Education versus guilds

This page describes the organizational forces that limit change. It explains how to overcome them when necessary.

This page uses an example to illustrate how:

A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence.
A program approach can ensure strategic alignment.

This page uses the example of HP's printer organization freeing itself from its organizational constraints to sell a printer targeted at the IBM pc user.
The constraints are described.
The techniques to overcome them are implied.

We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna. As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend them. So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS): Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class. The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched. The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift. Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did. Geisinger is an example of better solution. But transforming the whole network is a challenge. And public health investment has proved far more beneficial. Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system. Better alternatives have emerged. Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material. The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development; It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why. Example systems frame
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these systems can have disastrous consequences for their human managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage CAS, Dorner recommends use of: Effective iterative planning and Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he reviews. Complexity catastrophes
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. Adaptive ecology
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and energy goals. US vds alignment
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their successful strategy used the credibility of conservative religious leaders to: Demonstrate religious issues with the New Deal. Integrate the corporate elite and evangelicals. Use the power of corporate advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American people to view the US as historically religious and the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious socialism. Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham. Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower. Add religious elements to mainstream American symbols: money, pledge; Push for prayer in public school Push Congress to promote prayer Make elections more about religious positions. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends on persistence. Inventing Christian America
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation: Junk bonds, Derivative deregulation, CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud, Financial network deregulation, Financial network consolidation, Short term incentives Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged. The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics. He sees the result being a rigged system. Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. Financial WMD
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic alignment of the American justice system. The result he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to extract profits and leave the victim deflated. Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the: activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes, prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are: Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to win. Aligned justice
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of staff. Mechanics of power
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and libertarianism. Libertarianism
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs. He promotes strategies that help OKR success: Focus, Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance reviews, and provides illustrative success stories. Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's view that employees are adaptive and will respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture is tailored for the startups KPCB invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the association to planning. Startup PDCA
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces including famine and oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured that thoughtful leaders were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the crisis. Voltaire's disruptive network
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges during the enlightenment. It was a poem encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a humanist book hunter. Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the foundation of the modern world. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms are discussed. Constraining happiness
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of web services to explore Ada Lovelace's ideas about thinking machines and poetic science. He highlights the value of computer augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to fulfill the process. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and collaboration are discussed. Arts technology & intelligence
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the potential and challenges of associative neural networks. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that Haikonen's neural architecture, Smiley's Copycat architecture and molecular biology's intracellular architecture leverage the same associative properties. Associatively integrated robots
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented. Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS). Developing ideas
A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks: The evolving global scientific network. The Bell telephone network. And The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. Strategic innovation
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory and reviewed. BREXIT
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are monopolists that trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle class. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS). While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts with relevant CAS history and theory. Monopoly job killers
The IPO of Netscape is defined as the key emergent event of the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. New economy
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy. It was enabled by the experience of Keynes and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard, the necessity of improving the situation between the wars and the opportunity created by the catastrophe of the Second World War. He describes how it was planned and developed. How it emerged from the summit. And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy. Like all plans there are mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as best it could. And then Conway describes the period after Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed and also compares the relative performance of the various periods before during and after Bretton Woods. Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS) theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier. He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and against the development and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a key piece of the history of our global economic CAS. Bretton woods
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008 housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential mortgage value delivery system (VDS) by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst. Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. Housing amplifiers
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives system. Das describes the components of the value delivery system and the key transactions. He demonstrates how the system interacted with emerging economies expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. Derivative systems
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the eighteenth century administrations of England and France. The US embodies two different political and economic systems which approach the national debt differently: Taxes to support a sinking fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in: Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social programs; Starting with Hamilton, Lincoln & Chase, Wilson, FDR; Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison, Reagan, George W. Bush (Gingrich); Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US government does. They argue that the conflicting sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in the middle' with a future problem. And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the future. They conclude the question is still political. They hope it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed explanations. They ask who is willing to push all the coming risk onto individuals. Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery system, key CAS features are highlighted. National debt
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second industrial revolution were the foundation for American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people into difficult rural America built a population base which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets, Clothes in department stores; that supported increasing productivity and standard of living. The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities; terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow the economy. Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of: Communications and advertising Credit and finance Public health and the health care network Health insurance Education Social and welfare services Counter intuitively the constraints introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2 provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970 creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post war America. Subsequently the rate of growth was limited until the shift of women into the workplace and the full networking of voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were muted by the narrow reach of the technologies. The development of Big Data, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth, but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of the middle class. Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. American growth
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of money based on the attractive features of precious metals. He compares the potential for government edicts to create money but sees them as lacking. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts. Government backed promissory notes are analogous to: Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy transaction intermediates and Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in supporting survival and replication in the currently accessible niches. Emergence of money
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do this he replaces traditional economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an economy is a system in equilibrium, with complexity economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex adaptive system (CAS). He introduces Sugerscape to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics, Agents, Networks, Emergence, and Evolution. Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces map strategies to instances of physical and social technologies. And he identifies the interactors and selection mechanism of economic evolution. This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition of wealth. In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance, & Politics & Policy. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we leverage. Economic complexity
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land and labor to work it including slaves. He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages and the ways found to mobilize industrial labor. Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected. Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when the US civil war blocked access to the major production nodes in the American Deep South the CAS began adapting. Beckert describes the global reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation states. Beckert explains how other countries responded by copying the colonial strategies and creating the opportunities for future armed conflict among the original colonialists and the new upstarts. Completing the adaptive shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in the colonized global south and how over time they joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers, spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each other on cost. Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of disconnected peasant farmers, pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over time: of military force, global transportation and communication networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows, models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. The emergent system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic alignment. Globalization from cotton
The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The network: Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without. The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network. The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters; Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse; Globalization connects disparate environments in a network. At the edges, humans are drastically altering the biosphere. That is reducing the proximate natural environment's connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and far less diverse. This disconnects predators from their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that transform the local parasite network and their reservoir and amplifier hosts. The situation is setup so that man is introduced to spillover from the local parasites' hosts. Occasionally, but increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming broadly infected. The evolved specialization of the immune system to the proximate environment during development becomes undermined as the environment transforms. Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies. This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees. Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to. As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is: Costly and inefficient Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies. Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems. Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the: Hospital platform based sub-networks connecting to Physician networks Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA narrow network legislation Hospital clinical supply and food production networks Medical school and academic research network and NIH Global transportation network Public health networks Health care IT supply network Health care
Deaton describes the wellbeing of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public health strategies and the effect of growth in material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of aid. Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The situation he describes is complex including powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The biosphere, Politics, Economics, Philosophy and Health care. Improving wellbeing
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations of the major problems afflicting US health care as of 2006. Problems of US health care
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network. And they explain: How they planned out the transformation, Leveraging an effective governance structure, Using a strategy to gain buy in, Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians. Geisinger's leverage of biologics. Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience. Where Geisinger is headed next. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. E2E insured quality care
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader and son who know that the current health care network interacts with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that caused his father's death. But he is confident that these problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated, collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical errors and make care more cost effective. Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory including synergistic examples of these systems in operation. The health care network is built out of emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives. Bad medical models
US healthcare is ripe for disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that technologies are emerging which will support low cost business models that will undermine the current network. Applying complex adaptive system (CAS) theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist these progressive forces. Disrupting health care
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent improvement in quality in medicine by organizing to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists. With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates the effects of complexity and how to organize to cope with it. Following the short review RSS additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within the network of US health care, contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping his various examples and reviewing facets of complex failures. Complexity checklists
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on 1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects' lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking broadly across each subject's: Personality, Education, Parental impacts, Energy levels, Partnering, Careers, Religion, Social networks, Gender, Impact from war and trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways, which each individual could be seen to select and travel along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long life. Others were problematic. The models imply that the US approach to health and wellness should focus more on supporting the development and selection of beneficial pathways. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network, starved of resources. Promoting longevity
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to show how technology has amplified this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the independent self, living fully while aging with the support of the extended family. Central planning responded to the technological and societal changes with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But Gawande then contrasts the power of bottom up innovations created by experts responding to their own family situations and belief systems. Gawande then explores in depth the challenges that unfold currently as we age and become infirm. He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will have to understand the dilemma of integrating medical treatment and hospice strategies. He notes that all parties involved need courage to cope. He proposes medicine must aim to assure well being. At that point all doctors will practice palliative care. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death, evolution, cooperation and adaptations to new technologies are discussed. Agent death
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are infected each year with malaria and one million die. Malaria
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution of medical science. Medical science events
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies that generate complexity within systems. They do this through a focus on modularity. Modular designed systems
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer company IBM. Compartmented systems
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer software design. Object based systems
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data types and inheritence make object orientation a superior methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy to the use of objects. Software construction
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred. Tools
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the World. He highlights: A list of preconditions resulting in Additional niche capture & more free time Building a network to interconnect memes processes & tools which Enabling inter-generational transfers Innovations that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil fuels Memetic trading networks
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man building cultures and later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a change of approach. He: Explores creativity: how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter-gatherer, enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the evening around the campfire. He notes the power of fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing signature of aesthetic surprise. Looks at the current limitations of the humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect. Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and culture: Ultimate causes viewed through art, & music The bedrock of: Ape senses and emotions, Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied by humanities, & Exponential change in science and technology. How the breakthrough from our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat, supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory & language. Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution. The impact on human nature. Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are destroying. Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes, exploration, irony, and considers the potential for a third enlightenment, supported by cooperative action of humanities and science Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory: The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework for representing the cultural CAS while Wilson's desire to integrate the humanities and science gains support from viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS. Evening campfire rituals
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the economy. They argue it has generated exponential growth. This has been due to innovation. It has created a huge bounty of additional wealth. But the wealth is spread unevenly across society. They look at the short and long term implications of the innovation bounty and spread and the possible future of technology. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. Brilliant technologies
Education versus guilds
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed by CAS theory and reviewed. What drives success
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. Warrior groups
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory highlights the value of evolutionary testing of the food chain. Natural systems
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can take hold. Various social insects have developed strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable available niches. Like humans they invest in specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped competitors. Insect superorganisms
Computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by natural selection 'building out' specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs we call the mind. He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from psychology regarding: The visual system - an example of natural selections solutions to the sensory challenges of inverse modeling of our environment; Intensions - where he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers - making sense of the objects they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war. These conclusions allow him to understand the development and maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor, Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life. Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved amplifiers: Globalization, Cliodynamics, The green revolution and resource bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints. The implications are discussed. Computationally adapted mind
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span: conception, infantile puberty, girlhood, juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in how emotions are processed by women compared to men. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and behavioral CAS. Evolved female brain
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for scientific research on behavior. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured to successfully enter niches we now occupy. CAS behavior
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time: A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge: Our familiar time emerges Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions Emergence of time
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries. Now it is finally being characterized scientifically. That required a transformation of approach. Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. He describes the research methods. He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. Conscious access
Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene explains the importance of education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But he notes the reading networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved. And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing reading and culture. He explains the cultural engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that enable and constrain reading and culture. Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural complex adaptive system (CAS) are related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge. Evolved reading
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions. In particular he explains how: Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. Receptor indirection
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific investigation of meditation's impact on the brain. They introduce the book by describing their experiences with meditation, science and the research establishment, their friendship, how meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to back them up. Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds work. They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern tradition of exploring and altering the mind. Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at Harvard. Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of consciousness. It took over twenty years for scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align with this model. Much of the prior experimental data had to be abandoned. They introduce meditation's impact on the amygdala responding to pain and stress. They look at the changes in: Stress Compassion Attention Self-awareness; and the potential for use of mediation in psychiatry. And they warn of the occurrence of dark nights. They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters, starting with Mingyur Rinpoche, and detect meditation altering traits. Finally they discuss the potential benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it broadly to a busy America. Meditating neurons
Tara Brach was worried from a young age that there was something terribly wrong with her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded by developing Radical Acceptance. Brach then explains the steps in applying it: pause, greet what happens next with unconditional friendliness; allowing us to: Initially attend to the sensations of our body, Accept the wanting self and discover its source of boundless love. Welcome fear with a widening attention, accept the pain of death and become free. Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves and others. Focus on our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed, towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness. Leverage friendships to understand more about our shared nature and strengthen Radical Acceptance. Realize our Buddha nature. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist presence. Compassionate CAS
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant. Enneagrams define personality types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of childhood driven wounds. The Enneagram becomes a tool to enable interested people to transform from the emotionally wounded base, hidden within the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence. Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear. In response each of us adopts an induced Basic Desire of the type. But as we develop the inner observer, it will support presence and undermine the identification that supports the armor of the type. The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type armor: Triadic self revealing: Instinctive, feeling, thinking; childhood needs that became significant wounds Social style groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for managing inner conflict Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for defending childhood wounds Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual distortions reflected in the interests of the variants. The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development: unhealthy, average, healthy, liberation; including their current center of gravity, steriotypical social role, wake-up call, leaden rule, red flag, and direction of integration and disintegration. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family and social life. Emergent evolved amplifers can be constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies. Enneagram strategies
Antonio Damasio argues that ancient & fundamental homeostatic processes, built into behaviors and updated by evolution have resulted in the emergence of nervous systems and feelings. These feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general systems supporting enteric operation, are later ubiquitously integrated into the 'images' built by the minds of higher animals including humans. Damasio highlights the separate development of the body frame in the building of minds. Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the end-to-end integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the cultural creative process, linking culture to homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the development of tools to improve our lives. But the results of the creative process have added stresses to our lives. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Each of the [super]organisms discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems: Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns well with CAS theory. Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS examples. Emergence of feelings
Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd. John spent a lot of time alone during his childhood. He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam; so the US paid for him to attend University of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to Mary Bruce. Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a combat ready pilot in the Korean War. While the US Air Force focused on Strategic bombing, Boyd loved dogfights. His exceptional tactical ability was rewarded with becoming an instructor. Boyd created new ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers by using them in the F-100. He was noticed and enabled by Spradling. As he trained, and defeated the top pilots from around the US and allied base network, his reputation spread. But he needed to get nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at Georgia tech. While preparing to move he documented his FWS training and mentored Ronald Catton. While there he first realized the link between energy and maneuverability. At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie, he developed tools to model the link. They developed comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US aircraft performing poorly. Eventually General Sweeney was briefed on the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111. Sent to the Pentagon to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to pressure procurement into designing and building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a lightweight maneuverable fighter. The navy aligned with Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the F-X and force the F-14 on the Air Force. Boyd saved the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the freedom to compromise on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15). Boyd requested to retire, in disgust. Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd and Sprey secretly developed specifications for building prototype lightweight fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16; and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni. David Packard announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on prototypes. Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to prototype. Boyd was transferred to Thailand as Vice Commander of Task Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity training officer; roles in which he excelled. And he started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction and Creation. But on completion of the tour Boyd was apparently abandoned and sent to run a dead end office at the Pentagon. The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd, Christie, Schlesinger, and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's requirements in a covert campaign. The Air Force threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's concept. He accepted he had lost the fight and retired from the Air Force. Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable creative new assemblies. He uses the idea to explain the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he explains with the O-O-D-A Loop. Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney to expose the systemic cost overruns of the military procurement process. The military hierarchy moved to undermine the Spinney Report and understand the nature of the reformers. Boyd acted as a progressive mentor to Michael Wyly, who taught the Marine Corps about maneuver warfare, and Jim Burton. Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during the First Gulf War. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of air-to-air combat within a CAS framework. Air warrior
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles. Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven to create, and successfully invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and especially portraits. Vincent worked hard to allow artists like him-self to innovate. But Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis. Nemeczek also provides a brief history of Vincent's life. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Vincent creates
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse and eventual recovery. Elton stresses the serendipitous nature of his emergence as a musician. He describes the contributions of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's sister, and her mother Ivy; who formed his early childhood proximate environment which prepared him for a job in entertainment: he developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs; entering a network based around Dick James Music. And he almost got married. DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the food. A first album supported touring and the formation of a band. A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an overnight sensation. And during this period of time Elton's testosterone level ramped. Life changed dramatically. Stardom provided many rewards but there were still life's problems to deal with. Elton was befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated. His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly in hotels between concerts. His hair abandoned him. But he was saved by the challenge of transforming the collapsed Watford football club. He retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life. Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints, Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he hopes will bring him happiness: trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying Renata. He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio. Problems stress him. He is frightened by a cancer scare, AIDS, inspired by Ryan White, angered by the Sun, and saddened at breaking Renata's heart. But he was there for Ryan White's final days. And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton about his string of addictions. Elton finally agreed he had a problem. He went to rehab, stopped hating himself, gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other people. It seemed the higher force was supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all; they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni was murdered. Princess Diana died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral. He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina Turner. While his new records sold well he found himself in debt and terminated the management relationship with John Reid Enterprises. Elton and Bernie improved their situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with his seminal influence: Leon Russell. Elton and David became parents of two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate mother and network in California. They quietly get married when the UK allows. Elton's mum remains difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many at the funeral recall her fun side with him. Being parents increases the long-term stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys. But Elton needs to go out with a bang! And everyone helps. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details of the creative process from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. My song
Richard Feynman outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story. Richard's personality encouraged him to patiently seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and practice through building and fixing radios. Leonardo's life inspired him to try innovation, which he concluded was hard. He played with the emotion in communications, a skill which he used later at Caltech. And he made a game of avoiding following orders at MIT. Working during the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and practice. Feynman enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton, where the successful approach to science was just like his. His approach was based on patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for qualitative exploration. Overtime he added experimental techniques. He would test the assertions in articles with amusing investigations; with his mind aligned by feelings of joy. Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized. He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being taught at Princeton to his current pick. In his summer recess he explored biology. Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his creativity. And his practical orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway, supported his desire for choices and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural pursuits. Being mostly self-taught, he developed different approaches to problems than the standard strategies provided by mass education. Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father. But are they very different? While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about the implications of the European war. After a friend enlisted he decided to dedicate his summer holiday to helping the war effort. Feynman got involved in the Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the physics of the project, him on Niels Bohr; but was freed from them by Von Neumann. The records & reports of the project were kept in filing cabinets. Richard explored the weaknesses of the locks and safes deployed to secure these secrets. Just after the war he was called up by the draft board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally unfit. After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell. He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on fun. He enjoyed knowing about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate and approximate a value the fastest. Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much fun for Richard. So he used the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet beautiful women. Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque frequenting one, and later ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he drank with to sleep with him. Richard reflects on various times when he made government officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape; Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech. Both institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making, but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste of time and he saw risks in a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech and stay there. Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in Japan. Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little Japanese. Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse effectively, but stops when he finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his individualism. Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics. He felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the latest details, fearful that he could not cope; as the community worked to understand the laws of beta decay. But Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity premise. Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of reports. Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang discussed a failure and a theory to explain it. Richard felt terrified and could not understand what they said. His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student having fun, read every line and equation of their paper; he would understand it. And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what was happening and what still seemed conflicted. He reported his ideas back to the community. After Richard returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay. Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply describing the details of beta decay. He had identified the workings of a fundamental law. Years later he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics. He was conflicted about the prize and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip, where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese ambassador. Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling it on a digital computer. He explored hallucinations and the reality of experiences. Richard lobbies for integrity in science. In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science, Richard was quirky. He would tease those who asked for his help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to their part of the agreement. And he paid no attention to the logistical details of planning. He loved percussion, playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success. He eventually discovered art could be fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying mathematical beauty of the physical world. He had a great art teacher. But he discovered although he could eventually draw well he did not understand art. Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful, who were interested in integrating art and science, did not understand either subject. He found the situation was similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects made him angry and disturbed, so he avoided participating in them. It seemed ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing culture to the physicists! He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil. He gets involved in the California public school text book selection process which he concluded was totally broken, but also reveals how his father provided him with a vision of how our world works, inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical theory. Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported his creative development from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Richard draws
Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life, expanded from his own highlights: His naughty childhood, Wasted schooldays, Apprenticeship with Grant, His extramural activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow, life with FitzRoy on the Beagle, His growing love for science, London: geology, journal and Lyell. Moving from Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other books. He reviewed his position on religion: the long dispute with Emma, his slow collapse of belief - damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's advice; while describing Emma's side of the argument. He felt happy with his decision to dedicate his life to science. He closed by asserting after Self & Cross-fertilization his strength will be exhausted. Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Darwin placed evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose complementary skills helped drive the innovation. Darwin emerges
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. Accumulating small changes
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and the emergence of agents. Autonomous emergence
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition. Constraint based phenomena

Primary Navigation

In this page we:

Introduce some current problems of complexity for humanity
Explain how to use the site.

There are two main starting points:

The example systems frame and
The presentation frame.
And then there is how we use the site.

The site uses lots of click through. That's so that you can see the underlying principles that are contributing to the system being discussed. We hope that as you internalize and reflect on the principles the system should appear in a new light. At this site clicking is good!

Opportunities

This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A proposal that does not conform is wrong.

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented.

Theory

We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna. As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend them. So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS):

Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class. The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift.
Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did. Geisinger is an example of better solution. But transforming the whole network is a challenge. And public health investment has proved far more beneficial.
Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system. Better alternatives have emerged.
Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material.
The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development;

It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.

Examples

This page presents a search result list covering each linked region of rob's strategy studio.

Search

Rob's Strategy Studio aims to celebrate and illuminate complex adaptive systems (CAS) just as an art studio does art.

By way of introduction it notes the complex interactions that led to the partnership that discovered the DNA double helix and genetic code.

The page introduces the RSS vision 'I act, therefore I think' approach and the RSS mission.

It describes how many key aspects of the world are CAS including businesses.

Finally the page explains each of the framed pictures displayed at the studio including the other aspects explored in this vision frame.

Vision

This page introduces the programs that the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF) develops and uses to deploy Rob's Strategy Studio (RSS).
The programs are structured to obey complex adaptive system (CAS) principles. That allows AWF to experiment and examine the effects.
A production program generates the web pages.
A testing system tests the production program. It uses a framework to support the test programs. This is AWF's agent programming framework as described in the agent-based programming presentation.
An example of the other AWF agent-based programs that are also described in the frame is the virtual robot.
Finally a strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats assessment is presented.

Perl

This page introduces a series of asymmetries which encourage different strategic approaches.
The differences found in business, sexual selection, gamete structure, as well as in chess encourage escalations in the interactions.
And yet the systems including these asymmetries can be quite stable.

Asymmetries

This web frame includes a set of presentations about complex adaptive systems (CAS)

Presentations

Education versus guilds

Summary

Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles. He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan:

Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method.
Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity. The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework. Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics.
Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning.
Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis, an infrastructure amplifier.
even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs.
Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking.

Following our summary of his arguments RSS is Rob's Strategy Studio frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.

This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business.

Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the

This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent.

extended phenotypic alignment and

This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race. At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent. The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics.

evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network?

The One World School House

In Salman Khan's book 'The One World School House' he describes. Khan explains how he was working as a hedge fund is an investment fund that accepts investments from a limited number of accredited individual or institutional investors. Hedge funds are able to use investment methods that are not allowed for other types of fund.
analyst at Connective.

Free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere

Khan introduces this vision to frame the book. The world increasingly needs to actively process information, but we teach our children to learn passively while they flow through the education system in age based batches, presented with standardized curricula at a regular pace. A system designed a hundred years ago and hopelessly out-of-date is allowing the needs gap to widen. New technologies allow the system to be upgraded to match the current needs.

Khan notes there is broad interest in improving education. But there is confusion about what to do or even what is possible. Some historic examples show excellence is possible but they failed to scale or be broadly replicated and sustained. He is concerned about continuing to squander the potential of America's youth. Given the U.S. is the United States of America. offers a unique combination of creativity, entrepreneurship, optimism, & capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty. Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital. It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists. It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital). it enables sustained innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
. The education system should be supporting this with fresh and well-schooled minds while helping everyone develop.

Khan warns against deploying technology to incrementally change the current system. He argues for transformation from his experience experimenting with alternative educational approaches based on well-proven principles and backed up by technology that has worked at scale and which allows broad accessibility. In his spare

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time during 2004, while working at Connective, he posted math lessons on YouTube and then iteratively improved them using a

Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS). The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained.

Shewhart cycle. He became convinced this virtual teaching was his true mission. By 2009 he was focused full time on the Khan Academy, developing education tools based on Microsoft Paint & quizzing software that ran on a $50-a-month web host.

Khan sees the information revolution increasing the need for creativity and analytic skills. His approach of connecting together the components and highlighting the progressions, transforms education information into mastery encouraging excitement & participation.

Initially Khan worked alone & had one pupil Nadia. During 2012 Khan Academy was educating 6 million pupils each month, growing 400% a year and hiring the best educators & software engineers to help. The pupils enjoyed and benefited from the

Accessible, self-paced and active learning methods.
Concepts described and linked to dependencies for free.
Khan Academy tools, which were backed up by the promise that the source materials would remain available as the pupils' reference library.

With Khan Academy tools the world becomes a vast inclusive schoolhouse, augmenting the formal passive education that had been failing the pupils.

Teaching Nadia

Khan grew up in Louisiana in a single parent family with his mother. His father, from Bangladesh, was a pediatrician is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of infants, children and adolescents. They are represented by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
who spent his residency is the apprenticeship of a medical or nursing graduate with a practitioner (attending), usually performed at a teaching hospital: Brigham & Women's, Cottage Health System, El Camino Hospital, Johns Hopkins, LSU Health Sciences Center, Rush University Medical Center, Stanford University Medical Center; skilled in the specialized techniques required for consistent success in diagnosis and treatment, or treatment execution, of medical conditions. A first year resident is also called an intern. Christensen, Grossman & Huang note the difficulty of presenting all the necessary case types to a resident during the limited period of the apprenticeship. The difficulty of matching graduates with desired residency slots intrigued Al Roth who helped mitigate the problem with efficient market tools deployed by NRMP. Docphin provides web access to categorized research information used during residency.
at New Orleans's LSU health sciences center and practiced at Charity Hospital. His mother, who was originally from India, had a formal arranged marriage. His mother's family liked New Orleans and settled there - while feuding with each other as usual.

During Khan's 2004 wedding celebrations, in New Jersey, where his new wife Umaima's family lived, Salman was approached by his then 12-year old cousin Nadia's parents, who were worried about her failing a math placement test. As a result of the failure:

Salman's previous experience with Nadia implied her

This page discusses the impact of random events which once they occur encourage a particular direction forward for a complex adaptive system (CAS).

result was a fluke. He offered to tutor her remotely, if the school would let her retake the exam. Khan stresses everything since then about Khan Academy results from this offer, driven by the improvised strategies it demanded:

Khan had no teaching experience, training, or thoughts about how to teach - except for requiring the sessions be: safe, personal & thought-provoking.
He would use a
Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS). The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained.

Shewhart cycle, trying out
This page looks at schematic structures and their uses. It discusses a number of examples:
- Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity.
- Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them.
- Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations.
- Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models.
As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan.

Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals.
Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings.
These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples.
strategies
and leveraging what worked, just as he did as a hedge fund is an investment fund that accepts investments from a limited number of accredited individual or institutional investors. Hedge funds are able to use investment methods that are not allowed for other types of fund.
analyst at Connective. And he provided the same opportunity to his tuties. If they:

Got an answer correct they could move on.
Didn't then they would work on the topic some more and then try another question.

Searching for the core item[s] that Nadia had failed to master, for whatever reason and exploring them at her desired pace.

The standard education process allocates a fixed time to each item and then moves on. And since the pupils want to please the teacher they would accept moving-on, even as it occurred again and again to their detriment.

As he took on tutoring Nadia's brothers & their friends he needed a way to scale the personal pupil-paced discussions. Khan explains a friend proposed recording the lessons & posting them on YouTube.

No frills videos

Khan academy's foundations were built in a guest bedroom and then a walk-in closet. Khan selected a 'black' board as the medium. YouTube's

Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition.

constraints required the videos be a maximum of ten minutes long. That was fortuitous as Khan

Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented. Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).

later discovered from educational researchers:

A 1985 study of recall of facts from 20 minute presentations found that most recall was from the beginning of the lecture. There was little recall from 15 minutes onward.
Middendorg and Kalish's attention span
study, in 1996 found students had:
- A three- to five-minute period for settling down. Followed by
- Ten to 18 minutes of optimal focus
study found these were only maintained for 10 to 18 minutes.

In contrast the regular education system was requiring much longer attention spans! The only place where this seemed to work was the Harvard Business School case analysis where the topic has been pre-studied and all attendees must be prepared to defend their understanding through an 80 minute session. Here the ideas, shared by participants, stick!

Focusing on the content

Khan's personal and limited financing of the Academy drove his initial decision to minimize equipment and production costs. But his decision to focus on content was also aiming to simulate the one-to-one tutoring he did with Nadia. And he was well aware that faces are powerful attractants of attention which would distract from the message he was trying to convey. So he separated the content from any face-to-face time.

Khan assumed the pupils would watch the video first and then talk about the concepts with a skilled educator. An educator who could be particularly focused on helping those people who were struggling: Mentoring, Inspiring, Providing perspective. And he assumed a computing system could assist the teacher in doing more in a workshop setting.

Mastery learning

Khan sees mastery learning is a strategy of ensuring that a given concept is adequately comprehended before being expected to understand a more advanced one, explains Salman Khan in The One World School House. It was developed in the 1920s in Winnetka school district, Illinois under superintendent Carlton Washburne. But since the 1920s mastery learning was ignored until the 1960s when Benjamin Bloom & James Block promoted the technique and demonstrated its superior results. However, school system inertia sustained the traditional learning processes. Mastery learning was once again ignored until Khan Academy provided a technology supported implementation. as a strategy that is central to the operation of Khan Academy. He notes it instills a positive attitude about learning and the pupil's ability to learn.

But ever since its

first used in 1922 it has been predicated on radical upending of the traditional educational model:

During the 1920s there was keen interest in mastery learning. But it was different, costly and required vast teacher retraining. It was dropped and ignored until revived in the 1960s when it appeared in pilot programs across the US is the United States of America. and was shown to provide a far more effective education for the pupils, only to collapse just as before.

Khan sees another opportunity for teaching to adopt mastery learning now because:

The complex, highly interconnected world requires lots of highly trained capable people
Technology will act as a catalyst, an infrastructure amplifier.
lowering the cost of the transition.

How education happens

Khan argues we educate ourselves. He refers to neuroscientist Eric Kandel's discoveries about how our brains make memories. We:

Decide to learn
Concentrate

Kandel explains that in any individual brain, learning is reflected in changes is lasting change to the brain that occurs throughout life. It is also termed neural plasticity. The changes include:

The strength of dendritic input alters due to genetic, neural and hormonal signals

Hebb notes that memories require strengthening of preexisting synapses. Glutamate responsive neurons' post synaptic dendritic spines have two types of receptor: non-NMDA and NMDA. NMDA channels are responsible for this strengthening mechanism. LTP then occurs to prolong the increase in excitability of the synapse.
The LTP operation results in calcium diffusion which triggers new spine formation in adjacent parts of the dendrite. Eventually that can stimulate dentrite growth enabling more neurons to connect.
Short term stress promotes hippocampal LTP.
Sustained stress promotes:

Hippocampal & frontal cortex LTD & suppresses LTP. Subsequent reductions in NCAM then reduce dendrite and synapse density.
Amygdala LTP and suppresses LTD boosting fear conditioning. It increases BDNF levels and expands dendrites in the BLA.

Depression and anxiety reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number by reducing BDNF.

The axon's conditions for

Initiating an action potential.

Progesterone boosts GABA-ergic neurons response to GABA decreasing the excitability of other neurons over a period of hours.

Duration of a neuron's refractory period. Testosterone shortens the refractory period of amygdala and amygdala target neurons over a period of hours.

Synaptic connections being constantly removed and recreated
Synapses being created or destroyed. Stimulation generates additional dendritic spines which become associated with a nearby axon terminal and within weeks a synapse forms. The synapse then contributes calcium diffusion through LTP triggering more spine formation. When dendritic spines recede synapses disappear.
Cortical maps change to reflect alterations in the inputs and outputs from the body.
Birth of brain cells in many areas of adult brains: the hippocampus (where 3% are replaced each month) and olfactory bulb and lesser amounts in the cortex.
Restructuring after brain damage including axonal plasticity. Distant rerouting of axons is observed but no mechanism has been identified yet.
Vision is plastic in predators, where the eyes are moved during final development. Dehaene argues for neuronal recycling supporting reading.

in neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors. Neurons are supported by glial cells. Neurons include a:

Receptive element - dendrites
Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals. The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged.
Highly variable DNA schema using transposons.

including deployment of new synaptic, a neuron structure which provides a junction with other neurons. It generates signal molecules, either excitatory or inhibitory, which are kept in vesicles until the synapse is stimulated when the signal molecules are released across the synaptic cleft from the neuron. The provisioning of synapses is under genetic control and is part of long term memory formation as identified by Eric Kandel. Modulation signals (from slow receptors) initiate the synaptic strengthening which occurs in memory.
terminals. Khan notes that when a concept is studied from many different angles, each one will create additional connections. A web of associations will enhance understanding, reflecting physical changes including protein synthesis and synaptic enhancement. Khan stresses the system is dynamic and reversible. But through repetition, and initial concentration, lasting memories can be created. Khan concludes effective education must be active and focused. Again he is frustrated with the passive orientation of the traditional education process.

Kandel's neuronal memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory. This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus. This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP. The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected. architecture includes both:

Short-term labile traces, which consolidate is the process by which memories are made more stable and long lasting. Short-term memory traces maintained by attention supported working memory become represented by transduction cascades of kinase signalling pathways. Long term memory formation starts when these cascades successfully induce transcription, translation and protein synthesis and transport to synapses to support strengthening. Subsequently salient memories are further consolidated during sleep.
into
Long-term memories to represent significant associations.

Khan reiterates Kandel's point about the importance of "attending to the information and associating it meaningfully & systematically with knowledge already well established in memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory. This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus. This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP. The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected. ." It is clearly useful to teach the flow of a subject -- the chain of associations. This requires the opposite of the traditional educational model's solos which present a false paradigm of how the world works and limit understanding.

Filling in the gaps

Khan asserts that a topic's dependencies must be understood. Since gaps will develop Khan argues they must be found and filled in. He concludes there are huge benefits if the dependencies are revisited during covering the topic.

Khan sees the pupil as responsible for finding and filling in the gaps. He argues they start out as active explorers, so this comes naturally. But they can be helped by:

Khan notes the traditional education process can't support filling in gaps.

Questioning customs

Khan sees strong persistence & rigidity of our customs and institutions even once they start failing. Our education infrastructure is:

But he notes the education

This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Small world and scale free networks are considered.

network is manmade:

Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies that generate complexity within systems. They do this through a focus on modularity.

Designed,

This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

Evolved; along one of many possible pathways, Accepted aspects are

This page discusses the impact of random events which once they occur encourage a particular direction forward for a complex adaptive system (CAS).

frozen accidents:

Length of each class period
Number of elementary years
Number of high school years

Khan suggests the dominant model of education is not inevitable. But being integrated broadly into the US nation it is highly resistant to change, due to

This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent.

extended phenotypic alignment. Khan proposes to induce change by:

Presenting a fresh perspective at the basics of learning & teaching. Historical analysis suggests:

Noting what works, what does not and why?

The basics of the standard educational

The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment.

model are:

Teachers talk
Pupils listen

The Prussian model

The ubiquitous US is the United States of America. education network

supports building a compliant middle class by

Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Example flows are outlined. Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems. Examples of constraints are discussed.

flowing children through:

Primary schools & secondary schools executing the basics, all
Tax supported and compulsory, where the
State decides:

What should be taught
Who can be a teacher

The network was initially deployed in the US by Horace Mann was Massachusetts's Secretary of Education who drove the deployment of the Prussian education model in the US in the early 19th century. , and was then refined & standardized by the Committee of Ten was setup by the National Education Association in 1892 with a mission of determining what primary and secondary education should be like, following the deployment of the Prussian model by various states. The committee was led by Harvard president Charles Eliot. The ten members were all educators and most were university presidents. They were progressive & egalitarian for their time. They concluded that every child between age six and 18 in the US should have:

Eight years of primary education
Four years of high school
English, mathematics & reading every year
Chemistry and physics instruction covered towards the end of high school

.

The original template they copied was developed in 18th century Prussia by: Fichte was a Prussian philosopher & political theorist who helped design the Prussian education system. Salman Khan explains Fichte's aim was to create a ubiquitous middle class of loyal tractable citizens to staff the rapidly industrializing Prussia. Fichte asserted "If you want to influence a person, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."
; as a political tool to produce

Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents. These software agents are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined.

loyal, tractable citizens valuing submission to authority: Parents, Teachers, Church, King. It helped make Germany an industrial power. But the Prussian model worked best when:

Khan concludes the effect is to stifle deeper inquiry and independent thought that is so essential in today's world.

Having looked skeptically at the history of US education he sees huge opportunities to improve the present system so that it can support our present day needs.

Swiss cheese learning

Since the units of traditional education are time based it is typical for pupils to have an incomplete understanding of the concepts at the transition point to the next topic. The model uses a test to demonstrate proficiency, but Khan notes that anything less than 100% implies problems going forward with topics that depend on these concepts. Khan notes that this is especially true of calculus and organic chemistry which have lots of dependencies.

Khan raises another issue with this Prussian strategy - each fragment is isolated from its real-world connections. There is no opportunity to comprehend the significance of the subject. Naturally it becomes test fodder and with few associations is then forgotten. A legacy of holes builds up.

What is needed is a

Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS). The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained.

Shewhart cycle custom built for each pupil. Any hole identified must be filled in. But the architecture of the standard educational model constrains the allocation of

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time and individual focus.

Tests & Testing

Khan explains that a test can't measure a pupil's potential to learn a subject. Instead it takes a snapshot of the current situation which:

Fails to indicate how deeply the pupil's knowledge goes.
Does not explain why an answer is right or wrong
Synergizes with the Prussian architecture to reward the Swiss cheese strategy of learning for the test and then forgetting.

Schools emphasize that test results demonstrate the pupil's ability and potential. The impression is given of the network's objectivity and its creation of a meritocracy. But Khan shows the logic is circular with the desired result distribution becoming the goal that drives the subject fragmentation and test strategies. He concludes test results really act as

This page discusses the tagging of signals in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Tagged signals can be used to control filtering of an event stream. Examples of CAS filters are reviewed.

tags that categorize and limit the pupil's choices of future paths. The Prussian State needed lots of low skilled workers and filtering on test results ensured a plentiful labor pool.

Tracking creativity

Khan asks why arts are judged as creative while sciences are not. Khan sees: creativity, passion, originality; needed in both. These are aspects that are not highlighted by the testing process.

Khan sees a mismatch between our societies need for mind workers and the output of the current education network. The process of filtering pupils into streams and tracks excludes some early in the game. Any late bloomers with different approaches that may enhance creativity are tagged as different and slow and discarded.

Khan stresses:

Creativity tends to be selected against in our schools
Many educators don't see mathematics, science & engineering as at all creative. They ignore all the evidence of innovations is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
in science & technology. Instead they seek the right answer through memorizing formulas.

So he warns assessments can easily exclude the creative, passionate & original. That is a scenario that could have easily happened with Nadia.

Homework

Khan asks how much homework is good. The current system provides little clarification:

Some parents want lots, others a little
Sleep deprivation does increase with homework load
Teachers aren't trained in the theory and practice of homework
Quantity is easy for teachers to measure
In times when the US is externally threatened: Sputnik, Japan's economic success; more homework is assigned to US school children.
Some other countries require a lot of homework while others set very little. The amount does not correlate with the relative educational achievement of the pupils.
The best indicator of better achievement & fewer behavioral problems was frequency & duration of family meals.

Khan sees homework as practiced in the current educational network as providing the children of the well-off, well-educated and well-resourced with an edge that undermines poor children and their families.

But now that he has highlighted the questionable value of homework & 40 minute lectures he asks a very revealing question "Why was homework designed to be done at home?" He concludes the answer is "Because of deficiencies in the classroom processes not enough learning takes place there." It is a very inefficient system.

Flipping the classroom

Having pupils work with Khan Academy tools at home & then subsequently while at school discussing them, getting help & feedback allows:

Khan notes that this opportunity has been understood for some time. But the awareness of Khan Academy has pushed flipping into the mainstream of thinking. And Khan notes it is just an optimization of the Prussian framework.

Economics of schooling

US is the United States of America. education is expensive. And some of that money is wasted. Khan explains the funding allocation: $100,000 for a teacher, $30,000 for a classroom, $150,000 for: Administration, Security, Football fields etc.

Khan reviews the basic assumptions behind the spending:

Teacher student ratios should really be judged on valuable
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things
Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
time
spent mentoring. Lecturing does not benefit much from reducing class sizes.
Private education lavishes funding on low ratios and adds expensive tutors. Khan asserts that this investment is unnecessary, since all education can be made more effective and cheaper.
Technologies are being deployed in shallow, ineffective and costly ways which will eventually suggest technology is an expensive gimmick. The metrics, methods, goals and assessments must be adjusted to leverage the infrastructure. With these setup correctly, Khan asserts, teacher mentoring time can go to 90 - 100%.

Theory versus practice

Khan notes that experimenting on complex, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:

Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization and, for CAS, evolution
Systems that are adaptive
More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
Balance at the edge of chaos

subjects like education & medicine requires careful design, sufficient data collection, careful analysis and peer reviewed publication, a costly and risky exercise but one that draws a lot of investment.

He warns that the education researchers tend to overgeneralize.

Khan suggests that he avoids over generalizing by using

Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS). The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained.

highly specific strategies and then testing and refining them broadly on the many people using the Khan Academy tools, rather than adopting a general theory.

Khan explains his personal philosophy - do what makes sense and do not try to confirm a dogmatic bias with pseudoscience. He justifies it:

As grounded in "using data to iteratively refine an educational experience without attempting to make sweeping statements about how the unimaginably complex human mind always works."
Use:

Video-based lectures for certain contexts
Live dialogs, when possible, for others
Projects when appropriate
Traditional problem sets when appropriate

Focus both on what

The students need to prove to the world through assessments
Students actually need to know in the real world.

Focus on the pure and the thought-provoking as well as the practical.
Craft particular and individual solutions based on the availability of data from millions of students updated daily
It is happening in the real world now.

The Khan Academy software

Khan recalls that in 2004 he was doing a little private tutoring by telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights.
while employed at Connective. He was shocked that most of his tutees had a very poor grasp of the core material he was discussing. He determined the issue was that they were missing the connections between the various ideas. The tutees realized they did not know how to interpret Khan's questions and were lacking in confidence & tentative, appearing to guess at answers.

Khan realized he didn't have the

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time to search for each tutees gaps with them live and cover any of the more advanced topics. His solution was to write some software to:

Generate math problems so he could rapidly find each tutees personal gaps. And when asked the software explained the steps to solving the current problem.
Capture metrics on how many problems a student had done, what proportion were correct, how long they worked on them and when in the day. As Khan refined this tool he realized he could start to understand what & how they were learning. He observed huge variation in how the small number of tutees learned. An essential step was developing a strategy for identifying mastery is a strategy of ensuring that a given concept is adequately comprehended before being expected to understand a more advanced one, explains Salman Khan in The One World School House. It was developed in the 1920s in Winnetka school district, Illinois under superintendent Carlton Washburne. But since the 1920s mastery learning was ignored until the 1960s when Benjamin Bloom & James Block promoted the technique and demonstrated its superior results. However, school system inertia sustained the traditional learning processes. Mastery learning was once again ignored until Khan Academy provided a technology supported implementation. . He deployed a simple metric - 10 questions correctly answered in a row. A Shewhart cycle is the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) cycle developed at Bell Labs by Walter Shewhart. Each activity that an organization identifies it will 'do' is formally described in a 'plan' including a model of the expected outcomes of the act if it successfully achieves its goals. If a subsequent 'check' of the results of the action relative to the predicted model is unsatisfactory the initial plan is modified to correct for identified problems and the cycle is re-executed. The cycle allows learning to become represented in the improved plan. Following the process institutionalizes the learning.
then allowed the proposal to be validated and refined as necessary. A goal 'high expectations of the tutees ability to master the material' was signalled, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance. In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively. A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form. Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell. Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state. Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals. Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich. Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors. In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation. To be credible signals must be hard to fake. To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient. To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy.
by the strategic
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition.

constraint.

As Khan got more and more tutees he had to shift the allocation of work activities to the software. Finally he was able to focus on mentoring and had captured the time to do it. And as the tutees mastered each topic their confidence and self-esteeme rose.

The leap to a real classroom

By 2007, there were several thousand pupils using the Khan Academy videos. Hundreds were also using the problem-generating software. Khan was now relatively isolated from the majority of the users of his service. And he had little interaction with educators. Until a friend introduced him to a Castilleja School history teacher, Ryanne Saddler who was the summer site director of Peninsula Bridge is a Bay Area summer education program which as Sal Khan explains 'aims to provide educational opportunities to motivated middle-school kids from underresourced schools and neighborhoods.'
hosted at the school. Through her he got to talk with the Peninsula Bridge board that included mathematics teachers. They agreed the Academy services could be of value in preparing the children for algebra.

Three middle school Peninsula Bridge math classes were selected that would use Khan's tools during computer lessons. A subset of the teachers opted to start their classes with the most basic Khan Math concepts -- well below middle school level -- while the rest started at middle school level. Khan was excited to see a classic, if small, controlled experiment unfolding which showed that many of the kids had Swiss cheese holes beginning early on in their math foundations. But once these had been reached and worked through the children became confident and effective. Starting at the beginning proved far more effective over

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time.

All the children got stuck at some point or another due to a dependent hole. The experienced teachers asked Khan for a tool that would identify when & to whom this was happening. As with mastery, he proposed an arbitrary metric for "stuckness" - 50 questions attempted without getting 10 in a row correct - and used a Shewhart cycle is the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) cycle developed at Bell Labs by Walter Shewhart. Each activity that an organization identifies it will 'do' is formally described in a 'plan' including a model of the expected outcomes of the act if it successfully achieves its goals. If a subsequent 'check' of the results of the action relative to the predicted model is unsatisfactory the initial plan is modified to correct for identified problems and the cycle is re-executed. The cycle allows learning to become represented in the improved plan. Following the process institutionalizes the learning.
to refine the metric over time. He provided the teachers with a spreadsheet like report of the data gathered, indicating how each student was performing on each concept. That improved one-to-one interactions by orienting the teachers, and students proficient at a concept, to the pupils most at need on that concept so as to coach them past the problem.

The data about each student showed Khan that initially backward students who filled in all the holes became fast proficient students. It was clearly counterproductive to remedially stream these students and consign them to failure.

Fun & games

Khan's vision aims to make education more efficient and enable mastery learning is a strategy of ensuring that a given concept is adequately comprehended before being expected to understand a more advanced one, explains Salman Khan in The One World School House. It was developed in the 1920s in Winnetka school district, Illinois under superintendent Carlton Washburne. But since the 1920s mastery learning was ignored until the 1960s when Benjamin Bloom & James Block promoted the technique and demonstrated its superior results. However, school system inertia sustained the traditional learning processes. Mastery learning was once again ignored until Khan Academy provided a technology supported implementation. , to create

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time for other powerful learning activities:

Learning by doing
Learning with fun
is a powerful tool for learning social competence. It appears universal among socially complex species. It has an evolved high priority displacing foraging and using up energy stores. There are a number of behavioral strategies practiced in play that train those participating. Play:
- Supports safe practice of using social tools. Allows for trying out roles and honing motor skills.
- Allows a peer group to provide context for these developments: Approach to hierarchy; etc. Parents will aim to select the peer group.
- It integrates cultural details from local neighborhoods
- It supports practice of aggression.
- Demonstrates that transient stress is enjoyable.
- It allows the developing neuron network to identify which synapses to prune.
; this aligns well with summer camp. Khan's summer holidays were happily invested in operating summer camps with real projects: That illustrated the working of concepts by:

Using programmable Lego kits and sensors to build competitive robots with different strategies for winning and

Iteratively improving the robots.

Competing at Khan designed Paranoia Risk is Sal Khan's stealth learning Risk game where each player could only win by specifically eliminating one other randomly assigned player. Each player did not know who was assigned to try and destroy them.
where

Six played the game learning through discovery about: Psychology, Game theory, Probability
Others bet on the outcome and reviewed the operation of markets

Critical mass freeze tag is Sal Khan's stealth learning freeze tag game where each player gets to exercise playing freeze tag while they discover how the size of the field and number of freezers, which Khan adjusts, affects the ability to freeze all the players. The players learn that Khan has put them inside a complexity problem and how it is working.
illustrated through stealth learning about

Complex systems
, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:
- Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization and, for CAS, evolution
- Systems that are adaptive
- More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
- Balance at the edge of chaos
in operation

Taking the plunge

Both Khan and his wife, Umaima, who in 2009 was then training to be a rheumatologist is an internist or pediatrician who specializes in rheumatology. , grew up in single parent households. This, and their new-born son, added to the dilemma as Khan discussed leaving Connective to focus full time on the Khan Academy as a not-for-profit. He was kicked over the edge that August by:

Being chosen as a finalist for a major award of the Technology Museum of San Jose.
A letter from an underprivileged black boy who used Khan Academy's tools to overcome prejudice & lack of resources to reach mastery in 200 level university honors mathematics.

With hindsight he notes his decision to switch full time to Khan Academy was very naive and risky, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring. It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system. As such it is different from uncertainty.
. He had no experience operating or fund-raising for a not-for-profit. And sponsoring foundations were waiting for each other to invest. Even an invitation from Google to submit a two page proposal for a $2 million grant appeared to stall. And then Ann Doerr wrote to Khan "I am a big fan" accompanied by a check for $10,000. He suggested they meet for coffee. Once she discovered that he was funding the Academy from his savings she sent another $100,000! And then she let him know that she was watching Bill Gates at the Aspen Ideas Festival talking about how he and his children had benefited from Khan Academy.

Gates's chief of staff subsequently requested that Khan meet with Bill. After they talked Gates concluded "This is great." And through a Fortune article titled "Bill Gates' Favorite Teacher" finally convinced Khan's mother to forgive him for not going to medical school. The Gates foundation followed up with $5.5 million in funding and Google finally announced a $2 million award to fit within their Project 10^100.

The Los Altos experiment

Things started to take off:

To cope with the increasing demands Khan asked his old Louisiana and MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology. friend Shantanu Sinha to help lead Khan Academy.
Angel investor & Los Altos school board member Mark Goines connected them with Los Altos schools' superintendent Jeff Baier and assistant superintendent Alyssa Gallagher. It was agreed to start a pilot using Khan Academy services and methods integrated into four classrooms. Khan viewed it as a chance to learn how the technology could be used and improved to support the education network.

The pilot was fully operating by November 2010 with two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes - all full of enthusiasm and curiosity and enjoying being able to take control of their learning:

The fifth-graders weren't tracked yet and had the support of their mostly English-speaking, college-educated, affluent parents.
The seventh-graders were from the developmental tracks. Some with learning disabilities, others struggling with English, few with college-educated parents.

Khan software designers Ben Kamens and Jason Rosoff directly observed the classes & iteratively adjusted the software to help the teaching. The curriculum was developing and the classes were participating. Khan notes the power of open, respectful, two-way conversation between the tool makers and users.

Still Khan was nervous. They would all be judged on the results of the standardized tests. Thankfully due to a mixture of great teachers and the Khan Academy's services and methods:

The fifth-graders scored 96% at proficient or advanced grade level. The school board concluded they would use Khan Academy as part of the math curriculum for all fifth- and sixth- grade math classes the following year.
The seventh-graders improved 106% relative to the prior year: Twice as many students were now at grade level, A handful jumped two categories, A few even entered the advanced category; underserved, underperforming, 'slow' kids were operating the same as their more affluent peers.

For summer 2011 Khan Academy was setting up to manage a Los Altos district-wide pilot of 1200 children. And they were able to start pilots with public, charter, and private schools in California. Khan notes the results from these activities is just becoming available in 2012 but looks exciting with average scores 10 - 40% higher. He concludes the use of Khan Academy is fundamentally changing student character--with responsibility replacing apathy and effort replacing laziness. He sees this as the primary reason for the stunning results.

Education for all ages

Khan notes the tools can be used at any age. Like many others he wanted to learn what was going on in the

Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt.

Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation:

Junk bonds,
Derivative deregulation,
CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud,
Financial network deregulation,
Financial network consolidation,
Short term incentives

Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged. The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some.

Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics. He sees the result being a rigged system.

Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched.

2008 credit crisis. Typically for him, he worked to break the crisis into manageable and interconnected chunks, checking he had a conceptual grasp of any aspect before moving on to the next bit. He built videos for himself to explain:

Khan notes that as soon as he put these videos on-line he got e-mails reporting 'Thanks, now I understand what I do for a living.' And he was invited to do a 15 minute electronic blackboard lesson on-air for CNN at the peak of the crisis. He concluded education could be life-long and there was a deep need to help educate people of all ages about their increasingly complex world. Adults need the education tools to be able to adapt. Khan sees neural plasticity refers to lasting changes to the brain that occur throughout the life span of the organism. Many aspects of the brain can be altered into adulthood. Almost anything in the nervous system can change in response to sustained stimulus. And in a different environment the changes will often reverse. The changes include:

The strength of dendritic input alters due to genetic, neural and hormonal signals

Hebb notes that memories require strengthening of preexisting synapses. Glutamate responsive neurons' post synaptic dendritic spines have two types of receptor: non-NMDA and NMDA. NMDA channels are responsible for this strengthening mechanism. LTP then occurs to prolong the increase in excitability of the synapse.
The LTP operation results in calcium diffusion which triggers new spine formation in adjacent parts of the dendrite. Eventually that can stimulate dentrite growth enabling more neurons to connect.
Short term stress promotes hippocampal LTP.
Sustained stress promotes:

Hippocampal & frontal cortex LTD & suppresses LTP. Subsequent reductions in NCAM then reduce dendrite and synapse density.
Amygdala LTP and suppresses LTD boosting fear conditioning. It increases BDNF levels and expands dendrites in the BLA.

Depression and anxiety reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number by reducing BDNF.

The axon's conditions for

Initiating an action potential.

Progesterone boosts GABA-ergic neurons response to GABA decreasing the excitability of other neurons over a period of hours.

Duration of a neuron's refractory period. Testosterone shortens the refractory period of amygdala and amygdala target neurons over a period of hours.

Synaptic connections being constantly removed and recreated
Synapses being created or destroyed. Stimulation generates additional dendritic spines which become associated with a nearby axon terminal and within weeks a synapse forms. The synapse then contributes calcium diffusion through LTP triggering more spine formation. When dendritic spines recede synapses disappear.
Cortical maps change to reflect alterations in the inputs and outputs from the body.
Birth of brain cells in many areas of adult brains: the hippocampus (where 3% are replaced each month) and olfactory bulb and lesser amounts in the cortex.
Restructuring after brain damage including axonal plasticity. Distant rerouting of axons is observed but no mechanism has been identified yet.
Vision is plastic in predators, where the eyes are moved during final development. Dehaene argues for neuronal recycling supporting reading.

as signalling, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance. In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively. A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form. Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell. Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state. Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals. Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich. Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors. In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation. To be credible signals must be hard to fake. To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient. To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy.
some potential for adult learning. He is particularly enthusiastic about leveraging associative learning with adults.

Embracing uncertainty

Technological change is continuously enabling new surprising niches to emerge that make it impossible is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. This is different from risk, although the two are deliberately conflated by ERISA. Keynes argued that most aspects of the future are uncertain, at best represented by ordinal probabilities, and often only by capricious hope for future innovation, fear inducing expectations of limited confidence, which evolutionary psychology implies is based on the demands of our hunter gatherer past. Deacon notes reduced uncertainty equates to information.
for most children to know what job category they may eventually work in. He concludes that education must provide the basics of: mathematics, science,

Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene explains the importance of education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But he notes the reading networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved. And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing reading and culture.

He explains the cultural engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that enable and constrain reading and culture.

Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural complex adaptive system (CAS) are related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge.

reading,

An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges during the enlightenment.
It was a poem encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a humanist book hunter.
Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the foundation of the modern world.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms are discussed.

writing, history, politics; and then

teach people how to adapt and to enjoy actively learning with confidence, rather than educators worrying about specifically what is taught.

He argues for

To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible. Being sensitive to environmental signals agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their competitors.

flexibility rather than the brittle strategies of traditional education. But he sees the educational establishment as blind or resistant to the opportunity. Even as the prior one room school house model and methods fit perfectly with Khan Academy style tools.

My background as a student

Khan first met, and later became a friend of, Shantanu Sinha, when he was beaten by him in a math competition. Shantanu revealed to Sal that it was possible to 'test out' of algebra II and that he was officially studying pre-calculus early. Khan saw this as a fantastic strategy but was turned down by his teachers. The teachers argued "If we let you do it, we'd have to let everybody do it." This festered within Khan to eventually become: If kids can advance at their own pace, and if they'd be happier and more productive that way, why not let everybody do it?

Then at MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Khan learned how incredibly inefficient, irrelevant and inhuman broadcast lectures were. Shantanu and he separately concluded there was no point in attending. It was more productive to actively research the material from the text books. They soon found they could do more courses in the

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time available and were better prepared for the exams. Khan reflects that it should be no surprise since the Prussians had actively designed their system to be slow and limiting.

The spirit of the one room school house

Khan sees great virtue in the pre-industrial one room school because:

Kids of different ages should mix. In this setup that can happen enabling
More advanced children can support the teachers in mentoring anyone who is behind. They will gain respect from this activity.
Younger children sit with role models in a setting that matches the family and work environments

Khan notes this model is already successfully in operation at Los Angeles Marlborough School. They have supported the structure with Khan Academy services. The results have been magical.

Teaching as a team sport

Khan notes an advantage of mixing up the ages of groups of school children offers the opportunity to keep the teacher/student ratios the same by having teams of teachers work with a merged class. He sees this as adding value:

Support for each other - leveraging the different strengths and weaknesses each teacher brings to the team
Robust to personal holidays or illness of a teacher
Additional group techniques can be deployed
Offers more opportunities for the children to find a teacher they relate to.
Older teachers can impart their experience to the team. Younger ones can supply energy and fresh ideas.
With the use of active self-paced learning it allows the teachers to become coaches covering the children's backs when they struggle.

Ordered chaos is a good thing

Khan's schoolroom is dynamic with varied activities going on and no bells or mental walls:

20 pupils working over an hour exploring Khan academy concepts with immediate coaching as they get stuck
20 are using board games to explore economics is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics.
& simulating markets
20 are working in teams building applications to do novel creative work
20 are in a quiet zone working on art or creative writing projects while elsewhere
Some practice making music is a complex emergent capability supported by sexual selection and generating pleasure. It transforms the sensing of epiphenomena: Contour, Rhythm, Tempo, Timbre; to induce salient representations: Harmony, Key, Loudness, Melody, Meter, Pitch, and perceptions: Reverberation - echo; which allow musicians: Elton John, Elvis Presley; to show their fitness: superior coordination, creativity, adolescent leadership, stamina; true for birds and humans. Levitin showed that listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: auditory cortex, frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, and finally the mesolimbic system, culminating in the nucleus accumbens. And he found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout the session. He argues music mimics some of the features of language and conveys some of the same emotions. The brain regions pulse with the beat and predict the next one. As the music is heard it is modeled and generates dopamine rewards for matching each beat and noting creative jokes in the rhythm. The cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized.
; and each pupil can switch over to another area when they gain mastery of their current focus topic

Khan's goal is to ensure there is space for different learning styles allowing the curious, mysterious and original to grow and contribute.

Redefining summer

The whole family needed to be working on the farm emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances.
during summer when the US was an agrarian society. Khan notes with frustration that this need changed over a century ago but we still arrange school and University timetables around the ancient requirement. His frustration is due to the loss of

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time, idle

This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent. The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action. The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns.

infrastructure resources and forgetting that goes on during this long holiday. Instead Khan thinks schools could implement holidays the same way that businesses do. This would be especially easy with teams of teachers and self-directed learning. But he accepts such a move would be unpopular and resisted.

The future of transcripts

Khan expects competition for the places at top universities, major companies and professional guilds to become fiercer as they become able to attract from a global pool of candidates. Many of the candidates will have perfect scores as measured by current day transcripts, so these are of little help for effective accurate selection. Khan has already noted the risks associated with the yearly standardized tests. Not surprisingly the transcript does not characterize creativity given the failure of education to enable it. And assessing extra-curricular activities weights the race in favor of the wealthy is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker. It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche. and well resourced.

Khan proposes an alternative to the current transcript, including:

Exams that are expected to be retaken and learned from
A multi-year record of what concepts were learned and how

Details of how many relevant concepts have been mastered is a strategy of ensuring that a given concept is adequately comprehended before being expected to understand a more advanced one, explains Salman Khan in The One World School House. It was developed in the 1920s in Winnetka school district, Illinois under superintendent Carlton Washburne. But since the 1920s mastery learning was ignored until the 1960s when Benjamin Bloom & James Block promoted the technique and demonstrated its superior results. However, school system inertia sustained the traditional learning processes. Mastery learning was once again ignored until Khan Academy provided a technology supported implementation.
Open-ended design components
Character assessments, inferred from the approach taken to overcoming getting stuck,
Evidence of a willingness to help others

Creative portfolio which allows an assessment of curiosity and creativity based on the pupil's 'own product, created from scratch, to make a solution out of an open-ended problem.'

Serving the underserved

Khan reasons that, in our highly interconnected civilization, lack of education for the world's poor results in additional poverty and unrest that touches everyone. He asserts that trained minds and bright futures can counteract that situation. Our evolved tendency to focus on our own family ignores this global imperative placing our own children at risk.

Educating the poorest is fraught with challenges. In many places:

Malnourishment makes learning difficult
School infrastructure and supplies are limited and under-funded
There are too few teachers, their skill sets are limited, corruption is rampant and oversight non-existent.

But Khan sees software based self-paced learning as offering new possibilities because:

DVD players and TV sets are ubiquitous and so offer a baseline for access to the videos.
Time-shared low-end iPads and cellular network connectivity can be financed for around two cents a child a day. Bandwidth intense video would be pre-loaded Khan argues.
By time-sharing the iPads and networks between paying middle class and non-paying poor the startup funding can be bootstrapped. Indeed Khan argues middle class investment in tutors could be leveraged since the Khan Academy approach would prove more effective and cheaper, allowing some of this investment to be used for bootstrapping.

The future of credentials

Khan breaks university into three separate value streams: Learning, Social network and skills, Taking exams to obtain credentials; which typically get intermingled in discussions. He sees an opportunity to reduce the cost, and improve the specificity of gaining credentials.

Employers currently select for credentialed attendance at high tier colleges. That limits opportunities for poor smart students. Khan argues that credentials built from Khan Academy tracking data captured during learning can provide the basis for a superior and far cheaper credential. People could use low cost means of learning: Text books, Khan Academy videos and credentials to avoid building up debt. It would remove the barrier to entry from higher education enabling more job retraining.

What college could become

Khan argues our current universities have a design problem - they are rightly setup to encourage academic research by being isolated from the demands of the economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
, but they are asked as a secondary task to provide an effective tertiary education for our children. Children who mostly want help preparing to effectively perform a job or vocation.

So he looks for an alternative which better meets both the academics and undergraduates goals. Khan knows that computing and software companies see internships as the best way to identify people with the creativity, intellect and passion that are necessary to design and build the company's products and services. So Canada's University of Waterloo has made internships a core part of its computer science curriculum. Khan sees this as the major focus of redesigned curricula with extensive internships supported by Khan Academy style active online learning.

Khan hopes that ungraded seminars in the arts and sciences will allow academics to help undergraduates to enjoy and explore the great works.

Khan argues that the best educators for his redesigned college would be retired entrepreneurs, inventors, and business executives etc. who understand the roles that the undergraduates are interning for.

Instead of GPAs the reports from internships and portfolio of work activities would provide the information for a resume that bootstraps the graduate into the regular company hiring process.

Khan notes that his redesign is less radical than some others such as Peter Thiel's Fellowships. Regular universities could move towards his proposal by allocating

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time to internships and active learning that is currently dedicated to lectures.

Making time for creativity

Khan argues that no one knows how to teach creativity. But he notes the current education system is architected to discourage it by undermining motivation, removing

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time and discouraging risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring. It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system. As such it is different from uncertainty.
taking. Khan Academy is setup to grab back the time sequestered by traditional education so that it can be used by the learner to go beyond the concepts and connections Sal Khan provides for self-paced & self-directed motivating learning and explore, create and when necessary celebrate failure.

Khan argues that the key building blocks are in place for

Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the economy. They argue it has generated exponential growth. This has been due to innovation. It has created a huge bounty of additional wealth. But the wealth is spread unevenly across society. They look at the short and long term implications of the innovation bounty and spread and the possible future of technology.

Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory.

digital technologies to support a revolution in education.

CAS theory suggests:

The current education system does reflect an
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

evolved CAS, defined by a
Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions. The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed.

schematic plan specified legislatively and transformed via
Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination. The nature of the operations is described.

memetic operators, with a path shaped by
This page discusses the impact of random events which once they occur encourage a particular direction forward for a complex adaptive system (CAS).

frozen accidents. Competing paths exist to the present one persisted in our customs. But frozen accidents, our psychology and
This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent.

extended phenotypic alignment: John Boyd's struggles to do the right thing within the aligned military industrial complex
Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd. John spent a lot of time alone during his childhood. He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam; so the US paid for him to attend University of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to Mary Bruce.

Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a combat ready pilot in the Korean War.

While the US Air Force focused on Strategic bombing, Boyd loved dogfights. His exceptional tactical ability was rewarded with becoming an instructor. Boyd created new ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers by using them in the F-100. He was noticed and enabled by Spradling. As he trained, and defeated the top pilots from around the US and allied base network, his reputation spread. But he needed to get nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at Georgia tech. While preparing to move he documented his FWS training and mentored Ronald Catton. While there he first realized the link between energy and maneuverability. At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie, he developed tools to model the link. They developed comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US aircraft performing poorly. Eventually General Sweeney was briefed on the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111.

Sent to the Pentagon to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to pressure procurement into designing and building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a lightweight maneuverable fighter. The navy aligned with Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the F-X and force the F-14 on the Air Force. Boyd saved the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the freedom to compromise on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15). Boyd requested to retire, in disgust. Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd and Sprey secretly developed specifications for building prototype lightweight fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16; and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni.

David Packard announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on prototypes. Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to prototype.

Boyd was transferred to Thailand as Vice Commander of Task Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity training officer; roles in which he excelled. And he started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction and Creation. But on completion of the tour Boyd was apparently abandoned and sent to run a dead end office at the Pentagon.

The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd, Christie, Schlesinger, and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's requirements in a covert campaign. The Air Force threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's concept. He accepted he had lost the fight and retired from the Air Force.

Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable creative new assemblies. He uses the idea to explain the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he explains with the O-O-D-A Loop.

Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney to expose the systemic cost overruns of the military procurement process. The military hierarchy moved to undermine the Spinney Report and understand the nature of the reformers. Boyd acted as a progressive mentor to Michael Wyly, who taught the Marine Corps about maneuver warfare, and Jim Burton.

Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during the First Gulf War.

Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of air-to-air combat within a CAS framework.

illustrates the challenge; make the current path highly resistant to change. To do so it's necessary to:

Dorner
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these systems can have disastrous consequences for their human managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
- Effective iterative planning and
- Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he reviews.
explains
that understanding a CAS like education
The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.

The network:
- Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without. The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network.
- Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies. This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough.
- Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment.
- Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.
- Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to. As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions with patients tend to be transactional.
- Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is:
- Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems.
- Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the:
or medicine
is difficult to do. Khan notes the risk of overgeneralizing. That is a capability baked into medicine's off-label prescribing.

Khan hopes to avoid the pitfalls of advocating a general theory, with his approach, personal philosophy and skepticism about pseudo-science. Using CAS theory we:

Regard hypothesis formation as assisted by general theory. But we agree with Peter Medawar
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution of medical science.

that CAS science is conjectural.
Doubt, for a CAS subject, that the scientific method alone will achieve all that Khan hopes in the short term. These are situations where the right answer is legitimately open to question and future clarification will depend on strategic success,
This page discusses the impact of random events which once they occur encourage a particular direction forward for a complex adaptive system (CAS).

frozen accidents and which path gets taken. This is even true for physical
complexity
, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:
- Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization and, for CAS, evolution
- Systems that are adaptive
- More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
- Balance at the edge of chaos
. Indeed, Einstein highlights the difference between mathematical axioms, which are internally consistent, and physics which must be aligned with our limited understanding of reality, as a stepping stone to advancing our
The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment.

models of physics.

The implication is that CAS subjects must be presented assuming ambiguity. Just as hole identification & filling, supports mathematical comprehension, common place, a format of note book where multiple areas of interest were recorded, described, cross referenced, and iteratively developed over a period of time. John Locke's common place method's cross reference included an index 'hash chain' linking themes, such as 'money' to the pages where the themes were discussed. Steven Johnson explains how the idea of a common place book inspired Tim Berners-Lee's design for the world-wide-web. Walter Isaacson notes Leonardo da Vinci's use of a 'zibaldone' or common place book. Charles Darwin also used the format in his note books.
representations, glossary support and
Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS). The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained.

iterative development support CAS understanding.

See
Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS). The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained.

Shewhart cycles as using
Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions. The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed.

schematic plans as modifiable templates used to ground each instance's set of strategies and assist in subsequent inclusion of proposed changes. Without this methodological rigor
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

evolution would not work. We assume that Sal uses a 'plan' to focus his work in developing a new educational video. If these plans aren't written down it will be hard to ground further iterations and the core may itself develop holes.
Note Mervin Kelly's impact on the world from adding theory to Edison's practice.

Khan's observations, insights and strategies have thrust him to the
This page discusses the benefits of bringing agents and resources to the dynamically best connected region of a complex adaptive system (CAS).

center of the education network. To achieve his vision he must operationalize it. But that brings complex challenges:

Hiring effective
Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents. These software agents are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined.

agents, when he is depending on the problematic education network to make them available and identify them to him. He asserts he is hiring the best.
Developing strategies, associating them with the vision, prioritizing them, assessing their impact and learning from the assessment. And then updating the priorities and strategies for the next iteration.
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

Evolution does this by using
Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions. The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed.

genes,
Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination. The nature of the operations is described.

genetic operators and competition. But it is
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes.

a long, slow and destructive process.
This page looks at schematic structures and their uses. It discusses a number of examples:
- Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity.
- Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them.
- Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations.
- Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models.
As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan.

Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals.
Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings.
These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples.
Planning
presents alternative dilemmas in complex situations as Khan and Dorner both highlight. And if his organization is successful at structuring to deliver its actions centrally, how should it change the current network? Can the organization avoid misinterpretations?

Khan's network of freely available educational concepts provides bedrock for learners to depend on. It is a significant and valuable shift from what came before. But it also threatens the revenue streams of powerful companies who benefit from corralling knowledge within their text book product offers. While Khan is aiming to support the current educators with his tools he can
This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business.

disrupt the publishing network. We expect they will respond to the threat.
Khan notes the potential to continue learning throughout life. His tools will certainly make this easier for the motivated. But CAS theory suggests, as he concedes, learning is an evolutionary developmental is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
strategy to provide young adults with an effective tool kit. Sapolsky notes that
adolescence
in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment. And it is staged, encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications. It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development. The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively. The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time. The rest dissolve. So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal. The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first. The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult. Adolescents:
- Don't detect irony effectively. They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.
- Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup. Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards. Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack. Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor. The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards. Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting. And adolescents start to see other people's perspective.
- Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females. Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.
- Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents. Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity. Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.
- Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego. But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations.
is significant in this regard. Mostly such processes shut down when evolution detects further investment added risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring. It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system. As such it is different from uncertainty.
.
Khan highlights the difficulty of accurately identifying future niches and what skill-sets they will make valuable. RSS is Rob's Strategy Studio sees the current tactical are goals and actions which respond to the actions of the enemy in a combat, rather than focusing on ones own strategic direction.
network expansion as initiated by
A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks:
1. The evolving global scientific network.
2. The Bell telephone network. And
3. The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems.
Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine.
They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas.
Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed.
Bell lab's
strategic innovations is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
. The actual paths that develop in a CAS are likely to reflect such strategic influences but the details and timing will get impacted by tactical details. Khan fears potential resistance from the establishment. For RSS the risk is broader. For example Phyllis Vogel's Portal School successfully adopted the one room school house model, gathering interested teachers to operate it in the late 20th century Cupertino, California. But while parent's rushed to leverage the impressive results on their children, they reacted against what they judged a suspect process and insisted on shifting to the 'traditional model.'
Khan reviews the increasing competition for attractive positions within the US network. CAS theory indicates this fight is part of a
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings.

multi-cycle cliodynamic process. It will benefit the powerful to treat the situation as a war where they can strategically improve their chances. As such Khan's alternative transcripts will be seen as a significant
The page describes the SWOT process. That includes:
- The classification of each event into strength weakness opportunity and threat.
- The clustering process for grouping the classified events into goals.
- How the clusters can support planning and execution.
Operational SWOT matrices and clusters from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF) are included as examples.
opportunity or threat
. Turchin notes how education is an indicator of intra-elite competition. Gordon highlights the impact of this educational headwind:

Gordon notes the elementary system is financed by property taxes which are funneled towards wealthy suburbs which provide effective facilities. While other countries provide free education for 3 year olds the US does not.
Growth in educational attainment is dropping: only 25% of high school students are effectively prepared for college.
40% of high school graduates enter two-year community colleges, and these have low graduation rates:

Attendees are working part time to fund their education
The preparation is poor

College affordability is dropping and the poor fail to leverage the opportunities that do exist:

The cost of a university education has increased at 3* rate of inflation since 1972. State & local funding of higher education has declined. Forcing students to borrow: US college debt > $1.2 Trillion.
More than half of recent graduates did not find jobs needing college skills.
High-achieving students from low-income families don't apply to the elite schools which can sponsor them and enhance their chances of a high paying job.

Increasing student debt is also inhibiting graduation for the 99% due to two risks:

Falling short of average income will undermine the graduate's ability to pay off the debt.
Failing to complete college leaves the dropout with low wage options and no way to pay off the debt.

Demand for non-routine abstract cognitive skills has been dropping since 2000.

Khan suggests no one knows how to teach creativity. But reviewing the development and attributes of creative people provides some hints: Richard Feynman was a Nobel laureate in physics, who developed methods to describe the behavior of electrons and photons, formalized as QED by Freeman Dyson, and formulated quantum mechanics in terms of Hugh Everett's histories. His personality enneagram, is typed as an enthusiast, which aligns with his seeking fun, but with coaching in science from his father, a joking mother, and an early drive to read, understand and apply: engineering, science and mathematics; to have fun, he was able to slow down his thoughts and integrate into a creative, productive investigator.
, primarily an enthusiast, describes how his father used a process to make learning fun and bind the point to 'reality';
Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life, expanded from his own highlights:
- His naughty childhood,
- Wasted schooldays,
- Apprenticeship with Grant,
- His extramural activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow, life with FitzRoy on the Beagle,
- His growing love for science,
- London: geology, journal and Lyell.
- Moving from Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other books.
- He reviewed his position on religion: the long dispute with Emma, his slow collapse of belief - damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's advice; while describing Emma's side of the argument. He felt happy with his decision to dedicate his life to science. He closed by asserting after Self & Cross-fertilization his strength will be exhausted.
Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Darwin placed evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose complementary skills helped drive the innovation.
Darwin
, an investigator, collected and explored whatever interested him. CAS theory argues for any agent to have development and operational phase. Human
adolescence
in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment. And it is staged, encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications. It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development. The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively. The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time. The rest dissolve. So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal. The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first. The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult. Adolescents:
- Don't detect irony effectively. They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.
- Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup. Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards. Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack. Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor. The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards. Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting. And adolescents start to see other people's perspective.
- Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females. Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.
- Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents. Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity. Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.
- Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego. But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations.
provides the developmental transition from juvenile to adult. Learning creative strategies during this transformation is in line with
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

evolution's design. Steven Johnson
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented. Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).

describes a framework for generating 'good ideas.' And Johnson explains that common place, a format of note book where multiple areas of interest were recorded, described, cross referenced, and iteratively developed over a period of time. John Locke's common place method's cross reference included an index 'hash chain' linking themes, such as 'money' to the pages where the themes were discussed. Steven Johnson explains how the idea of a common place book inspired Tim Berners-Lee's design for the world-wide-web. Walter Isaacson notes Leonardo da Vinci's use of a 'zibaldone' or common place book. Charles Darwin also used the format in his note books.
note books provided Darwin & his peers with a mechanism for describing complexity. Walter Isaacson details the contribution of the common place book to Leonardo da Vinci's developing genius. It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that mass education would have ignored the common place toolset. With Khan's awareness of different learning styles he may enable the deployment of style oriented tools.

Sal Khan's book presents his powerful vision of how technology and common sense can transform the educational potential of all the World's children. His analysis explains and highlights the appalling waste of the current educational network. Khan Academy's current success and powerful sponsors add weight to his plans to deliver a free world class education for anyone, anywhere.

.
Market Centric Workshops

Politics, Economics & Evolutionary Psychology

Business Physics
Nature and nurture drive the business eco-system
Human nature
Emerging structure and dynamic forces of adaptation

integrating quality appropriate for each market

This page looks at schematic structures and their uses. It discusses a number of examples:

Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity.
Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them.
Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations.
Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models.

As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan.

Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals.
Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings.
These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples.

Strategy | Design |

This page uses an example to illustrate how:

A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence.
A program approach can ensure strategic alignment.

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