Why?
1/2 way between team and lone wolf?
1/2 way between social-coordination and social-looting
It seems inaccurate to simply call humans
eusocial. That's certainly not the whole truth.
Readers can select from endless examples, but here's one, arbitrary, example, below.
If you don't like THIS example, please just choose another one, instead of getting entirely side tracked on the perfection of arbitrary examples. Our goal is adaptive generalization, not fixation on details always lagging emerging context.
The opening sentences in this investment advisory article don't even make sense .. unless?
Oil slips on U.S. stimulus outlook but supply worries support "... analysts said prices were unlikely to sustain that level as European refiners cut processing rates because of gains in oil costs stemming from supply-curbing unrest in OPEC members ..."
Unless there's collusion to keep local prices at some arbitrary target?
Isn't there always at least some collusion? The balance swings between official and private? Either way, it's hard to follow the semantics of this kind of reporting. What is the underlying message implied by such confused messaging?
The underlying message when trying to combine public fiscal policy of so-called nation-states with personal-investing advice .... is that the populations of all families, neighborhoods, tribes, nation-states are suspended half-way between pursuing return-on-coordination, and
pursuing supposed personal gain at distributed expense?
Such habits don't persist for millions of years without solid reasons.
So why, indeed, do we seem to keep doing this? Are we really doing so purposefully, or is the perceived outcome of diverse, mixed messaging only a spurious happenstance? A shadow thrown off by one or more other, ongoing processes?
For example, could our continuously muddled outcome occur simply because it really is excruciatingly difficult to fully integrate an additional infusion of millions of people per year - into any nation or culture, anywhere?
In contrast, few physiological entities maintain continuous growth. Lobsters, as one of many examples, manage
continuous growth right up to the point of any arbitrary cause of death. Yet they do so partly through relatively slow growth rates, and also by
rigidly controlling the organizational state of the adult. Evolution in most complex
physiologies is largely - though not exclusively - restricted to
sexual recombination events. It's apparently too difficult and risky to continuously tinker very much with models once they come off the assembly line. Human and other social cultures, in contrast, undergo continuous cultural-embryology, cultural-ontogeny and cultural-phylogeny ... all simultaneously.
Cultures, in contrast to individuals, fail to evolve and survive precisely when they DO try to rigidly control their organizational state.
It's a miracle we survive ourselves at all. How do we actually do it? Why don't we focus far more on those subtleties, instead of all the spurious details? When trying to at least intelligently discuss the size of government vs size of nation, it wouldn't hurt to refer to
useful analogies?
Human cultures -
as super-organisms, on a completely different scale from the cellular-cultures which we call lobsters - have not only kept up continuous population growth for millennia, they've also maintained an Adaptive Rate that - usually - exceeds population growth rates. The fact that population growth rates in large, advanced nation states - or even European Unions :) - slow as a function of both organizational state and sheer numbers suggests another aspect of human cultural growth. Namely, that the absolute number of evolving system components - each increasing it's degrees of freedom - matters more than rate of population growth rate alone. Once again, absolute magnitude matters, in this case, the absolute number of inter-dependencies to manage.
Adaptive management of a constantly growing list of inter-dependencies requires exquisite maintenance of social instrumentation to distribute required patterns of feedback data. It's that simple? Why do we discuss everything BUT that simple, primary fact in our idiotic media services?
We're left with a conundrum. Growth of an entity - nation, union or culture - is a function of net Adaptive Rate. We also know that net, national Adaptive Rate is described by the running output of a long, polynomial of factors, where personal-, discipline-specific, institutional- and public-policy features constitute the cultural "factors" in that polynomial. All the growing #s of factors in those growing lists are capable of varying dramatically and triggering unpredictable inter-dependency effects. In short, every single term in that - constantly lengthening - polynomial has complex co-factors that can vary independently, but which impose dependent consequences. The output range is certainly messy. Constant cleanup is the order of every day. Let's simplistically describe a mutating human culture this way, by summing NAR, Net Adaptive Rate, including
p-personal,
d-discipline,
i-institutional, and
pp-public-policy groupings.
NAR = F
(j..n)[ fp
(j..n) ~ fd
(j..n) ~ fi
(j..n) ~ fpp
(j..n)] ... at
least.
That certainly doesn't do reality justice, but it's enough to begin to get a very simple point across.
For a given nation to grow into a bigger, more agile, more capable entity, it is necessary that the degrees of freedom of any subset never grow beyond local tolerance limits imposed by systemic feedback. Exceeding such tolerance limits would simply degrade inter-dependencies with all other subsets, and thereby reduce the return on net coordination of the whole. That happens in human cultures and markets, as surely as dramatically increasing the power of only one or a few pistons in a V8 internal combustion engine quickly causes more harm than good to both engine and vehicle maintenance costs - maybe even to driver & pedestrians!
Would it do your body much good if, say, your liver, turned into a SuperLiver, and tried to rapidly evolve into roles that randomly complicated the functions of the other, roughly
60 human
organs, ~
300 human cell types, and ~
70-Trillion cells making up a functioning human physiology? Unlikely - but who's to say what our physiology will look like in another million years? In all likelihood the resulting physiological disorder triggered by your SuperLiver would seriously impair your behavior in the interim, or even kill you. With indirect help from other humans, you'd probably label your new SuperLiver as either a benign or cancerous tumor, kill or excise it, and go on a transplant waiting list to get a liver that could stay within SURVIVABLE, local Adaptive Rates. By analogy, it's certainly relevant to ask whether the current, runaway asset-overgrowth by the 1% is killing the entire USA, not just the Middle Class.
Point is that it is excruciatingly difficult to select distributed tolerance limits that allow net adaptation. And, it is incredibly dangerous to pursue long-term projections based upon very limited samplings of full-system feedback!
That should be obvious to citizens of the USA, but it obviously isn't!
How does your liver stay within tolerance limits that keep your body alive? How do all components in complex systems tie all local ambitions and rate of evolving degrees of freedom to systemic as well as local needs?
They do so by tying all local functions AND emerging interactions, to the
entire spectrum of local-to-global feedback loops. Listen to all, and then
practice ... knowing how to use some or all that data - when and as needed - to grow and protect the system you're a part of. Don't just grow your local wallet. The result of coordination is called evolution, and it's worked miraculously for billions of years. That is, it works when supposedly brilliant humans stoop to actually participating in the collective activity. Sound tedious? Of course. Yet it's certainly not difficult. That's the rub. To accelerate return on coordination, we need only be patiently selective.
Yes, adaptive evolution is actually quite simple to do with TEAM PRACTICE at distributed trial and error. In fact there's a very simplistic name for it. [Whole System] Outcomes-Based Training and Education - or just
OBT&E for short.
OBT&E is simple to achieve via team practice - yet it is mathematically impossible to DESCRIBE via academic theory or rules. Why? Because the near-infinite lists of workable vs non-workable permutations of all possible degrees-of-freedom and actions that can be taken by say, either 70-trillion cells in a human body (at one scale) or ~320-Million citizens in a nation state, are far more rapidly selectable via ongoing feedback from ongoing trial and error than by predictive calculation! From the point of view of individuals, you might call the selection process the
Traveling Entrepreneur Task.
The task is even more difficult for the sum of individuals making a human culture. No complex system can mirror and calculate all system data fast enough to execute Central Planning. That's a mathematical reality. The volume of data generated is an exponential function of our own actions. The adaptive solution is never calculable - despite what Luddite "Austrian Economists" hypothesize. It is, however, always SELECTABLE, and that's what evolutionary adaptive rate is all about.
Evolution is the slow process of finding ways to tap feedback from more and more sources, so as to shield ourselves better and better from the constant effect of entropy. That's why many biologists have taken liberties with semantics & slang, to call evolution or
auto-catalysis a "reverse-entropy" method. Given that agility, maybe it's even possible to
fuse philosophy and actual science? Probably by abandoning the faux-religion of economics? A field that even bankers say is
more trouble than it's worth.
The power of group selection, i.e., teamwork, is an age-old lesson that humans have ALWAYS known, since we evolved. We keep using teamwork because it slowly sinks for all new arrivals that we have zero net predictive power. What is it that we're all feverishly working towards? Whatever it is, it is ALWAYS far easier to cooperate on exploring those endless options, and quickly agree on whatever we can all most benefit from agreeing upon. What we are tempted to agree upon thereafter, appears to be related by some power function to the mass of what we can collectively sense and perceive, rarely including anything we can or should actually calculate with any significant precision.
The group intelligence of a human culture is held in the body AND DISTRIBUTION PATTERN of it's group discourse. Similar to the function that a nervous system fills in a given physiology. The message is the same for individuals and whole cultures ... FEED YOUR BRAIN. That means both of them, your's, and your nation's. Feeding either in isolation won't help.
At the end of every day, it's again better to kick back with a cold beer & your feet up ... or at least have a clear path to doing so again, WITH addition of some capabilities that - last year - you or others convinced us that we were bored NOT having. Metalworking, steam engines, automobiles, telephones, big-screen tvs, internet, yada, yada. What's next, and - more importantly -
why will we struggle to more systemically leverage it, vs clinging to poorly distributed allocation? Excessive personal hoarding of static assets causes us far more trouble than it is worth. There's no doubt that it holds us back.
It takes us far longer to learn the optimal uses for new tools and methods. Far longer than it takes to intially mis-use them. As
many have noted, net system progress tracks the transition from random application to
Automatic Stabilizer function.
Our nation of ~320 million people is once again trying to arbitrarily over-expand the degrees of freedom of some small set of citizens (the tumor, some mix of Innocent Frauds & Outright Frauds), while drastically limiting the degrees of freedom of all the rest of our citizens - supposedly unexpectedly.
What is wrong with this picture?
There are 1001 ways to express HOW stupid it is. Let's have yearly student contests to re-describe the changing spectrum of those descriptions. We adults already have bigger issues to move on to.
More importantly, WHY are we doing this, repeatedly?
If nothing else, it's because we are NOT training our constant wave of new children to appreciate the
evolving system they are a part of? While newcomers learn details about the disciplines, institutions and public they choose to participate in ... don't they also need to appreciate the overwhelming importance of evaluating whether or not local actions and even degrees of freedom at EVERY level are compatible with actions & degrees of freedom at all levels? "All levels" includes the WHOLE NATION that is supposed to be far greater than the sum of it's ever expanding number of parts.
Every member born into a social species faces first and foremost a colossal, monumental
tuning task, and can help more than hinder ONLY if they appreciate the difference between being a wrench, lubricant or carefully selected catalyst thrown into the workings of an exquisite system. With that simple perspective always in mind, multi-level selection - in the form of distributed teamwork PRACTICE and FEEDBACK - can proceed as a matter of fact, even if unpredictably. In practice, citizens can generate adequate group practice only if they guarantee everyone's basic needs, through Automatic Stabilizer functions. That simple truth describes the 1st step in achieving and maintaining an
Agile Culture.
Our greatest focus should be on group SELECTION of the excruciatingly rare permutations of things which we can do to actually increase the Adaptive Rate of an already mind-numbingly complex and complicated human culture.
If that isn't a challenge worth going after, I don't know what is. It's a challenge that makes most local ambitions trivially boring.
Why don't we make all students intimately aware of this reality, by age 10? That little effort would produce a sea-change in the adaptive rate of any culture that does it.
How could we keep citizens down in their ruts, after they've seen that great possibility? Why would we want to?
