're not aggressively PRACTICING listening to all of ourselves, all of the time - so that an adaptive hierarchy of options worth exploring is always and automatically sorted and distributed, soon enough to matter?

Mal-adaptive ideas are never our core problem. 

In fact, the combination of having them and then trying to eradicate them instead of just ignoring them is our greater failing, and a self-inflicted wound! 

Mal-adaptive ideas are a constant, from an infinite source. 

Success lies in constantly & QUICKLY surrounding mal-adaptive ideas & outcomes with enough adaptive ideas to make the distinction obvious, early and often enough to steer ongoing outcomes.

After all, our goal is to SELECT more adaptive ideas than mal-adaptive ones.

Just make it easier to bias our selection in one vs the other direction.

Doing the little things that make it harder for citizens to work at cross-purposes ... is the same as doing the little things that make it easier for citizens to coordinate, at any scale.

Those two, desired practices support both goals, and reduce to the same practice set.

We need a Bias To Adaptive Outcomes, from coupling a Bias To Action PLUS a Bias To Full-Feedback Selection.

Building Aggregate Agility ... By Continuously Tuning Increasing Numbers of Inter-Dependency Functions ... With Increasing Numbers of Automatic Stabilizers

Finance and Economics Discussion SeriesDivisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary AffairsFederal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.
Inequality and Poverty in the United States: the Aftermath of the Great Recession - July, 2013 

          ###

Washington U faculty papers
Inequality, the Great Recession, and Slow Recovery - Jan, 2014

What do these data mean to you?

To me, they're simply interesting data, produced too slowly to be of functional use in a still missing RESPONSE to changing context.

What are we doing here? How are we doing it? And why are we waiting so long?

Instead of documenting the bad outcomes, why aren't we just focussing on improving policy in real-time?

Something is completely out of whack in our policy apparatus, and our civics.

We would NOT use economics to train jugglers! Why try to use them to advise policy development - which must, by definition, be either agile, or irrelevant?

No offense to economists ..... but the entire field of economics could - eventually - precisely document how every war was lost, but couldn't EVER actually win one, since that requires practice at a different skill set?

How does economics help us succeed at juggling, or even in real-time operation of a business venture? Let alone national policy?

This situation should make all citizens realize that the economics profession can never instruct us on how to ride a bicycle. It can only precisely document (eventually) why we fall off? :)

Let's get real. The act of falling off a bike is self-documenting.

As are depressions. 

Keeping an aggregate on a bike (or any growth path) requires us to constantly train increasing numbers of automatic stabilizer functions to respond and adjust in real-time ... to real-time data sets, called feedback.

Keeping all feedback data sets within tolerance limits is how complex systems juggle internals in order to survive context. To ALWAYS ensure that ALL internal functions can be kept within local tolerance limits, we
1) generate tremendous diversity, and
2) generate large numbers of inter-dependencies, and
3) demand distributed - i.e., "fiat" - adjustments to adequately distributed feedback,

4) all in order to thereby maintain distributed, systemic resiliency.

That is what agile aggregates, and Democracies, do - when they survive.

And they do it all in either real time ... or else.

The logic of social species is to guarantee survival of all components PLUS the aggregate, by distributing all stresses experienced by the aggregate. If all components adjust a little, then no component EVER need be stressed beyond survival tolerance limits.

So why on earth are we killing our MiddleClass? Is there a plan? Some Desired Outcome? Whose?

Social organization boils down to building aggregate agility by continuously tuning increasing numbers of inter-dependency functions. That's not rocket-science, only distributed PLUS aggregate practice at tuning inter-dependencies.

Where does the field we call economics fit in this social logic? 

Seriously. The very application of orthodox economics is entirely too academic, and inadequately operational. Since our context changes unpredictably, our aggregate reality is that NO model of anything works for more than a fleeting instant. Survival is a dynamic, unpredictable art of extension by highly distributed innovation, and NEVER a static model.

Just set functional tolerance limits for all components ... including education, nutrition, liquidity, employment .... and let distributed, not concentrated, adjustments be mediated through existing and added Automatic Stabilizers. It should be easy.

Where does that leave the entire field of economics? It has clearly been a colossal, operational mistake to even attempt to use economists in policy offices, rather than just having them tally accounting reports after the fact, and spend more time on the golf course.

Accounting & economics involve fairly boring tracking of basic fundamentals, and NOT dynamic exploration of emerging options.

Our survival is a simple question of keeping boring fundamentals separate from the emerging options which we must explore?

That means setting goals, keeping boring fundamentals as fundamentals vs dynamics, and making any and all distributed adjustments IN REAL TIME, that are necessary for aggregate exploration of aggregate options.

Once seen that way, our key Desired Outcome is to maintain aggregate resiliency precisely by maintaining all of our social components - and especially our Middle Class - safely within operational tolerance limits.

If all citizens focus on avoiding application of excessive stress on other citizens, then we'll never have to worry about our aggregate resiliency. That is the logic of all aggregates.

It is the logic of social species.

It's also the logic of statistical process control (distributed control of net variance).

And the logic of diverse expressions of military science (force readiness by managing frictions generated while aligning highly distributed decision-making). Believe it or not, armies at war are much more democratic than our electorate at home.

And, by the way, it is the logic of using automatic stabilizers in fiscal and social policy.

In conclusion, to maintain National Security as national resiliency, functional policies are those that 

a) provide us with freedom to execute distributed expression of more Automatic Stabilizers, and 

b) guarantee us freedom from the stress inherent in the clash of random ideology. 

In short, make coordination of a more perfect union, not civil or class war.

Building Aggregate Agility ... By Continuously Tuning Increasing Numbers of Inter-Dependency Functions ... With Increasing Numbers of Automatic Stabilizers.

That is what evolving systems do. That's all they do. That simple logic allows evolving systems to solve seemingly any challenge ..... by throwing more nested layers of the same logic at whatever options emerge.

Any and all ideology just gets in the way, and slows down distributed adjustments.

Why can't we teach this simple paradigm, to all students, by age 10?

"Urban Planning" is NOT Cultural Planning - Which Deserves A Far Richer Toolkit If We Are To Steer Our Cultural Growth More Productively

London street growth from 1786 to 2010.



From a study of physical infrastructure growth patterns.

This is an interesting map, of course, yet it misses the more important question of Cultural Planning, not just Urban Planning.

To steer our own, zooming growth of both population and citizen capabilities, it would sure be nice to have some visual maps of Cultural Organization. Not physical infrastructure maps, but maps of all the emerging inter-dependencies between all of our truly novel, emerging inventions.

Such "regulatory" maps or "Interactomes" are everywhere in the life sciences, but seem, perversely, to be largely banned from most policy and political practices (except where they are misused). With better, and more widely distributed Cultural Organization maps, our MiddleClass electorate might be less confused, distracted, divided and conquered by their own bevy of cultural parasites.

An interactome, with genes represented by text in boxes and interactions noted by lines between the genes.

We certainly need many more maps of Cultural Infrastructure, as a visual assessment tool.

Analogy?

Street growth & other changes in physical infrastructure represent the incidental noise broadcast by a growing culture, and do not map the inner infrastructure of the culture itself - at all.

In the 1830's, de Tocqueville supposedly noted with surprise - during his American travels - that US towns everywhere averaged ~6 civic organizations that literally everyone belonged to one or the other of (Farming networks weren't far behind, with their granges, co-ops, fellowships and various church-based and other initiatives). Participation in multiple such organizations served to bind the affinity & coordination, of communities, and both preserve and grow the agility and maneuverability of American populations.

European populations of the day had long since gotten used to remote, aristocrat "authorities" doing their thinking for them. Early American populations had to think for themselves, and thrived because of it. Not any more?

Many citizens have a vague sense that much of our Cultural Infrastructure declines as physical infrastructure grows - yet we lack visual feedback tools such as maps, to graphically convey that degradation of inter-dependency management so that we're more easily motivated to develop needed checks & balances. Without rapid, pervasive feedback and assessment methods, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage a culture that is both growing and diversifying rapidly.

As self-governance methods tends towards leaner, more brittle & less distributed "Central Planning," it is our quality of distributed decision-making that declines. In the process, the very nature of lean, Central Planning defeats it's avowed purpose, and steadily degrades the maneuverability of a democracy, and the agility of electorates.

We need culture maps and other assessment tools, to monitor and manage Cultural Infrastructure, not just physical infrastructure.

Surely some fledgling examples already exist? Are there any Cultural Infrastructure maps, similar to the street maps and bio-regulatory maps above?

Has anyone already visualized our Cultural Interactome? Or has that been banned by the Koch Brothers?