There's A Very Simple Lesson In All This. Tuning Our Envelope Of All Known Tolerance Limits

Take our embarrassing example of Greece & EuroZone Policy, PLEASE! Before more citizens get lost in the fog of fiscal war.

In other words, how the eurozone helped lead to Greece's crisis.

These are the same people who built CERN?

How did they NOT see this coming? Why aren't Europeans probing the fundamental structure of their own cultural aggregates?

And why are they taking it out on the citizens and plebes of Greece, instead of on their own reckless lenders & profit seekers? And why are citizens & plebes across Europe egging on their own feckless leaders, and encouraging them to flog the neighboring serfs all the harder?

This is the usual plight of people who know more & more about less & less, until they know everything about nothing (especially their own context)

Lissencephalic policy apparatus, convoluted cultural outcome paths.

Or, how flat-earth level, slow witted ideologues produce criminal politics, when allowed to, by citizens acting like innocent bystanders, & pretending not to be active accomplices.

It's only when policy-forming processes are nuanced enough to be adaptive, that culture evolves.

Right now, with so few paying attention to the most simplistic fundamentals of inter-dependencies, our vast stockpile of detailed data sits unattended, as everyone assumes that policy is unimportant enough to leave to the presumed process owners. Whom everyone privately agrees are idiot politicians! Go figure. Denial is perhaps most rampant among PhDs begging the excuse of being "specialists," and thereby absolved from involvement in evolving democracy. You couldn't make this up.

Have data, won't use it to drive aggregate selection. Only nitpicking.

There's a very simple lesson in this.

Recombinant aggregates can't adapt if emerging components don't get emerging feedback & then practice contributing to aggregate selection, early and often enough. There has to be overall tolerance limits for the variance allowed across the entire envelope of tolerance limits (including time constants*) for all aggregate processes.

That's the essence of system tuning, and that's how autocatalysis slowly occurs.

For those who don't understand that paragraph .... here's:

Human Systems for Dummies

1) Recombi-NATION. A human culture or nation is a massively parallel recombinant system (even more so than a forming nervous system or a whole organism growing from an embryo). Well Duh!


2) What is a recombinant system? Recombinant systems "connect everything to everything" and then relax briefly to a selected form, before doing it all again. Again, Duh!
Evolution of species illustrates a steady progression of recombination occurring less stochastically, and more smoothly & continuously. Human culture now recombines by continuous production & education of children, in pre-k & K-12 learning systems, plus a proliferating array of adult "disciplines."


3) Connecting everything to everything, before selecting what form of relaxation is briefly safe. To be blunt, if kids don't get exposed to the entire range of human thought, soon enough & often enough, then aggregate knowledge (context awareness) cannot grow smoothly, and we instead just stockpile data-minus-context in inaccessible journals & other archives.


4) Practicing Aggregate Selection is a group exercise. Our cultures & economies can't meet the challenges of selective pressure if we can't generate adequate adaptive tempo. That only comes with early & frequent practice at addressing whatever the moment-of-selective-pressure is, i.e., our biggest policy challenges. It just never helps enough, to have students tied up for decades paying attention ONLY to trivial errata that rarely, if ever, helps extract context from excessive amounts of data.


5) Tuning our whole system, not just the components. Our culture & economies also can't generate enough adaptive tempo unless we actively involve a threshold level of multi-generational involvement in pressing policy issues. If success means surviving an endless succession of unpredictable challenges in unpredictably transient contexts, then our #1 goal is not to optimize current skills, but to develop education & training systems that maintains adaptive recombination skills and doesn't let them wax & wain with too much variance. We want to survive the hour (or the business quarter, or the budget year), but we want every new ripple of graduates to be able to solve tomorrow's challenges, and we want every new generation to be able to handle the challenges that will come 2 decades out.

Zero predictive power? Seemingly unlimited adaptive power? What would you do? Try to do too much (of the wrong thing) until you're gone? Or, prepare your kids to take over AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, and then ALSO train them to have kids soon enough ... & know how to train the grandchildren to again take over in their turn, as soon as possible? That's how to keep our species ship afloat, and our culture growing.

Term Limits is not enough, by far. We always need an annotated package of Adaptive Limits that includes:

term limits, plus ...
early education minima (mis-education limits),
lifelong exposure to aggregate challenges (mis-exposure limits),
lifelong training & education & work (human mis-allocation limits),
lifelong involvement in policy formation (mis-recombination limits).

This is simple biology-101 and anthropology-101. Every recombinant process on this planet meets that entire envelope of challenges ... or soon disappears from the stage.

Data is meaningless without context. It doesn't matter what we know, only what we know how, and why, to use ... to survive ... in the future, as well as today. We won't get there by knowing more about less, any more than we will by knowing less. Nor by arbitrarily paying attention to less of everything.

Above all else, we need to be agile about what and how we contribute to aggregate selection, and how we train to help our aggregate survive natural selection.

 * A "Hamiltonian" is the presumed equation describing some aspects of a hypothetical system. Similarly, members of any human team or aggregate eventually come to appreciate the critical interplay between the time constants of multiple processes. For some outcome to occur, many different, interacting processes have to occur with some minimal tempo, and deliver local outcomes within some critical period, i.e., with a maximum time constant. This is the basis of orchestral or band music, for example. It would be useful for students to formally grasp this as a named concept and ponder it, from pre-k onwards. The Grumbletonian? :)  Timing of cooperation is an inherent part of cooperation, and something that humans are geniuses at, even as babies - if that talent is developed, rather than neglected. Aggregate tuning is all about reducing NET frictions. Managing that begs for a consensus definition, and delivery of the summary data to track it.

How To Do More Than Just Carp Uselessly From The Sidelines?

Complaints are, after all, an admission of weakness, and an appeal to the admitted victor.

Yes, these types of policy statements are a significant problem, since they attempt to reverse the meaning of insult and reason.

"It's an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the [Assad] regime carried out this [Sarin gas] attack [in Syria]."

Obama address to UN General Assembly, Sept 24, 2013

And it gets worse, now that Obama is roped into talking about the Ukraine.

Time to reassess context? Let's back up to find a point of consensus. We're each bystanders lost somewhere in a rapidly growing culture, wondering how to catalyze Cultural Growth vs terminal mistakes. If answers were easy to find, we wouldn't need to think so hard.

How would YOU best catalyze coordinated growth in a LARGE set of interdependent automata?

So what do we actually DO about this disorganized context we're in, stuck with increasingly inept bureaucracies?

First off, what's the key friction?

My first guess is that there are now too many layers of credibility and missing communication between political offices and the various subsegments or subclasses of an electorate now exceeding 320 million current/emerging voters.

Call it a problem in marketing or propaganda or lack of honesty ... the fact is that it's not currently possible for any politician to convince a majority of the electorate to swallow any one, simplistic story. Using present methods alone, that defines organizational breakdown, and growing incoherence. There a better way, and we have to select it.

Honesty obviously seems like the safest course, but apparently those currently at the top haven't been trained or selected well enough to sense that. Hence we're 

squandering the very strength of a democracy - the ability of the whole to use, better/faster/sooner, a BIGGER PROPORTION of what its distributed components collectively know!

Seriously. What's the wisest way to start or select a reform movement able to chart a survival course that veers away from our current warning signs?

We have some past examples, but they're just that, examples from a different context.

Well before the start of the American Revolution, distributed efforts called "Committees of Correspondence" spontaneously formed, in anticipation of replacing the bureaucracy of Royal dictatorship. That was followed, later on, by the centralized "Federalist Papers," to articulate one focused version of an idea that had already grown to near consensus. Formal political parties didn't even appear until after the Declaration, Revolution, Constitution, and George Washington's first 2 terms in office!

One modest goal at this time? Anticipate 

replacing our current political parties with a more open process that acknowledges, generates, samples and leverages far more distributed feedback ... faster.

Many of my economist friends harp on the vague concept of capitalism being dead. My best interpretation of what they're trying to say is that a strategy of over-reliance on accumulating Static Capital is no longer agile enough, and that steps to even further embrace Dynamic Capital (coordination skills) are long overdue. 

Hoard coordination skills, not static capital?

Yet promoting even such a simple concept doesn't look likely, using ONLY our present institutions. My gut feeling is that, as always, we need a few NEW institutions to rapidly promote growth of methods allowing a bigger Policy Space and more Policy Agility.

When we're continuously tuning complex systems, there's an inevitable string of milestone goals -

finding the next subtle, buried tuning step that unleashes the most additional system agility.

It's all about the indirect subtlety.

Any serious suggestions about the LEAST number of subtle, new institutions to launch? I know that's a lot to ponder, but please comment or write, AFTER sleeping on it awhile.

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.

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?

What Do We Do When We Have This Much Contention At The Highest Levels Of System Governance? ALLEVIATE IT!

Last Friday, I was just at a contentious seminar that turned out to be a model for nearly every systemic policy process underway today.

The forum discussed MICC decision-making & how well it aligns vs ignores critical service demands for CAS (close air support) decision-making.

http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/weapons/2013/a-seminar-on-combat-effectiveness.html

see also http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/weapons/2013/air-force-brass-ignores-wars-lessons.html

The whole event was literally riveting, from start to finish!

Why? Ultimately, for what it revealed about our systemic governance processes, beyond even what it meant for those working with the topic at hand.

There is far, far too much to relate about the content of this forum, but here are two key points that cut through all the other details.

1) A retired AF pilot and officer, Chuck Myers, said the whole concept of CAS had been off-track from it's inception (>85 years ago), and should be re-named as MAS (maneuver-air-support) - to direct all discussion of it to the key concept of net, team agility (i.e., Adaptive Rate). Chuck seemed to be the oldest person present, yet seemed to have the most - and an astounding - grasp of system development, or appreciation for a "system," from tactics all the way up to politics. Yet, his story was one of lifelong frustration. Learning much, and passing on cogent warnings about tragic, unsolved systemic issues. Made me think of a drill-down of Eisenhower's MICC speech.

2) Chuck Myers also related a story from post-WWII, involving a legendary AF Gen he once worked with, Elwood Quesada. Quesada had suggested to the highest levels of DoD command, that AF/Army/Navy/USMC coordinate weapons platform development ... and was told by senior generals that they couldn't do that, since the competing service leaders "are the enemy."

    You can't make this stuff up!

As I understood it, that observation of deep, organizational toxicity occurred before even the Korean War! Worse, it has never been remedied, and persists, magnified, in the highest levels of our cultural policy governance, even today.
  Astounding!

(At this point my mind was already silently screaming to myself: "What about our Goddamn 2-party system - that makes an ongoing art out of having whole swaths of citizens name each other, and each other's representatives, as enemies? And all our isolated, narrow-thinking lobbyist processes? What have we descended into? And what are we going to DO about THAT?)

More direct ruminations triggered by the meeting.

The meeting agenda revolved around the immediate furor over the AF removing the A-10 CAS/MAS airplane from service, and leaving a significant needs-gap with only vague promises that it would or could be filled by alternate means. There were deeply moving testimonies from multiple service veterans documenting that morale suffered from such decision processes, starting with a sense of betrayal, progressing to organizational fatigue, and culminating in performance degradation.

Amazingly, the resulting discussion REPEATEDLY drove home the hierarchy - for systemic success - of people(affinity)/practice/equipment - in that order ... YET, the whole meeting concluded with a question rather than a conclusion: "We've nailed the problem, now what do we do about it?"

That conclusion - or lack of it - was astounding, (for an outsider) since they'd all just finished re-documenting and re-agreeing on the classic solution ... at least at THEIR level. Yet, they COULD NOT, for the life of them, see that the systemic solution was simply a process of extending the "people(affinity)" grouping to the larger set of people that every task-team has to coordinate with every year (in every evolving culture) - as both populations and their layers of organization governance expand!

Restate it this way, as a question. What did pre-homo-sapien species do, as their cell-count and physiological complexity kept evolving (from, say, 1/2 Trillion cells in some small mammal, to the 10X Trillion cells, different cell types, and different organs in the current human physiology)?

Answer: First off, all the human cell numbers in our body maintain their total group affinity, above all else, as they grow from one egg cell to the 10X Trillion cells in an adult.

System growth simply cannot outgrow it's methods for maintaining affinity and hence it's motivation for "inter-service coordination" among ALL system components.

It's either a system ... or it's a mob in some grade of civil war.

With system expansion, every (seemingly) intractable system-organization task has a solution, and that solution involves adding yet another layer of indirection - to maintain first affinity, and then coordination? Ya think?

In other words, systems evolve by coordinating on a larger scale. Success is DEFINED as reaping the astounding return-on-coordination.

That dynamic at the meeting was, for a systems scientist, simply astounding to see, and experience, and to see ignored and missed once again!

To me, it seemed to be a system not hearing feedback from it's own new trees, simply because of the increased size of today's forest. They were missing their own, self-evident solution once again, and snatching defeat from their own, migrating, jaws of victory. The bigger problem - overall - seemed to be the task of expanding our electorate's perception - situational awareness - as fast as our own, bureaucratic situations expand.

The pace of the meeting was so quick that I never could get a comment in. There were always too many people with uniforms or urgent testimony to give - all dotting more "i's" and crossing more "t's" in the sympony which the chorus was preaching to itself. That's exactly what made the meeting so riveting, and yet we simply ran out of time to discuss what to do next. But I did get to talk with a few people afterwards, and think I have a follow-up path to try to help this critical effort along.

After all, if this group - who are SO close to perfecting continuously developing methods - can't be helped to take another step, then what hope is there for all our other sectors, who haven't accumulated anywhere near as much experience at actually having to make complex social-systems work? Those would be our other congressional/industry/agency/professional complexes.

That question stuck in my mind all weekend, and I woke up Sunday morning with an epiphany ... that surviving, agile systems are those that select for feedback loops operating with at 3, parallel, time constants (an old observation in biology; that there are always AT LEAST immediate, medium and long-term response mechanisms at work, EVERYWHERE you look, involved in every process).

My epiphany was that, in human-team terms, one can say it this way:

"Leaders" save the butts of adult groups in critical situations - immediate term.

"Teachers" train adolescent groups to handle newly discovered, critical situations - medium term.

"Parents" are always adding subtle new wrinkles, preparing developing groups to avoid getting deep into whole new patterns of critical situations (prevention through early intervention, as an improved form of "steering"). Long term adaptation.

Amazingly, military science has long recognized a parallel observation (but failed to adequately apply it to their own, personnel systems?). Their counterpart of this same observation is called the "3ɪˈs" of contingency management.

That is, deal with impact/interception/instigators[causality]. Military teaching also states that if you don't manage all 3 processes in parallel, that you can't win. Right?

So, an obvious question arises. Can we continuously adapt if we don't apply the same logic to our own, system development processes?

Isn't that how we avoid developing views which lead us to disastrously label our own team members as our enemies? For Kilroy's sake! Why is that NOT our #1 priority?

The "3ɪˈs" of managing the parallel contingency of our own, changing, internal systems ... are:

total team performance (self-leadership), 

total team training,  

total team gestation (cultural development).

What's that old saying?

If war is too important to leave to the generals, then surely EVERY process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners?

That lesson quite obviously holds for owners/managers of whole systems too.

It's fatally erroneous to presume that processes AND WHOLE SYSTEMS (including ourselves and our institutions) are permanent, and not transient.

   *****

ps: Someone also just sent me a reminder of a similar issue, currently in the news.

"The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Committee investigated until 1978 and issued its final report, and concluded that Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_Assassinations

Tactically, it no longer matters whether JFK's death was or wasn't conspiracy by whichever particular people who saw him as "the enemy." It DOES matter that we have no systemic method for dealing with this taboo subject - in a timely manner - at ALL levels of our current culture. The perennial questions are - where can we get to from HERE, where we currently are, and how soon?

The claim is that some of our own people in high-level governance positions came to view Pres. JF Kennedy and Senator RF Kennedy as "the enemy?"

Again. For Kilroy's sake! If we can't quit targeting ourselves, then how can we focus, as a team, on external challenges and explore our own, emerging options? If the return-on-coordination is always the highest return, by far, then how do we keep our eyes on that, instead of lesser, goals?

If the lesser goals are below us, then we really have seen the enemy, and it really is true that "he is us." Therefore, our chief task is selection, and eliminating those process attributes that hinder team coordination. Those friction-generating sub-processes are our biggest enemy. We just have to train ourselves to recognize "them" as we keep spawning their child-processes, in every new thing we add.

It's a process of selectively pruning the high-friction parts of all the new activities which we constantly sow amongst ourselves?  Ya think?

There's no reason why we can't be better "parents" for our evolving culture - as well as leaders and teachers - of our existing electorate. We just have to teach appreciation for our own systems ... and their evolution ... to every student by, say, 5th grade. (Or, make that age 10, if we're already going back to self-directed, Open Source, education.)

That doesn't sound like a difficult task at all. These are simple concepts. We just need to apply them more systemically.

A Thinking Electorate Capable of SELECTING A Thinking Policy Staff? Why A Liver Cell Doesn't "Retire" On It's Own.

We are now deluged with discussion of "retirement" as a personal, not a national concept.

Let's put things in perspective. The best security for an aging, human atom is to establish and help maintain coordination among the 10x Trillion atoms inside a typical human cell.

The best security for an aging liver cell is to help establish and help maintain coordination among the 10xTrillion cells and ~60 organs making up the typical human physiology.

The same holds for any single person among the ~320 million residents inside the USA.

How do WE organize on a bigger scale? What are the unimaginable returns we could reap if we'd just all work together? We have a long way to go to match previous organizational achievements. We're not even getting started, folks. Could we stop this evolving train, even if we wanted to?

Thinking ONLY as isolated individuals is obviously not the solution.

This is NOT a difficult concept to comprehend. Life-cycle utilization of aging components in an organized, GROWING AND EVOLVING system is a trivial task - IF all components just work together. Teamwork makes progress and growth incredibly easy for team members. That's why "social" atoms, molecules, cells and species evolved, and why teams work. Call it the return-on-coordination.

The opposite - team members ONLY parasitizing one another - only leads to dissolution of teams and nations, and loss of the original return on coordination - which is the highest return, BY FAR. This is 2nd nature to all kids converging on a playground, or huddling around a game. What are we doing to remove it by the time they're adults? Our real goal is to drive adaptive SELECTION at all levels, from local to national ... and then to mold mold them into NET, not random, adaptive selection. That requires a lot of connections and interactions. More than none, and less than too many. But how many in any given context? There's no pat answer, other than "just enough," but working teams can easily figure that out on a daily basis, if they try. Even large electorates can do this easily, but only if they at least try.

What happened to our founders original goal of a thinking electorate capable of selecting a thinking policy staff?

Instead, we're faced with with a flood of randomly distracting messages, like the following.

Every $5 worth of food stamps generates $9 back into the economy.

Seems to me that the whole article falls into the trap of being confused, divided & conquered, by unnamed opponents who are getting us to promote our own demise. Those opponents might even be ourselves, purely by accident! For Pete's sake! Instead of being distracted, divided and conquered by the mass of disorienting details in this story, please briefly ignore those details, and instead ask a simple question about context.

What Desired Outcome is this discussion implicitly embracing?

A strategy for an undefined SOME of us, to live off a "stabilized" serf class?

The whole discussion drifts towards an abstract view the US Middle Class as a commodity, somewhat like cattle on their way from Kansas stockyards. However, the new slaughterhouses are on Wall St., not in Chicago.

Why is this even happening? Where does this view come from? Partly because of the highly publicized - and highly abstract - economist's myth of "equilibrium" in an evolving system?

Doesn't that make you wonder who finds it convenient to SELECT economists who spout such nonsense? When all you have is a parasitic ... er, aristocratic outlook, every policy question looks like a question of ruling? By idiosyncratic Central Planning? Regardless of whether the commodity SOME have targeted for domestication involves sheep, cattle, serfs or even our former Middle Class?

For us "commodities," it doesn't matter whether we were targeted innocently or purposefully by those who think they are destined to rule. Either way, we need to refuse to go on the journey to the financial slaughterhouse others have selected for us. Stop cooperating with those targeting you, and start playing team ball with YOUR teammates in the former Middle Class.

That's how we can ALL retire while seamlessly rebuilding, not looting, our nation, and enjoy every step of that journey too.

The whole failure of Central Planning is that the perspective from yesterday's context is never sufficient to avoid mistakes in tomorrow's, bigger context. Only with constantly increasing perspective can further adjustments continue, sooner, rather than later. Adaptive adjustments are those based on expanding perspective. All other team adjustments - individual or group - tend, by definition, to be random actions, mostly maladaptive.

So why are we still drifting back to Central Planning, this time under the guise of capitalism? We can't see the context for all the fees we're charging one another?

There is a better way. We have the tools of democracy. Let's just use them. Once perspectives are broadened and stimulated to at least LOOK at our constantly changing and EXPANDING context, an element of doubt is possible. Those doubts about how we're navigating through a CHANGING situation are the only thing that keep any evolving system alive.

Without an adequate fraction of nagging doubt about all actions AND their growing connectivity, we don't re-examine our increasingly complex systems.

And if we don't re-examine emerging outcomes, and actually assess what we're seeing? Well, then don't be surprised if outcomes don't steer towards what YOU recognize as survival - for you, your kids, your neighborhood or your entire nation.

That's how we end up even dwelling - so much - on the occurrence of mal-adaptive things that clearly have no public purpose.

Take the following series, as another complement to Bill Black's scathing review of banksters, their lobbyists, and the "policy staff" which "we" SELECT to let them buy.

How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part I in a Series

How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part II in a Series

How To Steal A Lot Of Money (Part III In A Series)

How many ignored messages DOES it actually take, to make the US electorate actually wake up and re-examine what they really want?

Not mention their actual process for SELECTING their own, national policies that steer us to those outcomes?

Nor our methods for SELECTING the policy staff they task with delivering those Desired Outcomes.

The ball is distributed all over our court. We have 320 million players on our team. Can we organize this team to achieve what we want to achieve? How soon can we mobilize to do that? Before it's too late?

Needed, investment in info-channels to tune return-on-coordination.

Sanjeev Kulkarni emailed some comments about viewing multiple nations as an organized eco-system.  That, of course, weakly implies that each given nation is an organized eco-system.  How organized is our nation?  Are we being everything we could be?  Or are we fat, sick, drunk & passed out on the curb?  If we're somewhere in between those tolerance limits, which are we closer to? These questions open up a bigger can of worms, and unleash queries which span bacteria, amoeba, social insects, and humans.  No worthwhile question is easily answered, so, I'm going to query multiple disciplines for some perspective.

Why fuse input from different disciplines?  Because too much of academia has become academic, and the potential relevance of channel-specific insights is no longer propagating quickly enough to the cultural power zones where our moment-of-adaptation is actually held hostage.  Those power zones include lobbies, industrial & business centers, and our Fed/state/local congresses.  Outside those zones, we have backlogs of both data and knowledge building up, in info-channels choked by sclerosis.  Luckily, we have other adaptive power zones, being held in reserve.  Why are we waiting to access our adaptive reserves?  And what, exactly, could we be doing to unleash them sooner rather than later?

The core task is to drive organization on a larger scale, and mobilization rates as well.  Solving that task depends on key methods, not just desire.  For us, most roads affecting this outcome quickly lead to the practice, training & education our electorate receives, so let's just jump to that part.

So far, efforts to improve modern education inevitably push too much, overly fragmented, information into increasingly uncoordinated info-channels.

We've known this for a long time.  And that sentiment led us to define the "liberal arts" education.  Unfortunately, our methodology hasn't scaled up very well, and is now a rather neglected topic.  Our own educators school graduates are no longer palpably aware of the following insight.

"There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live."    John Adams

Or, just fuse the diverse, education channels, sooner?   That necessity of that fusion is implicit in all prior aggregates, from before bacteria evolved all the way up to human tribal cultures.  In prior examples, info-channel fusion is mediated through direct, inter-component or inter-personal connectivity methods.

How do other, model systems, eventually coordinate the increasing scale of emerging behaviors spawned by their own adaptation rates?   That process eventually creates new species, but since methods drive results, it's the adaptive methods we're interested in, so that we can use those examples to re-examine our own adaptive methods, or lack of.

To scale up larger populations, any aggregate has to constantly titrate how little key info must be distributed in interleaved channels, in order to reap return on coordination.  The complexity of that map-reduce fusion task quickly scales up to, and beyond, the complexity of thermodynamic statistics within & between channels in an organized aggregate.  It's awesome to imagine, yet we have to tune it even further.

Any ideas? :)

Adaptive tuning of complex systems obviously happens, yet mostly by distributed trial & error.  We can't personally tune our national outcome in realtime, but we can tinker with all the channel processes, wait for the distributed feedback, and then parse it.

To analyze & use that trial & delayed error reporting, no matter how distributed, one suggestion is that we need a core matrix of aggregate "Welfare of the People" signals.   A background hum, so to speak, that unsettles us when it dwindles.   It equates to maintaining homeostasis.  In your own body, for example, no part can survive without the others, and a spectrum of signals are used - in any combination - to trigger homeostasis-preserving behaviors.  Yet in a scaling national culture, we're never completely free from the idea that some subgroup can strike out on their own as a colony somewhere else.  That's fine, but we've let that dissociated thinking get out of hand, expressed as rampant social disparity.  The outcome is a sum acting as less, rather than more than the sum of it's parts, and an astoundingly large Output Gap.

Is aggregate awareness of our Output Gap just another info-channel to manage?  Is that awareness very different from whatever is internally perceived when a honeybee colony reaches a crescendo and decides to swarm?  Point is that bee colonies do this in a reserved, organized way.  If they all go their own way too soon, they all die.

In honeybee colonies, there are subtle sub-processes which drive worker-behavior to compete with queen-behavior.  In good times, the workers induce & nurture new queen larvae & let 'em hatch.  They may even let the old queen kill most of them (how selectively?) but not all.    What subtle process titrates the workers to scale queen protection until the ONE colonist-queen (or a few competitors) is chosen & kept alive?   They may also quit feeding the old queen, so she slims down enough to fly.  (Is that the core reason the "ruler" leaves?  Just to escape starvation?)

In what at first seems a surprise twist to us, it's the old queen & experienced workers that set out to form a colony somewhere else.   That leaves an inheritance to the inexperienced young'uns, in a method that works well for bees.  Back in the original hive, there may or may not be a succession-fight.  How much input do the workers exert on who becomes the next queen?  Do they have a strong union, called the Wobblies? :)

Researchers like Tom Seeley may be able to tell us something about the molecular or hormonal substrates that allow different bees species to manage the particular info-channels that sum to trigger swarm behavior.  It would be particularly interesting to know the degrees of freedom governing interactions between info-channels.  What varies across the bee species which can support markedly different maximum hive sizes yet still express colonizing swarm behavior?  Much is context-specific, but there's also inter-species variance.

  Meanwhile, the way Americans scale up exploration of our own, emerging options is largely based upon completely different methods, although the outcome is recognizably similar.  Even the US Constitution does not deliver the tight organization of a bee colony, where there are few, if any, analogies to unemployment and/or economic disparity.  As with honeybees, much of our organizational state is highly context-specific, but there are obviously extreme differences in the methods supporting organization in bees & humans.  As far as I know, disparity in native bee populations is expressed largely between hives, not within.  Also, I've never heard of immigration/emigration between hives, other than total war (are foreign drones allowed into other hives to feed?).  Mammals generally allow more degrees of freedom in how Romeo & Juliet find one another.

Far as I know, there's no example of diverse bee colonies fusing to create empires.   That level of organization is beyond them, so far.   Humans are organizing on a greater scale, but we're still VERY inefficient at it, and obviously still working out the kinks.

The social amoeba Dichtyostelia provide a remarkably pertinent analogy for fusing & dissolving human lineages into and out of culture.

Nevertheless, we don't seem to have any human institutions capable of accelerating adequately distributed awareness of lessons from other model species as warning examples, or at least not fast enough.

The main point is that we don't need answers to these questions to ONLY be published for academic credit.  We need emerging methodological options to be practiced & explored - at faster tempo - in our state & federal Congresses, or in indirect practices which bypass our existing Congresses.

We need academia to be more relevant, and less academic.  That's obvious.

How?  Why don't we have more academics studying how to be less academic?  Or more entrepreneurs providing that service to academics, faster?

We may need to spawn more info-coordinating channels, ones that cross all existing channels, akin to agile standards groups.   An interesting prototype was the German General Staff, which was remarkably effective - and an early prototype for Open Source as a cultural method, not an abstract philosophy.  Ironically, the concept of a novel, "General Staff" parallel to existing info-channels, was first undermined by the 1919 Economic Consequences of the Peace, then later destroyed by the Nazis, and finally ostracized by the winning Allies, simply by association with the losing "Germans" triggered by the allies as an Economic Consequences of the Peace.  Go figure.   Why does it often seem that a highly adaptive emerging regulatory option is universally opposed - via a mal-adaptive selection process - by the very institutions which would thereby be saved from themselves?    The Economic Consequences of the Peace occurred precisely because an aggregate was not listening to it's own, emerging info-channels!

It seems that every example of organizing on a larger scale requires an emerging information channel specifically for selecting from the emerging, indirect options being spawned.    That task is palpable in, say, software programming.  It's recognized that every insurmountable programming task has a solution, and that the solution always involves another level of indirection.

Yet individual or even team programming doesn't compare to the complexity of market or cultural adaptive rate.   Our nation spawns indirect options at a rate at least exponential to our population growth.   How do we create - quickly enough - specific info-coordinating channels allowing us to select net-adaptation from all the emerging options being explored?   That sounds like a tongue twister, and it is.  We've been solving this problem for 3.5 billion years, at least.  How do we accelerate that process, from our current context?

Anything less is pathetically boring in comparison.

We can obviously do this.  First step is to describe the spectrum of emerging tasks in existing hieroglyphics.  Next step is to crowd-source efficient expression of the leanest, adaptive re-statement of that task, by a process of distributed trial & error.

To love your kids, you have to first love the future.   If you love the future, you have to let it go be distributed, by indirect paths.   Then you have to accelerate it's distribution, with a nudge out the door.

To paraphrase Darwin and Boltzmann, as well as the USMC:
Adaptive survival follows the quality and pace of distributed decision-making.
and ...
"We generate pace by decentralizing decision-making."
To which I'll add:
To prepare for the future, openly accelerate our distribution of adaptive preparations.
To have co-citizens, you have to be one.   To help tune, you have to be tuned.

To help tune an aggregate, faster/cheaper/better, you have to invest in tuning instrumentation.  Right now, the moment of aggregate tuning in our nation appears to be hovering over Open Source methods.  We need to extend those methods faster/cheaper/better, to more info-channels.   To reap the insanely large margins from return on coordination, we have to write off the relatively negligible cost of coordination.