Sunday, February 2, 2014

Data-Wise And Context-Foolish, On A Scale More Epic Than Ever Before. The Task of RIGHT-SIZING AGGREGATE CONTEXT-AWARENESS

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




In case you haven't noticed. THE USA WON.

Yet now we're addicted to the form, and have lost track of the function.

The corollary message that this whole Snowden-NSA affair drives home?

The awesome, overwhelming power of the USA.

I don't see how anyone reading the details could conclude anything else except the fact that the US won, hands down, and now has the capacity to easily know & ward off literally every significant challenge occurring anywhere. We can, will and do know seemingly everything about anything ... but nothing about what any of it is for.

The bigger message here is that we don't seem to know what to do with that capacity, and with our victory.

We are actually misusing our victory so badly that we're actively trying to stuff square success into the round jaws of failure.

The only constant seems to be our systemic ineptitude despite overwhelming brilliance in every narrow discipline.

We're simply back to data-wise and context-foolish, on a scale more epic than ever before.

Even though we've been better than this before. 

We obviously couldn't KEEP our better capabilities. You have to conclude that our grandparents would be disappointed, and downright ashamed of us. We're supposed to be better than this, can be, and will. It's only a question of how, and when. Why is not up to us. If we can't regain our adaptive role, someone else will do that TO us.

The ONLY things that we don't over-teach in our schools?

As a start, how about the fact that, by definition, interdependencies between truly novel discoveries cannot be predicted? Certainly not in real time. And, that failing to acknowledge & explore unpredictable inter-dependencies is a guaranteed way to keep interrupting our systemic success? 

We are actively lying to ourselves about the unpredictability of systemic failure. Systemic failure is guaranteed by the unpredictability of emerging interdependencies. We only need to ditch the arrogance that leads us to lie to ourselves about our predictive power ... and then go about the easy task of discovering the awesome interdependencies generated as a totally free byproduct of our narrow discoveries. This is NOT rocket science. It's simple, aggregate practice.

To illustrate the easy part, say three people independently invent a hammer, a metal nail, and a saw. Do we arbitrarily focus on war hammers, nail-bombs and CIA-torture methods - and in keeping others from using hammers, nails & saws? Or do we discover carpentry, house-building, architecture and art - and who knows what else? It's all in our outlook, our ability to parse feedback, and our amount of practice at assessing aggregate outcomes.

WHY are we turning something so easy into something so difficult?

If the NSA can presume to predict the proclivity of oppressed, under-educated people to resent our actions, then they sure as hell COULD also acknowledge, track and report the proclivity of our own sociopaths to presume that they know how to constrain our Aggregate Adaptive Path, by Central Planning!

Further, the NSA's same methods could be re-purposed to Adaptive Use by our full aggregate, to track and assess our electorate's balance of listening over-much to our few sociopaths, versus to our entire aggregate's feedback. 

If we want Democracy, we have to invest in methods to extend and then KEEP it's benefits. That's exactly what we are not doing. Instead, we're investing in keeping admirers in other countries from emulating what we've already achieved. That reduces to investing in our own failure. It's self-assisted suicide policy, and we should outlaw it. Our own adaptive rate is our most valuable moving target, and we've taken our aggregate eye off of that target!

Instead of bothering to attack the NSA and our MICC, let's stop them in their tracks, and repurpose the MICC, just like we did with the banks in 1933. We can repurpose the MICC by gifting them a killer technology called a social mirror (full, aggregate, feedback awareness). Given a mirror, repurposing them will be incidental ... but only if they're forced to actually use our social mirror.

There is, actually, a simple, concluding question to draw attention to.

It's not just continuously right-sizing fiat currency supply that matters to a dynamically changing population.

How does any aggregate Right-Size Aggregate Context-Awareness?

And then continuously KEEP it right-sized, despite unpredictable changes?


3 comments:

Tom Hickey said...

A fundamental difference between Keynesian and neoclassical approaches is logical. One of the most significant logical points that Keynes made was the fact that the fallacy of composition distinguishes micro from macro.

Neoclassical economics assumes that macro is scaled up micro. With this approach awareness of context in terms of wholes is lost. This is the Achilles heel of the US.

On the other hand, China gets it.

Go figure.

Roger Erickson said...

Killer point, Tom.

Perusing our own recent history, of the 20th century, one can't help but wonder if our Luddites were so easily frightened by the experiments in communism that they simply threw out the freedoms of democracy ... as a panic response.

And the rest of our good citizens simply went along, out of complacency.

Fear always drives our worst mistakes?

The combination of fear plus complacency accelerates the tempo of our worst mistakes?

Fear & complacency are the twin tools of a social-immuno-deficiency memirus?

Unpredictable inter-dependencies work in all directions. It's up to us to SELECT which of OUR directions to catalyze with new methods and new tolerance limits.

We can't select if we don't assess.

Ryan Harris said...

China has the opposite problem where government tends to over coordinate and dives head first into solving all social problems to the point of absurdity. They chart a course for the country and anything that doesn't support that course or conflicts gets squashed.

We are sort of the exact opposite and let easily solvable problems fester because abstract models of economics and politics say the problems shouldn't exist or can not be solved.

The effective leaders like FDR or Deng have used their power to raise consciousness about what the source of real problems are and then provide a range of possible solutions. They were somehow able to overcome that fear and complacency to collectively move people enough to change their minds.
A lot of it comes from good story telling, over time, narratives that framed and effected people at an emotional level. Those stories resonated with the nation. The fire side chats were well designed propaganda to help government teach a weary public that helping themselves meant helping each other. Conversely Deng let the "cat" out of the bad that helping yourselves meant helping your nation at a time when that could have you executed.