Is This Possible? Start Continuously Re-Building a "National Map of Vulnerable Processes"

Everyone, and every organization, and every nation would benefit by doing this more formally. (A more organized attempt to "know ourselves" - and keep that profile up to date. That's what dictates cultural adaptive rate.)

That would be 100x more important than only the following.

Hacker Creates Worldwide Map of Vulnerable Devices

Vulnerable equipment? That's certainly important, but it in reality also the least of our worries! There are always options for improving all equipment and all tools. All the hard lessons about system dynamics, however, converge to a simple fact. ADAPTIVE RATE dictates survival, i.e., the methods we use to change any and all equipment, tools, processes and operations in general.

Given hierarchies in systemic organization, i.e., (all linked by diverse operations) ... we are always using countless emerging methods to map diverse operations to emerging context hierarchies. The historical pattern, rarely excepted by surprises, constitutes a design-build hierarchy. Recognize context, then set and achieve major goals (one at a time, in sequence), using context-dictated policies, policy-constrained strategies, and strategy-constrained tactics. Tools and equipment - if not selected per the above hierarchy - can easily become a fatal resource sink.

Context...................O
..................m.........P
Goals............e.........E
..................t..........R
Policies.........h.........A
..................o..........T
Strategies......d..........I
..................s..........O
Tactics.....................N
(tools/equip.)...............S


It is always true that novel options for linking, sequencing and staging net activities (i.e., re-organizing) - are both dominated - AND most threatened - by resiliency issues further up that hierarchy.

After all, thinking organizations are always, via practice, rebuilding the following, iterative mappings.

"National Map of Changing Context"
"National Map of Vulnerable Goals"
"National Map of Vulnerable Policies"
"National Map of Vulnerable Strategies"
"National Map of Vulnerable Tactics"
"National Map of Vulnerable Equipment"
"National Map of Vulnerable Tools"

Out of those mappings comes an always unpredictable list of what has to start changing soonest.
Evolution of complex systems means that survivors are those that are quickest to adequately refine infinitely nested, evolving methods for re-mapping context-navigation operations to changing context.
The iterative stages of evolving faster/better/leaner methods stretches is an unbroken stack, extending from human culture back to enzymes and further back, to the physics of quarks - maybe beyond.

At our level, luckily, we need only focus our attention only on, say, the latest 5 layers of this nested stack of methods. All our tasks are subsumed into a general process of continuously re-building two, inter-dependent and iterative mapping processes:

  semi-static....................... more-dynamic
 "National Map of                     "National Map of
Vulnerable Processes"               Vulnerable Methods"
.................................... (for adjusting any/all processes; on-demand)

Creating those 2, overall maps describes the, often intangible, outcome of OBT&E exercises, aka, effective team building.

It's somewhat chilling that we're still struggling to scalably restate principles that were - at least in context - already obvious over 2000 years ago. Somehow, we're raising citizens that don't practice knowing themselves and their situations, and therefore can't see emerging group options for the spurious details?
I can't imagine what could happen if we changed our training methods, but it gives me the chills just trying to imagine it.

Can we do this? We have so far, for about 3.5 Billion years.  The ONLY thing generating any doubt is us. Luckily, our kids don't even see what the adults have learned to fear.  Our job, mostly, is to not stay in their way too long.

Minimal Planning for Sustainable Organizational Coherence

If anyone thinks any of the discussion raised below is obvious, simple or not needed, one needs only review the ongoing charades over massive financial fraud, political treason, WikiLeaks, Cryptom.org, or Bradley Manning to see how compromised our high level policy processes are.

How does ANY growing organization invent new methods - fast enough - for keeping it's policy staff aligned with "general welfare of a GROWING population" - a task that is increasingly distributed, by definition?

The interests of politicians - or "leaders" of any sort - are FAR too easily diverted by very simplistic, existing methods. Protection & maintenance of their personal needs and pressures are grossly neglected relative to the impact of the national issues they're supposedly shepherding.

We tend to discuss this as personal treason, but a better perspective is that of the group. From a group perspective, leadership treason reflects gross neglect and mal-adaptive group methods which have exposed key people in key positions in key organizations to concentrated pressures. Those are not just stupid mistakes, but ones trivially correctable by groups, given their immense resources.

As an analogy, how does any "immune system" protect it's immune cells from infection by novel agents? How does a commanding CNS protect itself from being hijacked by a virus? How does an organizational culture protect itself from Control Fraud?

The bigger the organization, and the faster the growth, the sooner and easier it is to derail and pervert it from the top.

Ergo, managing organizational risks & uncertainties requires that top-down methods regulation remain top priority, and that such management always use "general welfare of the people" as a constant reference. In all system models of evolutionary Adaptive Rate, maintaining simultaneous diversity and recombinant discovery of options is roughly synonymous with maintaining "general welfare of the people."

If we don't continuously model, test and pay minimal attention to safeguarding the regulatory pressures that "policy-level" staff are subject to ... then we make a mockery of all organizational investments at all subsidiary levels. We may as well invest all national resources in winning an evolutionary race, and then voluntarily give away the victory.

Unfortunately, the following questions are novel for most people. What methods keep emerging, key leaders fully immersed, oriented to and constrained by the general welfare of the people? How do we make policy staff immune to narrow temptations, and instead adequately connected to group, and fully motivated by group outcomes? How do we keep such people from becoming isolated, pressured, misguided, susceptible ... and tempted by things that shouldn't even matter to the group?

More attention to modeling and practicing our own group outcomes-based practice methods?

Practice our own practice methods? You know who's most familiar with that concept? Sports & other team coaches. We really need to discuss running our politics and policy apparatus with the same attention to group outcomes. It obviously matters, more than anything else.

Our Only Real Goal is Operational Agility

In a recent post, Warren Mosler comments on the economic impact of the recent FICA Hike and Sequester.

Warren's terse writing style is sometimes difficult for for beginners to follow, but it provides a very refreshingly different view of policy, showing how much divergence & uncertainty there is between goals, policy, investment strategy, governance tactics ... and unpredictable outcomes. Given that unpredictability, our only real goal is operational agility in realigning our goals, policies, strategies and tactics with ongoing versus preferred outcomes. 

For Pete's sake! We make simple outrageously difficult. Why? Simply for lack of adequate interaction?

This country has far more talent than it marshals to work together. Sequester is a minor issue. Squandering available talent is a far bigger issue. We're not even trying to build a whole greater than the sum of it's parts. Instead, we're hoarding the freaking parts!

We have too many partially blind people all squabbling over their incomplete views. That's reminiscent of a horde of gnats so thick you can't even see the economy they're mobbing. Just a mass of gnats (or piranha?) flopping around this way and that, like a drunken sailor.

Hottest bets in both 'Vegas and Wall St.? Waiting for proof of whether the piranha cloud shows even a semblance of active navigation, or just truly random floundering. 'Vegas and Wall St. are like drunks in an Irish pub, arguing over what will happen at their wake.
If everyone is driven by incentive, and the biggest return - by far - is ALWAYS the return-on-coordination, why don't ALL of us always see that biggest return as the biggest incentive? Simply for lack of adequate interaction?

A brain is not a brain if the neurons aren't all connected to one another. Similarly, group and cultural intelligence is not an impressive intelligence if all people aren't connected to one another, exchanging at least key feedback and iterative discussion.

Did I mention that our only real goal is operational agility? Please. Go practice some random acts of coordination.

Pursuing Coherent Public Purpose, by Summarizing and Extending Evolution, Warfare, C&C, Leadership&Appreciation, OBT&E and ... Whatever's Next

John Boyd's summary of his own journey to summarize these points is a more than adequate, if completely arbitrary, take-off point for our present uses, in our search to extend our own, group aims. Everything a student needs for further evaluation can be easily discovered by searching for commonly known themes mentioned here and in the links provided.

"Organic Design for Command and Control" - by John Boyd
[find in the list at http://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd/ ].

My slight re-wording of Boyd's message is that group "Command & Control" is more usefully described as "Situational Appreciation, and Flexible, Distributed Leadership".

Many have since further summarized the process of actually developing those attributes, in both individuals and groups, as OBT&E: "outcomes based training & education."

Task-Based Organizational Development seems even more obvious. "TBOD"
(TBOD is also, quite conveniently, a pun on a Boydian phrase, "To Be or Do", summarizing the organizational struggle to let component alignment "be" diverted into locally static assets that dissociate organizations, vs actively focus them to "do" what's necessary to evolve endlessly higher levels of dynamic value in organizations, through increased net system liquidity.)

Implicit in either "Situational Appreciation & Flexible, Distributed Leadership" or evolutionary "TBOD" is selection for an unending tuning process, one that continues Adaptive Evolution by accelerating Adaptive Rate.

The conceptual spiral further implicit in driving unending acceleration of Adaptive Rate involves nested methods for tuning successive tuning methods, within a surrounding, changing Options Space. The lessons learned by practioners constantly acclerate agile, implicit distribution of shared lessons from ongoing net outcomes.

Preparing Students to Conceptualize TBOD/GOBOD*, and Thereby Extend Their Capabilities Beyond Prior Group Size Scaling Limits.
Cursory review of past & present & emerging evolutionary history provides some perspective on the nature and axes of our Options Space, and the agility of groups who have operated in that space.

One reference involves energy as a reference for "Resource Taxis" - i.e., the relentless ability to harvest and utilize available energy or resource gradients. We are far from exhausting that organization reference, and hence our own evolution still seems to be dominated by a race to access and utilize continually discovered resources. The guiding "T" or task in TBOD is always to obtain access to additional resources, and the options which manipulation of additional net energy opens up. All of our tasks can be descrimed in terms of optimally growing the options available to context migrants, i.e., as a Traveling Entrepreur Task. *Hence, some may prefer the term GOBOD; Growing-Options-Based Organizational Development.

At this point it may help the typical student to visualize our population as a band of Context Nomads migrating through Options Space, involved in a grand journey demanding constant invention of methods for quickly accessing new Option niches as soon as possible. That exploration process provides an adequately simple world view encompassing all known observations plus a currently adequate framework for enjoying the challenge of exploring it. Disseminating such relaxed, encompassing views among all students would do much to provide the required orientational simplicity and behavioral flexibility that Boyd noted as prerequisites for our continued cultural success.

One immediate consequence of resource access as a dominant orienting feature is establishment of organizational expansion - i.e., sustained teamwork growth - as the still most prominent way to advance along that particular orientation axis.

While continuing this ancient and continuing "Resource-Taxis" race, increasingly capable organizations - i.e., "species" - have appeared, including examples as disparate as quarks, molecules, bacteria and human cultures. It seems that there is always room at the top, and that our most rapidly enlarging evolutionary "front" extends along the resource-harvesting axis. Further, the rate of advance along that axis is dominated by accumulating methods for tuning increasing net capabilities of adapting "species," which keep growing their nested organizational self-tuning capabilities, in the process also branhing out and adding species diversity.

Human culture reached it's organizational zenith in the genius of the incredibly agile, pass-through, tribal structures exhibited by all humans, worldwide. It is easy and fair to say that many of our current organizational problems arise simply because our population numbers have temporarily outrun the limits of exquisitely evolved tribal methodologies. We need new, more scalable, organizational methods - far more than we need more technological tools. We are still producing optional tools and practices faster than we can practice and perfect ways for groups to wield them. To reiterate, we need new methods. Specifically, self-tuning methods that scale better than ever before.

Accelerating Context-Migration by Tuning Organizational Expansion.
To date, additional resource access has been dominated by simultaneous physical expansion and increased organization of systems, leading - in our case - to existing human cultures and nation states. Per the review above, evolution of system-tuning is proceeding along an oblique mapping front. In any given situation, systems manage to grow, by exploring the minimal shared alignment signals that can be disseminated the most widely as the spectrum of cofactors eventually affecting a "tuning polynomial" shared across an increasing number of system components. We solve our toughest tasks soonest by generting more indirection, based on more options, based on increased capabilities and/or population - while struggling to scale organization of the capablities and/or popualation that we need. Success, obviously, requires efforts in an orthogonal direction, one that lowers the time-energy cost of self-organizating on a larger scale.

Given an adequately simple "function" definition for a given species' Tuning Polynomial, then migration of the species or system through Option Space involves exposure to altered situational feedback, and complete freedom for the constantly altered context information to ripple through its intrinsic "tuning polynomial." Each species - including our present US culture - exhibits an intrinsic Tuning Polynomial which itself retains enough recombinant infrastructure at every stage to slowly build up the net variance required to shape the species to any conceivable Options Set it encounters. The Tuning Polynomial infrastructure possessed by different species, of course, bestows a different Adaptive Rate on that particular species, thereby imposing a selection gradient. It is the instrinsic tuning methods which determine rate of generating adaptive outcomes, either adequately, or too late to matter.

Having gone through this example, one might visualize a constantly growing amoeba slowly devouring it's environment, and wondering if there is a limit. Although such a visualization might turn out to be useful, long term, we are so far from detecting any limit to our recombinant Options that our only choice is to continue probing for those limits. We may find them someday, or we may not. We do, however, have to keep going. As always some may not, while others will always continue on. As far as we can tell, it eventually doesn't matter who does or doesn't continue.

Existing Choices. How to enjoy exploring our immediately expanding options.
If our task to explore our expanding Options Space boils down to re-mapping our instantaneous situation and letting the feedback freely ripple through our Tuning Polynomial in any way required, then we must admit, embrace and leverage some simple messages. Our existing "culture" is, quite literally, defined by our Tuning Polynomial, and our cultural Adaptive Rate is quite literally defined as our rate of relaxing barriers and shaping tolerance limits so as to adaptively tune our own Tuning Polynomial. To retune all our disparate interactions to optimal net resource access, we need a pass-through tuning process, not just a pass-through economy. Agile evolution of our culture quite clearly requires infinite flexibility in and freedom to explore all options at all levels, for all fuctioning system components.

It is useful to recast our distributed flexibility task more usefully as an extension of our more general Recombination capabilities. Obviously, dynamic recombination occurs at quantum, atomic, chemical, molecular, genetic, cellular, organ, behavioral, sub-group, regional- and national-cultural levels. Once restated that way it is easier to ask how and why we should restrict some particular recombinant rates while actively pushing to increase others. It's clear that our Adaptive Rate is a function of our "Recombinant Rate Envelope," or the pattern of agile recombination we can generate in response to different situations. In general, there is a view that the rate of chanage of "old" evolutionary infrastructure steps should be gradually reduced and briefly "frozen." For example, a national highway right-of-way system may briefly be as fundamental to national commerce as mitochondrial genetics remains to human cellular biology. Whether roadway surfaces remain concrete or aphalt, or retun to grass may matter less. Similar, there is a view that an entire spectrum of recombinant rates should be present at any time. In human cultures, the rate of change in segments from infrastructure construction, basic R&D and "skunkworks," to active military defense should vary accordingly. Similarly, in human physiologies, the dynamic rate of change in, say, liver cells, germ cells, hyper-mutation zones and immune systems all vary accordingly, at dramatically different rates, all ultimately set by deeply entrained processes built up as the result of past experiences - i.e., our implicit but very real set of system Tuning Polynomials and their recombinant cultual tuning cofactors.

As a national culture, our common "US" job and overwhelming responsibility, is to actively participate in the "TBOD" or "GOBOD" which clearly dominates our common fate. As Boyd and countless others have repeatedly noted, it is laxity in making these simple rules apparent to an adequate proportion of group members that generates the frictions limiting the agility of our group outcomes. To accelerate the rates of tuning our cultural Tuning Polynomial, we have to achieve a shared orientation to that as a task, then share all feedback while exploring optimal ways to continuously tune our own system-tuning challenges. This can be natural, fun, easy and fast, or it can be disjointed, painful, arduous and slow. It's our choice, but ONLY if we actively select to even make a choice! Selection occurs only as a consequence of the will to build Situational Awareness and sense potential.

The typically hidden cultural tuning cofactors governing the actual rate of change are alternately referred to only obliquely and infrequently, if at all. Terms such as the "gearing" or "tendency" or "externalities" of organizations, economies and cultures crop up in the literature, but are certainly not yet widely shared, universally understood nor rapidly disseminated in any coherent manner.

What can we do to continually accelerate achievement of both the "simplicity of orientation" and the "rapid, flexible reponses" that together define rate of progress in our nomadic exploration of Options Space?

For surety, one is forced to advise students to ALWAYS challenge themselves - as a group - to most simply and succinctly summarize both group Situational Awareness and options for full group alignment, in sequence.

An annual National Situational Awareness Challenge might work wonders.
In addition, efforts by responsible "leaders" to study, grasp and continuously better enunciate the benefits of focusing on our greatest adaptive opportunities - simplicity and agility - might do wonders for the USA.

We never need to hear more about what we're doing wrong. The more simply a better way is enunciated, and the more flexible people are about allowing it, the faster everyone drops what they're doing to get on board. No one wants to be wrong, but everyone wants to be right. Keep the door between the two wide open.

However, there is also a caveat. To honestly prepare for unpredictability, we must also acknowledge the possibility of significant, even complete, dead ends in even our most carefully explored plans - and therefore retain complete retreat paths. One can see the overwhelming evidence for this reality in the incredible diversity AND fractious nature of all evolved systems. It is as though evolutionary systems are audacious enough to tackle all options. Yet they are also determined enough that, in the event of complete and absolute initial failure, they will leave some range of recursive seeds in that particular Options Zone, to start from scratch if necessary, before rebuilding success in terms of the unexpected twists in regional options. Relentless is an undeniable feature of adaptive systems that also allow for 100% recursion upon demand. Humans, for example, are quite capable - and half are willing it seems, to return to our stone age (or earlier), seemingly knowing full well that we'll be right back, knocking on the same gate, within 10,000 years - or less. THAT, my friends, defines being relentless. We still can't tell whether we are in an original unbroken or a re-started development process, and it hardly matters now, either way. Further stops and restarts, however, absolutely do matter. As Napoleon noted, we can never recover lost time. At least not in our currently accessible dimensions.

We are driven, therefore, to conclude that Context Nomads exploring Options Space continuously recombine through even increasing dimensions of diversity, starting over where necessary, so as to cover ALL outcomes as the wavefront of Options Exploration proceeds. Thus it frequently occurs that wildly regressed and/or recombinant variants from the same initial stock may eventually meet again, and not recognize one another. Then it is always a question of either recombining the recombinants, to enlarge their net stock of variance, or to proceed with one or the other choice, as the ultimately more flexible and recombinant tool and tool-tuning set. Once conceptualized, avoiding lost time in the recombinant race counts more than any other consideration.

The conclusion of these abstractions is that all imagined outcomes are ok, and we should be comfortable with them. Our ultimate challenge, at present, is therefore to traverse these sub-challenges as graciously and quickly as possible, as abstract but real puzzles, rather than obstinate - and exceedingly wasteful - life or death struggles. It's a constant challenge is to grow out to and occupy our current abstractions.

Enjoyment and Public Purpose as Focusing our Greatest Talents on Our Greatest Opportunities.
Our greatest opportunities are to accelerate net exploration of our expanding options faster/better/cheaper than before. Simultaneously, our greatest talent is our intrinsic ability to be increasingly clever in our nested tuning efforts - in how artfully we recognize, disseminate and collaborate on improving the net system tuning methods which alter our sharable system "gearing." No matter what we do, there is always an even better way that will someday deliver even more options, and we should rejoice in enjoying that challenge, not recoil from it. No matter where and how we wander in Options Space, as Context Nomads, we can enjoy the migration to the fullest of our imagination.

Inter-Nation and inter-group competition as a FEEDBACK-DISCOURSE CONTEST

John Boyd wrote his DESTRUCTION AND CREATION essay after wondering why some people invented novel things like snowmobiles out of spare parts from other devices, while others - notably the typical Pentagon & MICC bureaucrat - remained resistant or hostile to creative thinking.

Boyd's prior background was an early BS degree in economics, a stint as a USAF fighter pilot, a masters degree in Industrial Engineering, then continued USAF fighter-plane design.

After writing the essay about his frustration, he supposedly abandoned all interest in fighter planes, and focused on battling Pentagon bureaucracy from within the Pentagon. He apparently refused association with any non military corporations or think tanks. Boyd also never took steps to organize platforms to further disseminate his own, strong beliefs - e.g., starting any consulting firms, think tanks or foundations.

His essay shows remarkable insight into superficial aspects of systems thinking, yet also mentions nothing about neurophysiology, psychology, sociology or mass education. Hence, it - very curiously - stops short of obvious suggestions for how to initiate and leverage leaner/faster/better tools and practices for optimally maneuvering a large system constantly destabilized by it's own ratio of destruction/creation, and then constantly nudging it even further along adaptive versus mal-adaptive re-organization paths.

Many scientists from other fields would read Boyd's essay and say, "YES. SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT? WHAT ABOUT THE DOMINANT MISMATCH ALLUDED TO, OUR LAGGING RATIO OF DESTROYING OBSOLETE GROUP PATTERNS (BUREAUCRACY) AND CREATING NEW GROUP PATTERNS BASED UPON ONGOING FEEDBACK ABOUT EMERGING GROUP OUTCOMES?"

It's a valid question. So where DO we go from here? Here are some observations and suggestions.

We're dealing now with destruction/creation of group, national and cultural patterns of behavior - i.e., cultural competition.

Cultural discourse is where group-patterns of creation and destruction are embodied. It seems rather obvious that if we don't practice "group practice" itself, then our national ratio of destruction/creation can rapidly slow to a crawl. Any group not actively and continuously re-shaping it's own cultural discourse to optimize group outcomes will, by definition, increase it's probability of dissolution, and increase it's likelihood of failure.

Do we have metrics for adequately conceptualizing, tracking and managing our net, national level of group-discourse? NO.

Do we have ADEQUATE diverse and actively fluctuating platforms for eliciting and intermediating existing public discourse? NO.

Do we have existing models for tracking and managing the number of catalyst platforms necessary for eliciting and accelerating adaptive rates of creation and destruction in our group-discourse patterns? NO!!

John Boyd summarized fighter-plane combat as an energy-maneuverability contest, and he reduced real-time plane performance models first to those component features affecting energy-maneuverability, and secondly to the FastTransients that affected the time required to initiate re-deployment of component features in different combinations and sequences - i.e. the agility of planes and pilots. He apparently stopped after analyzing only the 1st two catalyst levels affecting system outcomes - having already revolutionized a moribund field. Examples of FastTransients for fighter pilots would be low latency servo-motors for wing-flap controls, instead of sluggish and tiring hydraulic controls, as well as the physical agility and decision-making latency of trained pilots. 

Not surprisingly, these general concepts have long been discussed in other fields, in terms of system, species or cultural resiliency, agility, AdaptiveRate, etc, etc, etc. Nevertheless, much of that fragmented discourse is at present walled off in specialized literature, and expressed in jargon not portable across disciplines, nor to the bulk of our electorate - and therefore NOT adequately conceptualized as a whole!

Hence, it might be worthwhile to borrow John Boyd's terminology and describe the outcome-managment for any group contest, from local team tactical-agility to national policy-agility, in simplistic terms similar to those he pioneered while revitalizing air combat modeling and plane design.

International and inter-group competition as a FEEDBACK-DISCOURSE CONTEST.

Group agility determined by constantly mutating and emerging FastTransientPlatforms able to initiate, alter and re-deploy further variants of all existing group-discourse patterns (the secret to OBT&E).

Group "jerk" - the derivative of group agility - is determined by Social Liquidity, allowing steadily increasing diversity of tools and practices from which FastTransientPlatforms may initiate agile selection and re-deployment, in any combination necessary.

Most specialists in various fields may recognize some - but not all - of these highlighted features as crude metaphors for already familiar cultural features, such as markets, market-research services, regulatory agencies, political bodies, sensory systems, integrative systems, motor systems, etc, etc - yet all will find it easy to agree that we lack consensus models allowing agile application of ALL these concepts from all, narrow fields to our general, group agility needs. Without consensus models, large-group agility is difficult to manage and slow to adjust.

The continuous process of tuning both the patterns and latency of nationwide feedback/response cycles constitutes our net Cultural OODA LOOP. Keeping our COODA LOOP inside that of other nations is our goal, so that our survival chances remain in our own hands. If, for “Decide,” we slip in some other letters, to represent, say, "Upscaling, Largescale Decisionmaking," then we have an even more easily recognizable useful, nationwide, COOULDA LOOP. At any instant, our national Output Gap is obviously a function of our COOULDA LOOP, further helping us zero in on lagging Cultural Agility as a direct consequence of lagging CulturalFastTransients and finally lagging Social Liquidity, itself a function of hoarding fiat to excess instead of putting fiat to work. 

We can then end with the not surprising observation that successful cultural innovation rates track the quality of distributed liquidity provisioning.

Once stated, it's clear that we as a nation can easily do this - far better than we've done at any time during the last 67 years. We need only the vision, will and practice to succeed faster. Alternatively, we can simply continue to dissociate further, and let the USA fail at some point, all for want of continuously increasing our group discourse, group direction and group practice.

USING THE SUPPOSEDLY UNEMPLOYED TO TUNE ADAPTATIONS TO THE SINGULARITY

Since we're a remarkably recombinant system, the supposedly unemployed are always employed. We're just not paying them!

And even when we do, we never distribute pay according to what we're actually worth to ourselves!

Otherwise, we'd have no Output Gap! And, HP would always know what HP knows, and be able to act on it with agility!

I'll leave it to astute readers to connect this essay to currency operations. Use your imagination. :)

While swapping some puns about Brits burgering the bovines and politicians - and other puns crossing linguistic as well as semantic borders - we closed with the following question, entirely by happenstance.

"Has our imagination outpun our utility polls?"

While it's total nonsense in one, restricted coordinate system, it's actually crucial to note how and why that last phrase reminded me of something fascinating from my neurophysiology days.

There had been periodic attempts to better discriminate how well inmates fit in insane institutions, using implanted reporters (more on that later) that are, by definition, out of place.

One jarring fact was that all such attempts I'd read about quickly failed.

Invariably, even if sane people tried to act insane, the truly insane people would immediately notice and say "you don't belong here, you're not one of us." I still wonder what that really implies.

We could go many directions from this point, so please entertain this particular direction for as long as it takes. The speed readers who've already left are excused.

What clues were so noticeable in people >2 std deviations apart on diverse sane/insane behavioral distributions? Whatever the defined "distance," and whatever it means, do "insane" people always recognize the "sane," and see paths back to joining them, but just don't find it attractive? Is it only "sane" people that don't get practice recognizing the signposts to infinite flexibility - aka, imagination - and therefore struggle to go back and forth? That brings up the questions of who needs whom, and how much? What's that say about imagination and the art of the possible, versus Luddites and their dull, plodding reality? What's it say about courage versus fear? Does our definition of insanity largely overlap with no fear in exploring imagination, aka boredom and impatience?

And, why have so many sane people - throughout history - made such efforts to be periodically insane? Are all "mind-bending" efforts - whether voluntary or induced - simply a way to accelerate hyper-sampling of pattern-space? Isn't pattern-space, or options-space always our real BattleZone? And isn't controlled, hyper-imagination no different from controlled hyper-mutation?

If so, then adaptive rate of our control systems is rate limiting for our adaptive capabilities. Specifically, adapting our control-initiating steps defines the moment of adaptive jerk - the next derivative of Adaptive Rate. Adaptive outcomes really depend most upon what we still discuss last, the subtle, Fast Transients, catalysts or co-factors, buried n-layers deep in every example of institutional or process momentum. Philosophers noted this hundreds of years ago, and coined the phrase "to know the truth, ask 'why' 5 times."

Why don't our schools train students to look at the source of group momentum, rather than letting them flounder in tactics dictated by previous group momentum? Is it only fear of uncontrolled insanity itself that we have to insanely fear?

To have arrived at current reality proves controlled selection of many prior leaps into what were then fearful unknowns. Yet to go further still is for many still too fearful a leap into the unknown? What have we done wrong? Have we shielded our own students from too much of the history defining their own, social momentum? You'd think that it would be obvious that we can't win by arbitrarily lying to ouselves! Our selections should at least be more adaptive! We absolutely must select vigilance and the selective effort of thinking.  Otherwise, obsolete habits can always be resurrected faster than adaptive habits can be selected. Have we heard that before? Misery loves company?

Why do we both "have" reality and explore it's unpredictability too? If we're going to see further every generation, don't we absolutely need our own, giant, Luddite behavioral patterns, whose lumbering shoulders we stand upon? Don't stop doing #N! Yet do add behavioral component N+1?

That question actually highlights an informally well known paradox in neurophysiology. Humans reason by analogy, or by recognizing the "fit" between patterns in different data sets. Our seemingly innate "logic" = the "wiring" and feedback methods we use for comparing current input patterns to previously stored patterns. Once described that way, it's clear that the same process occurs in all organized systems, whether neuronal or cultural. Deep logic, gut feelings and even cultural responses must, by default, equate to summing nested pattern matches and triggering established network reflexes ... PLUS occasionally accommodating exception handling to parse the next, unpredictable step. How do you construct a pattern-recognition network that is:

1) infinitely scalable, AND
2) fully preserves return-paths (to escape dead ends), AND
3) features exception-handling upon demand, AND
4) always maintains coherence across all nested layers?

Quantal Quip Tunnels, Batman! If you knew the answer, you sure as hell wouldn't bore yourself tinkering with Intelligent Design! Surely you'd just move on?

No wonder all cultures have sought hallucingenic states, from personal to Carnival. They're basically skunkwork imagination zones, where you clear your template matching circuits of any prior restrictions, and briefly widen your exception handling nets. The methods used, of course, may be very crude or very elegant, and vary in both productivity and continuity.

Nevertheless, given that we, individually and culturally, have zero predictive power, what's the ongoing good of all accumulated "method" sets? Granted, they got us here, but they project no further, by definition, or we'd be there - also by definition. Who or what keeps moving our cheese? We just can't tell.  Until we recognize THAT ooda loop, our next step always requires trial and error exploration of exceptions to past rules.

There's a simple rubric to follow. All of our "rules" mattered up to yesterday, but may not get us any further in the next evolutionary step. So which of our thumbs do we choose, as a rule, to be under? "The Credentials are Dead. Long live the Credentials?" Adaptive, real-time, tracking of the unpredictably changing utililty of credentials requires simultaneous delicacy, honesty, humility, courage and patience. At any one time, few seem to possess just the right features needed, which is why we need so many of us, to throw up a reasonable, group approximation within a survivable time window.

Adapting, vs relying on obsolete credentials, requires us to actually think. Accidentally let just a few letters recombine, and "rule of thumb" becomes "rule of dumb." From there it's a short squat to "rule of dumbass." My point in dwelling on this is that rules are absolutely to be used at "home", but NOT necessarily in the "field." In the field, our primary duty is to be on the lookout for the next adaptive exception, and to be ready to quickly find some way to accommodate and use it well! Of course, the changing boundaries of home & field depend on context, including past and future.

If you follow that premise to it's logical conclusion - for now, don't ask why - you get the astounding premise that it may not matter what quantum physics may or may not reveal about reality. In fact, if we can conceive of, or even trigger, the next Big Bang, why would we bother restricting ourselves to just one? Why not just see through whatever allows Big Probability Waves to occur, and move on to yet more topologies? If there's one, then why not an infinite number? Gives one the chills!

If, alternately, you follow you're chillingly illogical imaginations - why not? - then any answer is possible, and available sooner. The suggested answers just may not necessarily come with a pre-defined path from here to a guaranteed adaptive outcome, or they may not come with a guaranteed adaptive outcome attached to interestingly altered methods. That, would, after all, spoil all the fun. It's up to us to have fun, selecting from our insane imaginations. Anything may be possible, if we don't constrain ourselves to any of our previous permutations. Alternatively, we can briefly be someone among the obsolete Luddites, putting 2+2 together and staying put.

It seems clear that exploring combinations in other dimensions can jump-start mapping of unpredictable paths. Are other dimensions simply the emerging interdependencies of existing dimensions? Can realities, therefore always generate as many dimensions as they need, until one, initially subtle, emerging interdependency alters a previous probability constraint, and triggers a cascading phase change in an entire economic system, if not the entire universe?  If so, were those dimensions always always there as sub-threshold interdependencies.  Just as with fiat currency, did it just take us this long to recognize the obvious? That makes both us and the Universe out as Transistors, waiting for perfect timing of the appropriate, weak signal gating wholesale phase changes in systems.  Here's a tipping point: BE THE AGILE WEAK FORCE! :) Just look for the right time and place to casually act.

If recombination is everywhere, does evolution task us with exploring all permutations of our logic base PLUS our imaginative exceptions? The weakest one now can still have a blast?Does that mean that the trick is to accelerate, and even degenerately interleave, exit & re-entry between arbitrarily defined sanity and insanity? LOL! It's not just the meek that will inherit, they'll always be left with an equal population of the uninhibited! :) If not, the meek will - by hypermutation - quickly generate the adequate proportions of insane people that they need, and maintain that dynamic by subsequent culling if necessary. Blessed are the recombinant, for they shall inherit the meek, or whatever's left! Like the proverbial honey badger, the recombinant don't care.

Further, it seems that systems with the highest Adaptive Rate are always degenerately - i.e., simultaneously - sane and insane, the more interleaved the better. We all should recognize that particular Catch-22, and laugh at it! It's actually healthy to have our imaginations, and laugh with them too?  Who knew, except everyone, before the last time we started taking ourselves too seriously again!  Forget the Business Cycle as form over function. It's our scalable cultural-self-awareness cycle that causes far more waste, and slows our Adaptive Rate.

Conclusion?  We'd enjoy amazing success if we stimply started training our students, earlier on, to practice simultaneously co-expanding our recombinant base, our system's sanity, and our system's insanity, by keeping all three processes within unfolding co-tolerance limits. Talk about an awesome tuning puzzle! We can do this, and happily spend the rest of our degenerate lives simultaneously engrossed in it and laughing at it! Capitalism as currently defined will someday be remembered as just a very limited, dead-end diversion.  Instead, just return to enjoying outcomes-based training and education.  There's no mystery is accelerating methods for keeping America abreast of what distributed American's know.  Forget restrictive CopyRight, and enjoy the far higher returns available from distributed AdaptiveRight.

If survival of our grandchildren depends upon the nested pattern-recognition PLUS exception handling that we manage to pass on, then we need methods to scale coherence in a self-adapting, highly degenerate cultural network.  That cultural network already features not only fully interleaved re-combination, but continuously degenerate cultural-embryology to boot! We're simply not allowing it enough time and liquidity to practice teamwork! Can we correct that failing?  CONTINUOUS PIECE OF CONTINUOUSLY EATEN CAKE! :) Is there a Cultural Obstreperatrician in this noisy world, standing by to catch all the recombinant events popping out? :) That's where we'll really need robots, to help us store, hold & parse all our exploding cultural options fast enough, so we can keep surfing our Output Wave. It's either that or wipeout.

Social species and human cultures are just the latest to accelerate this never ending task. Our evolving solutions seem to depend upon constantly redefining the smallest distributed feedback set that simultaneously delivers the most affinity PLUS distributed agility FOR A GIVEN CONTEXT. When discussing the quality of distributed-decision making, the "quality" that we refer to has meaning only relative to some completely dynamic reference. In it's most enduring form, "quality" involves optimally accelerating Adaptive Rate, which implies NOT all the time - only when and as needed. Comically that that depends upon Adaptive Jerks. :)

Our reservoir of insane, adaptive jerks provides us with what we really need, but never want - since it's undefined until it's over - resiliency of distributed-decision making. It all boils down to our skill at knowing when to be more insane. Anyone can act insane, but to trigger, mobilize and align group-insanity to sample more potential solutions to the right problems, at the right time, depends upon sane application of the triggering methods, our forgotten but critical Fast Transients.

So the pain in reign falls mostly on those not insane? Imagine that! If your imagination is agile enough! If not, come back to it after some more practice.

So, our job to have our insanity and select from it too? Then we should be much more agile in selecting whom we lock up and whom we elect as leaders. If we feared our imagination less, we'd swap more prisoners and politicians!

Who knew that managing Distributed Imagination requires the ultimate in tuning distributed tolerance limits? All paths to tomorrow's sanity go through today's insanities? So how do we continuously increase our agility at re-labelling yesterday's insanity as tomorrow's sanity in new dimensions? Only by trial and error exploration of exception handling, and a talent for re-expressing indirection as direction. That always involves inventing newly adaptive coordinate systems for reorganizing existing data sets using constraints imposed by previously weak or unrecognized interdependencies, aka, our new dimensions.

To surivive,we really must return to teaching Situational Awareness and Group Maneuver Context Management in elementary school, by giving students practice learning that EVERY new context demands full attention to full process. Parse the context first, then get data, and only then adjust any altered compartmentalization of as few rules as possible. 

If our electorate learned to approach every situation as a new scavenger hunt, we wouldn't be so easily fooled by changing semantics, changing data, or emerging inter-dependencies. To better train our electorate, we'd need a whole host of parables to deliver recognizable, context-specific meaning to people at all stages of development, in all directions of exploration.

Why not use all the unemployed to help us better co-manage our outdated sanity and insane demand for coordinating our emerging imagination?

Show me a robot who can do that job! The Singularity may turn out to require infinitely flexible distribution of sanity/insanity ratios - which means it will never arrive with a bang, just continue to evolve along with a whimper. If you simply redefine humans as the robots trying to tune ecologies, then the Singularity occurred at least a million years ago, and no one noticed for quite a while! :) Fitting!

As usual, we have a more than adequate distribution of people in insane institutions, collectively voting that it will or won't be different this time. It always is, and such people will always, by definition, constitute a comedic singularity distribution which we can sample and select portals through - at will. Face it, there's ALWAYS been an infinite Singularity. We just keep hopping half way to infinity.

Surf's up Dude!

CURRENCY OPERATIONS AND THE GROUP PSYCHOLOGY of SEMANTIC MOBILIZATION

Without first calling attention to context-dependent semantics, and static-local vs dynamic-aggregate context, it's impossible for a population of our size to have a coherent policy discussion.

Allowing confused semantics in fiscal policy discussions is exactly how we strayed into our current confusion even after initially going off the gold std way back in 1933.

Are you frustrated, wondering why we're reliving a problem we solved in 1933?

Are you also wondering why it's so hard to explain the floating value of fiat currency to people fixated on static, commodity value?

Are you baffled by orthodox economists refusing to discuss fraud?  Or cost-of-coordination?  Or return-on-coordination?   All are truly ancient topics in other disciplines.

Are you becoming aware of the horrifically disorganized semantics displayed in any group discussion of fiscal & monetary policy?

There's no need to feel alone, or to feel frustrated. Sensing and sampling all aspects of a distributed tuning task is simply a prerequisite for solving it. To tune a complex system, the 1st requirement is an adequately broad conceptual model. Otherwise, all efforts will make things worse rather than better - barring blind luck. Can you imagine wasting frustrating days trying to tune an engine by working on one piston, before realizing that there are 8 pistons involved? (Or even 10 or 12?) Imagine radio astronomers trying to tune coherent signals from a large array of receivers.

Our goal is coherent system tuning - not heroic, individual effort.

System tuning is both difficult, & trivially easy. Every sensory system in our body produces coherent signals from large arrays of dumb cells, distributed as sensory receptors, whether tactile, retinal, cochlear, vestibular, taste or smell. Their inter-connectivity wiring just follows some organized principals.

Coherent system tuning depends upon organized campaign design.
A tuning campaign has to first recognize the boundaries of the system to be modified - otherwise the system will respond in ways the campaign couldn't have imagined. Does that sound like the current, degraded state of our politics? There is a better way, so let's look for one.

Let's work backwards through the list above, using the operations of linguistic semantics are a reference point for campaign design.

Campaign design for a growing economy requires Semantic Mobilization.

Since we re-use words & meanings so fluidly, semantic mobilization simply means sharing enough group-wide discourse to know when given semantics apply to what concepts and tasks, local or aggregate-wide.  This isn't rocket surgery.  Shucks, given rational discourse, it's not even taxing! :)

The many inconsistencies producing Sophistry from adaptive semantics are well known, and are frequently mislabeled as mysterious "cognitive biases." In such essays, psychologists note that frequency of so-called cognitive biases correlate weakly with so-called measures of individual intelligence.

Let's ignore the vague definitions of both bias & intelligence. The approach itself is subtly misleading. A core, mal-adaptive mistake occurs in sophistry when broadcaster and audience presume that they're using the same semantic paradigm.

The definition of logic itself is looking for consistency in explaining unpredictable reality. Logic is defined as the reliable mapping of theory to discovered operations. In the process it selects sense from nonsense.

The book "Here's Looking at Euclid" provides a useful lesson, by comparing findings from math & linguistics. One key point is that many if not most "natural" sensory operations parse and encode context by relying upon signal ratios, not absolute calculations based on the arbitrary construct of an equally-spaced measuring systems.   You have to expect that the same, lean signal parsing characteristic occurs for all semantic parsing, not just for number systems.

It all boils down to how our brains actually re-map representations of changing contexts. Given that actual neural networks report on pattern associations as a shortcut to formal calculation, it's easy to postulate that the questioners are the responsible parties when it comes to coherent Q&A.

The whole purpose of language & semantics - and parsing them - is to free us from the tyranny of disorganization, not to see who can confuse whom.

When inconsistencies appear in dialogue, it's because we're so frequently asking context-dependent questions using QUESTIONABLE METRICS, usually in a inappropriate paradigm - i.e., those we were arbitrarily over-trained to use, after someone else developed them for some completely different sub-context. Everywhere you look we have dynamically degenerate semantics - rather like using the same 5-to-7 variable names in every software program you write.

A famous example is the Nobel acceptance speech by Max Planck. He noted that Ludwig Boltzmann was previously aware of the "Boltzmann Const", but that none had bothered to define it's value. Planck went on to derive it's value, in common units, but then went even further. He'd realized that by sampling different, newly defined, scientific units - & plotting the position of the Boltzmann ratio within different coordinate sets - you could make Boltzmann's Const be 1, or any value you wanted. This example is instructive for novices surprised to hear that there's a difference between currency issuers and currency users. Yes, Tommy, data really is meaningless without context.

The more you look at our use of semi-static semantic variables in very dynamic context-space, the more it's apparent that our own semi-static semantics are rate limiting for our own aggregate operations, which are diverse & dynamic.

Amazingly, there are multiple old books on this very topic as well, e.g: "The Tyranny of Words" by Stuart Chase.   He was one of the architects of the FDR New Deal, and realized that much of their policy confusion stemmed from non-scalable semantics. Politics as we know it won't scale simply because it's trying to map semi-static, personal semantics to dynamic, aggregate contexts. Everywhere you look, we need to "dynamically re-define our terms" for multiple, overlapping and changing contexts which can simultaneously scale from local to aggregate-wide.

For a complex system to grow, members eventually have to know their multiple audiences!  Otherwise we never know if we're broadcasting more confusion than clarification.

Ala Max Planck, there's an conclusion here that is completely orthogonal to the paradigm suggested by cognitive psychologists. Smart is a vague term implying hyper-aware context scouts, not dependable, predictable Luddites. A resilient system needs both, just as explorers need a conveniently unchanging foundation to stand upon. Even though there's no consensus, smart people are generally considered to be those with more distributed neural-net mappings & associations. Yes, they're more aware of & hence more easily recruited to subtle or weak associations. The underlying reason, however, is not a mystical "bias." Rather, it's due to the wider breadth and mismatched kinetics of waxing/waning synaptic connection patterns across our huge population of CNS neurons. Similar patterns - though not yet as robust - are expressed in the patterns of discourse expressed nationwide.

Resilient group intelligence gracefully handles semantic exceptions.
Semantic "bugs" in our neural-net operations have been recognized as sophic tricks since the time of Socrates & the Sophists. Adaptive Q&A depends on the distribution & adoption of context-dependent semantics. Managing the utility of that distribution is very similar to appropriately identifying fixed vs dynamic addresses & values in complex software programs. Much information in any optimally engineered system is made implicit by context, thereby achieving substantial resiliency and lower overhead.  In an adaptive race, there has not yet been any escape from the need to engineer in as many - but no more - short cuts & hacks as we can get away with.

At any rate, there's a general solution for people constantly bothered by the sloppiness of translating across old-to-emerging and local-to-aggregate slang & formal semantics. 

If you want an appropriate answer, just rigorously "DEFINE YOUR TERMS" when asking a question which you actually want the answer to.  Otherwise audiences will always answer the first "question" that their context-specific semantic shortcuts indicate to them is the one that you're presumably asking. It's not an inherent bias or stupidity, it's a short cut that gets them through most instances they've encountered, and one that they will continue to use until some out-of-range responses require closer attention. Getting diverse, initial responses from members of a large, diversely bored or engaged audience should never surprise us.

For anyone asking a question, it's a key mistake to presume that the audience is sharing your semantic paradigm. There's many a slip 'twixt the ear & the interpretation, not to mention the calculated implications.

All this still doesn't tell us which came first, psychology of individual stupidity, or the non-scalability of some psychology-specific paradigms. Yet it does make us better aware of the distributed subtlety of our policy context!

For example, for non-psychologists, the article "Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot" needs a more generally useful title. The following seems more useful to a diverse aggregate. "If you ask sloppily phrased questions of audience members from diverse contexts, using questionable semantics, you'll get a broad range of initial answers." However, that title might not sell as many books for psychologists. That brings up the topic of willfully - not just innocently - broken semantics, i.e., Bernays propaganda.

As Max Planck noted, ~100 years ago, parsing & leveraging coherent information exchange depends upon adaptive selection of an optimal coordinate system for signal coding & decoding.

Where does this leave 312 million people trying to seamlessly fuse diverse, developing personal paradigms with an aggregate paradigm that is also dynamic and developing? Hopefully with one, starting reference which we can build upon as a bedrock principle. We're constantly mixing semi-static local semantics AND dynamic aggregate semantics. That's a problem mathematically inherent to every growing network, organization, culture or market economy. By not recognizing and mitigating that cost-of-coordination, we constrain our own rate of mobilization and limit our aggregate coordination. Bypassing our return-on-coordination is the primary cause of our ballooning Output Gap.

We don't have to wring our hands over imagined cognitive biases, or console ourselves that ignorance represents things "no one could have predicted." To reduce our Output Gap, we need to be comfortably aware that diverse semantics is a minor cost of a resilient culture. Comically, psychologists also know this task by another name, the "Fallacy of Composition*," which is more aptly named the "Fallacy of Scale." Nevertheless, more advanced solutions come not from psychology, but from comparing the perspectives of other "uniquely blind" professions groping the same context from different perspectives.

The common solution to selecting group intelligence, avoiding fallacies of scale, and coordinating degenerate semantics is just adequate Open Source information exchange.

For your info, this was & is widely discussed in biology, systems theory & neural/analog network fields too. Consensus is that no component can ever fully sample, know or wield all the knowledge available from it's aggregate. Therefore, "group intelligence" is always held in the body of group-wide discourse, and cannot possibly be expressed by any one citizen or subgroup.

Utility of group discourse is, of course, dependent on group practice, above all else.  If a group doesn't actively probe & explore situation & capabilities, it doesn't sample the possible mappings between the two and doesn't get good at actually doing the mapping.  And it never masters the adaptive use of dynamic semantics.   No practice, no semantic mobilization.
We only have to let American policy sample and know more of what Americans know. Yet tempo counts. Since national intelligence is held in the body of population-wide discourse, it's also clear that our national intelligence can wax and wane very quickly, with changing patterns, extent & sampling of group discourse.  Our group intelligence can also fluctuate regardless of how much insight or knowledge is stockpiled in un-leveragable subsets of the population. Like any other analog network, the genius of a democratic culture is very much a use-it or lose-it talent.

What does this all mean for the semantic mess confusing all discussions of fiscal, monetary and general policy?  Without first calling attention to context-dependent semantics, and static, local vs dynamic, aggregate context, it's impossible to have a coherent policy discussion.  That set-up paves the way for all subsequent discussion.

* example Fallacy of Scale: If one person stands up at a sports stadium, they can get a better view. Ergo, if everyone stands up, they'll ALL get better views! (False)