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.

MacroEconomics: The Simple PRACTICE Of Re-Orienting All Eyes Onto Emerging Aggregate Options.

Is it just rigorously managing the supply of transaction denomination units? DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH!

Every time I read some dimwit, orthodox macro-economics discourse, I still end up wondering what it is, exactly, that we're running out of.

A line from one of the "Change" songs keeps coming back at that point too.

"I been around the world once or twice before,

and the answer ain't found in seeking more [stuff] ... I promise you that"

And there's an old Irish tribal proverb that also fits. "It is in the shelter of each other that the people live." Well Duh! That's what social species do, and in fact, all members of all ecologies.

So suddenly, once there are too many of us for our own wits to handle, we're no longer shelter to each other? Something doesn't add up here.

It must be our wits and behaviors, not our physical capabilities, or possessions that are degrading our median quality of life.

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will [appear to] change."  Max Planck(?)

It's the scale, dummy? The more people we have, the bigger the tent we can hold up? Yet cultural tent design at one size does NOT scale, unchanged to provide cultural tent design at a different cultural scale.

"Much of the difficulty in reconciling scale-related axioms arises from CONFUSING MICRO-SCALE AND MACRO-SCALE INTER-RELATIONSHIPS." Max Planck

It's a mystery to me why we as a people struggle so much to see the superior value of more coordination, rather than more stuff.

We're so close!

How? Because almost everyone I meet already values their learned knowledge of how SOME relatively complex process works, and hence they don't sweat the ingredients. Ever seen a homemaker hoarding flour, or yeast, or salt, or ovens ... to ensure forever their capability to make bread? They know that that don't make no sense. Or mechanics trying to corner the market on nuts and bolts, for their retirement? No. They all grasp process scale, at least to some degree.

And yet we're still so far!

How? Because, to a person, those same people:

they just don't see our nation and electorate as just another process! 

They just haven't gotten used to seeing the bigger scale. It only takes practice, but they aren't getting enough of that practice yet.

Hence, they get sidetracked and completely swallowed up in hoarding, to gross excess, various ingredients that go into making "us" - a dynamic human culture that is much more than the sum of it's parts. For example, they all foolishly agree to hoard each other's transaction denomination units, for retirement - like athletes trying to hoard the "scorekeeping points" which their leagues create at will. 

Weepin' Jesus! Can't see dessert for all the Ding Dongs? Join the throng failing to recognize itself in the mirror.

It's astounding.

It's not the parts, dummy, it's the whole! Perhaps another addition to the books for dummies series might help.

Wholes, for Dummies! :)

Perhaps, but only if it was embedded in every year of our K-12 curriculum.

The backlog of stuff we already know about current human-culture recipes is so astoundingly large that it's either ignored or it actually gets in the way as institutional momentum or bureaucracy, as does our stockpile of ingredients.

Offer people a little bit of corn or butter, and they'll buy it all up. Give them unimaginable corn surpluses, or Butter Mountains, and they'll pay to have it hauled away for compost ..... and never examine the change in logic that accompanied the change in scale.

Every nomad understood this implicitly, 100,000 years ago. Say there are are 4 food sources, which appear at 4 times of the year, in 4 different places. First, ACTIVE nomads quickly find them all, and optimally use those resources. Is there enough for all, and excess? Always, but it required some travel.

You can picture that eventually, some lazy idiots started building fences around every new, transient resource discovered, in attempts to corner that market. Most would sit on it all year, trying not to starve between times it would blossom. Economic civil warfare began, along with leverage and enslavement. Local outcomes sometimes looked good to the dimwits withholding from the aggregate, rather than helping to keep the aggregate eye on aggregate options. Soon the net Output Gap was recognized, and it began to steadily grow.

The ongoing outcome? New layers of nomads eventually realize that their food source has become the people sitting behind the fences. Hence, the proverbial barbarian waiting at every misguided gate. Aggregate civil war escalated into unending civil war. Amazingly, aggregates grew despite themselves, but always slower than they could have. Sometimes MUCH slower, even briefly reversing the course of cultural evolution. Nevertheless, even our own genius idiots can't keep our resilient Middle Class down forever, no matter how hard they try.

This pattern continued until we witnessed the inevitable next link in that chain of idiocy.

Neo-Liberals attempting to build fences around distributed, public fiat, so they can sit on it.

BMHOTK! That's the final stage of "perfecting" the theory of idiocy, before it's tossed in the garbage bin, for good.

All our resources - including our denomination units - are all meaningless, without ability to see our emerging context.

"Those cultures are richest who can best explore emerging options soonest, with the least of their old baggage." That's my take.

Yes, countless superficial thinkers keep insisting on simple changes to our imagined cultural recipe - even though it's obvious that there cannot possibly be any isolated, simplistic solutions.

Yet there is nevertheless always something simple that's missing. It's just too subtle for most people, but ONLY because we don't teach the obvious. In fact, we train people out of seeing the obvious!

To make things easier on ourselves, we just have to re-orient our orientation coordinates to see our own evolving culture in a simpler light. No context seems simple until a context-specific coordinate system is adopted.

To re-orient whole cultures faster means a higher Cultural Adaptive Rate - despite our numeric growth. We have to face the fact that we're not doing the simple things that will cause a phase-change in the structure and process of existing human culture.

What does it take to transition a cultural engine from low potential to achieving more of it's potential? Tuning? Based on feedback from expanding system instrumentation? Requiring expanding investment in ourselves? That means realizing that the return-on-coordination is the only revenue that can cover our expanding cost of coordination. The only other option is slow suicide.

What part of tuning is it that's missing the most? Mostly the action, more than the analysis?

Both experimentation and imagination are necessary, but not sufficient. We need both. So far, we're constraining ourselves with austerity habits and hoarding stuff that in reality is only useless baggage, and that is keeping us from exploring options that are even more exciting.

To keep adapting and surviving, a culture needs to keep the entire electorate's eye on the NEXT prize. The idiocy of trying to sequester and bury Public Initiative (fiat) in the ground and hoard it is just another form of suicide. To leverage the distributed fiat we have, we first have to keep enough of it distributed. Then we need ever newer methods for driving better/faster/wider appreciation of context, throughout our electorate, no matter how fast it grows.

Aggregate Methods drive Aggregate Results.
     Aggregate Results are measured against Aggregate Desired Outcomes.
          Aggregate Desired Outcomes drive Aggregate Methods.

Or, if you will, Aggregate Practice Makes Aggregate Perfect.

That's why I prefer Marriner Eccles' actual operations over all subsequently published theories. We can always learn more from experiment than theory alone.

Eccles & FDR practiced exploring options. Then, too many bookworms spent subsequent decades theorizing about what Marriner & Franklin once did, instead of just helping us stay on our Economy Bike, exploring newly emerging options - by rushing to see the aggregate outcome of DOING things!

What other field rides a bike once, then retreats to book-reading instead of aggregate group bike riding? My head is spinning, just thinking about the ironic lunacy of it all.

Can we just close down every economics department in the country, talk less, and get back to MORE action and less theorizing, while utilizing inter-connected OBT&E?

That is, get students - & the whole Middle Class - back on the damn aggregate bike, and just let 'em PRACTICE riding it? ASAP?

So what view of context is it, exactly, that we aren't enunciating clearly enough to ourselves and teaching to our children .. that would allow us to do far more for ourselves, and make life more fulfilling for more of us?

The only conclusion I come to is that we always need even more thorough distribution of all human feedback, derived from maintaining fully distributed, full human activity. 

First, feedback minus diverse experiments is useless theory. 

Second, given the limited bandwidth of human components, useful feedback comes down to adequate, systematic re-sampling, to assess external change, changing internal capabilities and potential for further internal change.

Everyone has a responsibility to broadcast key info to key receivers.

We all have a responsibility to also adequately sample the entire spectrum of human feedback.

Simultaneously, to do either, we also have a responsibility to ensure that diverse feedback is allowed to be both broadcast and reviewed, by all.

None of us can be as smart, or active, as all of us. It's not even close.

"Organization" means getting key info to key people in key positions in key institutions, within critical time windows. All that, or nothing.

A healthy brain is one that's been nurtured adequately, developed through practice, and trained to rapidly analyze all emerging data.

Similarly, a healthy Group Brain - a human culture - is one that's been nurtured adequately, developed through practice at group discourse, and gets adequate practice at rapidly analyzing the changing spectrums of internal/external data. Leveraging that full spectrum of data/actions is what defines our emerging cultural response options. That's how we'll survive the unpredictably changing contexts we must face.

We can look either direction up and down that axis: as component "neurons" looking at their shared Group Brain ... or as the Group Brain looking at how it trains its component neurons (our individual brains).

Then, of course, we need national practice at generating alternative aggregate responses, and comparing them to our Aggregate Desired Outcome.

Did I mention that we need formal processes for continually re-estimating Aggregate Desired Outcomes, honestly? Instead of trying to rely upon the disproven process of Central Planning by too few Neo-Liberal, capitalist "elites" instead of communists? Big Difference, right?

A group has a Group Brain only if all parts talk to one another. What good is a Democracy if we don't USE it?  System intelligence is actually held in an aggregate's Body of Discourse, and expressed in aggregate actions. The more aggregate agility, the better, and aggregate agility is defined as the outcome of aggregate practice - aka, the Quality (including tempo) of Distributed Decision Making.

Where to start? You want specifics? Just generate more activity, everywhere you look, at every scale, among all citizens. And then get 'em all practicing coordinating across existing and emerging scale. If we don't, what's left of our grandchildren will, if THEY'RE left.

Statistically Significant Practice Of Democracy: The Adaptive Culture Cup Challenge For Context Nomads, and Teaching Citizens To Think.

This essay was prompted by yet another advertisement that both cracked me up, and also unleashed the stream of reform. Here's raising a cup to those who pave the way.

Consider the following ad.

"Live well, Live Green [buy a printed book]"
For 200K years, the answer has been "talk to people," right?

For 3.5 Billion years, the answer has been "interact," right?

So what is this ad really referring to, in what context? For what reason?

Living? That's a life-process, for individuals and groups.

Green? That's a sustainability-through-extended-maintenance efficiency concept - about extended life.

Printed book? That's a static repository of fixed observations, usually raw data plus notes about a few data-interdependencies.

Yet what are the real boundaries and substance of the data "store & hold" matrix that these concepts reveal? When presented with such ads, all kids face the same dilemma, and eventually ask the same questions, in fumbling ways, depending on age and background.

Basically, as soon as all concepts being discussed are wrapped in a single matrix - i.e., a recognized situation or context, then kids can't help sensing - and maybe voicing - questions about the matrix itself.

Where did we come from, and why?

Where ARE we, anyway?

And where are we going next?

And why. Why? Why? Why? Why? [SETA: search for extraterrestrial answers to kids questions. The genesis of all religions?]

Even some adults retain this natural inclination, if it hasn't been "successfully" trained out of them, in their typical dinosaur race to become uselessly over-adapted to one, transient context.

When considering the questions that kids ask (when protected and left to their own, imagination, especially if it's actually nurtured, and not beaten, "educated" or otherwise "trained" into arbitrary prejudices and biases) - several answer patterns frequently appear.

A large % of the stuff implicitly described/learned/used ... is never explicitly written down! (usually more than 70%?)

Another large % of the stuff written down ... is written down by people who never use it anyway. [Go figure!]

Most of the stuff that actually, unpredictably gets done ... is done by people who do a little of everything, while "everything" keeps changing?

But where does that leave us? In a system that no member can fully understand?

There obviously is a "way," since we're here, after 3.5 Billion years ... but it can NOT be written down as a static message that most people can use, regardless of how many rules-based systems we cycle through when trying to describe change.

Sisyphus pushing Budda up a Tao finally learned that no static rules are Sufi_cient? :)

How do we finally discern the "sufi" in what's "transiently necessary" as opposed to what's "enduringly sufficient?" By neural tuning of repeated, sensory-triggered patterns? Upon reflection, every reactive or agile system ideally requires every supposedly static component to in actuality be an agile, reactive unit displaying degeneracy.

Like system components, system interdependencies (aka, "rules") in an agile system must also display degeneracy if that system is to "stay in the race" for very long. In short, the necessarily tuned rule is not an absolute rule, only a dependent probability function. Again, go figure!

Systems, pre-human and human, have obviously evolved, and aren't stopping yet. So we ALWAYS have a challenge: to quickly & simple describe the source, the current state and the next-steps of our developing population.

Selecting which of many aggregate, composite steps is THE next systemically adaptive aggregate step, from any given state, is the fun part of existing.

How do we prepare and encourage kids to solve that challenge, and enjoy every part of it?

There are no easy answers, but here are a few observations and thoughts.

Observation. A growing system's net operation can only be described in terms of past/present/emerging dimensions that 99.9% of people never get anywhere near enough practice describing, thinking about or manipulating - in every day activities. Unless, that is, they stay proportionally involved in personal, regional and national policy - and thereby maintain statistically significant practice of democracy.

Observation. A growing human system can only evolve through maintenance of full-group practice/observation/discourse as a navigation process?

Yet what moving target are we chasing, and what changing obstacle course dimensions are we navigating through?

If target-location and obstacle-course-dimensions are both constantly changing ... then there's nothing we can write down fast enough to solve everything.

Therefore our navigation process has to be constantly weighted towards discovery of emerging dimensions of obstacles to navigate or steer past.

Individual organisms initially evolve through natural selection from prior, diverse sets of individuals. Social species also evolve, through natural selection from diverse models, known as cultures, presently organized into nation states.

Ongoing development of each human cultural evolution model is aided by constantly referring to and updating an evolving navigation guide, i.e., from a given culture's net body of cultural knowledge, practices and discourse. To remain relevant, that navigation guide requires continuously interleaved stages of discovery/editing/re-writing - reinitiated in roughly that order. Obviously, the proportion of net group and individual time applied to each interleaved stage must float, as fleeting situations dictate?

Surely that reference model can be absorbed by all ten year old humans. In fact, we can do even better, and it's long past time to do so.

Walter Shewhart famously said (80 years ago!) that "Data is meaningless without context."

Really, Walt didn't go far enough! Our conceptual hole is actually deeper than that.

"Data - and paradigms too - have no enduring relevance, without context path!"

In the end, even redneck stock car racers realize that no one gets brownie points for being #1 in every process that may or may not even be needed in each pit stop. There's a bigger goal - one that requires staging, linking and sequencing of multiple contexts for some longer term purpose.

Our cultural race never ends, and every context is simply a pit stop.

So why do so many preening capitalists strut around bragging about their quarterly results? They're stupid for taking their eyes off our moving, cultural prize. And we're just as stupid, for pausing to watch current capitalists in their mindless action.

Their entire paradigm is only randomly connected to our long term requirements! That's an inescapable corollary to the observation of evolution itself. The unassailable reality is that we are charged with navigating through a "context path" where the details of each and every successive context, as well as their rate of arrival, are entirely unpredictable. We want dynamic cultural options, not just instantaneous, static results! The two vary independently, but one always serves the other.

Results are simply the dimensionless "currency" which we denominate our increasing options with. Today's results are yesterdays loose change, most are soon discarded, and all are soon just incidental to new options.

Results are meaningless without option paths. 

Where can we go from these results?

For every year and every generation of humans, data, paradigms and results will always be meaningless without not only context awareness - or Situational Awareness, if you prefer - but context path.

In short, we remain Context Nomads, migrating between transient contexts. All that's changed is that context change is - for now - no longer dominated by geography, at least not here on planet Earth. Yet the progressions of unpredictable contexts certainly didn't stop. Rather, our awareness of the dimensions of the personal and aggregate context changes we're experiencing have simply lagged.

So what is actually relevant and enduring about all this? Is there anything here that we can use to update and refine our Cultural Navigation Manuals for all 10 year olds?

How about this notion. There is a 3-step challenge that every ten-year old can easily grasp, with only minimal practice, without even bother to call it Set Theory.

Kids in ancient nomad cultures absorbed this lesson effortlessly, before learning to walk. 

You can still quickly demonstrate this to kids in a wide variety of past/present/future, simple card games, to drive the point home.

Challenge Level 1: Gather data and recognize patterns of data that reveal interdependencies in a given context (end of your nose, here & now). Local Survival Navigation in Dimension Level N.

Challenge Level 2: Gather data-pattern harmonics and recognize patterns that reveal process interdependencies (end of your nose, over extended context). Local Survival Navigation In Families of Dimensions.

Challenge Level 3: Gather data-sub-pattern harmonics and recognize sub-patterns that reveal multi-process interdependencies beyond end of your nose, over multiple, successive contexts). Agile, Navigation-Upon-Demand, Through a multi-Context Obstacle Course.

How does complexity of that obstacle course vary? It gets more complex, simply as an exponential function of our own numbers and characteristics AND our own rate of change! Not to mention any outside sources of change. We have to constantly practice, just to stay in the Cultural Game. That's why play behavior is literally EVERYTHING!!! That discussion, however, is for another time.

In the meantime, if those simple challenges can be consolidated into a Culture Cup Challenge that student's can aspire to continuously vie for, surely it would provide a better outlet for growing individual and group intellects than does our present spectrum of competitions for static assets, sex, drugs and rock&roll?

Screw the Sprint Cup, Davis Cup and even the America's Cup! We have bigger cups for our group intellects to pursue! The Adaptive Culture Cup.