Wednesday, July 22, 2015

How Banal The Sum Of The Last 60 Years Is! Have Solutions, Won't Deploy Them.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)
See the context of this article, and then the killer comment about Kenneth Boulding.

RGE: "Anyone paying attention in anthropology-101 or biology-101 would have told you Graeber was right, before he had to document the obvious & well known, for unlearned audiences. [Reality is still ignored by most, no matter how well known by a few. That's why academia is largely academic.]" 
TH: "This is the great weakness of disciplinary education as a model. It breaks the wholeness analytically and never repairs it synthetically.

The world badly needs a meta-disciplinary model based on general systems theory.
This is why Kenneth Boulding switched out of economics and into general systems theory [GST] as one of the co-founders. He was somewhat of a precursor of MMT, btw, and Randy has written about him."

Great point, Tom. Couldn't agree more, though we might have different view on some aspects of deployment timing.

It's not clear that the entire world is ready for GST, any more than Europe is ready for the euro, but economics and several other social sciences certainly are!

Why aren't some disciplines ready, while some are? Simply put, GST became trivially not-helpful to the mass of specific researchers (because vague concepts like aggregate adaptation & macro economics are not ready to be fused with physics), yet something analogous to GST should STILL replace macro economics .... if there is still any intelligent life to be found in that discipline.

GST, stripped of over-promises to physics/chemistry/biology/etc, should be tremendously useful for universities seeking to fuse English/Philosophy/Anthropology/etc into a standardized form of "Liberal Arts" and "Social Sciences."

AMO?  For "adaptively modified academia?"

In fact, SETI should turn it's attention to helping to vet economic faculty & students - not to mention politicians! :)

Further, both GST and MMT absolutely must drop the trailing T as inappropriate. Replace it with an O.

General Systems Operations (or just call it culture).
Modern Monetary Operations (just fold it into general operations).

And where does this lead us? To how banal the sum of the last 60 years is!

All the sturm & drang of politics, policy & academic revolutions comes down to the pathetically slow metamorphoses of human cultural aggregates recombining minor components into new forms for new needs.

Yes, Maude, it really is that mundane.

What does it take to just do the obviously necessary, sooner? Perspective, mostly.

Aggregates fusing academic disciplines (or repurposing entire workforces) is as trivial as an individual combining shoelaces with shoes - or quickly taping 2 things together with duct tape, before rigging more permanent solutions. It could and should happen dynamically and without discussion ... and rapidly! That's what Cultural Adaptive Rate is all about. Adjusting and tuning.

Mostly, it's about redirecting preserved hoarding instincts, from local hoarding of tangible assets ... to distributed hoarding of coordination skills.

Hoarders of institutional momentum are terrified by change, while leaders & evolvers are not. In the end, surviving social species must RAPIDLY scavenge and re-purpose their own Luddites, in order to compete with the other social species that do so.

Nevertheless, we're on the same path as the first social species that evolved. Today we're just traversing trivially different contexts, at yet another scale.

We have met the enemy of autocatalysis, and he is us. "We" are both the sum of all, tangential, institutional [phenotypic] momentum ... and the pending adjustments too. It never ends.

Whatever.

We're now back to this.

  Methods drive results,
    Which demand reassessment of Desired Outcomes,
      Which drive coordinated actions,
        Which drive interactions,
          Which drive awareness,
            Which drive selection of new methods ....

A circle has no start and no end. You can come at this from anywhere and find ways to catalyze it further.

And an aggregate this big has members starting at every possible point, simultaneously & continuously. That's true for all recombinant systems.

So we're back to the obvious ... that we face an arduous, escalating tuning task (return on ever-scaling coordination) that will never end, as far as we can tell. So why isn't that reality the #1, consistent message throughout ALL forms of education & training, at all levels?

Again, don't ask me, ask your mirror.


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