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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 |
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 |
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
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 frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 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 extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
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 |
|
|
Globalization from cotton
Summary
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 in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage. Holland argues: complex adaptive systems (CAS) adapt due to the influence of schematic strings on agents. Evolution indicates fitness when an organism survives and reproduces. For his genetic algorithm, Holland separated the adaptive process into credit assignment and rule discovery. He assigned a strength to each of the rules (alternate hypothesis) used by his artificial agents, by credit assignment - each accepted message being paid for by the recipient, increasing the sender agent's rule's strength (implicit modeling) and reducing the recipient's. When an agent achieved an explicit goal they obtained a final reward. Rule discovery used the genetic algorithm to select strong rule schemas from a pair of agents to be included in the next generation, with crossing over and mutation applied, and the resulting schematic strategies used to replace weaker schemas. The crossing over genetic operator is unlikely to break up a short schematic sequence that provides a building block retained because of its 'fitness'; In Deacon's conception of evolution, an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary.
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 is Rob's Strategy Studio comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of
disconnected peasant farmers 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. ,
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 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). stores and flows,
models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at
key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and
evolved amplifiers. The This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent
system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of
extended phenotypic alignment.
Empire of Cotton
In Sven Beckert's book
'Empire of Cotton' he describes and analyses the transformation
of cotton farming 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. and
manufacture 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. This
transformation is of great significance since it is a formative
step in the development of our modern industrialized
world. Since 1960 most cotton is grown in India, China and
then Soviet Uzbekistan, spun and woven in China, Turkey and
Pakistan and then turned into finished goods in Bangladesh and
Vietnam. But around 1860 slave plantations in the American
South grew cotton and then sent it for processing to British
factories which provided two thirds of the world's cotton
spindles. British workers operated the newly This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent factories spinning and
weaving fabrics that merchants sent to the world's
markets.
The newly developed value delivery system ( The complex adaptive system (CAS)
nature of a value delivery system is first introduced. It's a network
of agents acting as relays.
The critical nature of hub agents and the difficulty of altering
an aligned network is reviewed.
The nature of and exceptional opportunities created by platforms are discussed.
Finally an example of aligning a VDS is presented.
VDS) was easily adapted to other
products. Beckert stresses that the 1860s VDS was
imperial. It depended on huge military expenditures to
support the near constant state of war. Protectionist
tariffs, high taxes and large accumulation of debt were used by
Great Britain, and then other colonizers, to develop the system
which united the power of the state
with the power of 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). .
In the 1500s entrepreneurial use of war allowed the leverage of
slavery, genocide and imperial expansion to claim sovereignty
over lands and people. The captured wealth 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 knowledge
strengthened the nascent European institutions enabling
industrialization.
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 slaves became wage
workers, coercion became contracts and debt based
constraints. Persistence and expropriation became property
rights. Private factors using genocide and master slave
relationships gave way to the rule of law.
As nation states gave workers the vote their conditions and
remuneration improved allowing the entry of lower cost labor
based alternatives in the global south.
The rise of a
global commodity
Aztec farmers 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. grew maize,
beans, squash, chilies and cotton in mixed cultivations.
The women spun and wove the cotton with simple tools to
contribute to the taxes levied by the Aztec rulers.
Cotton is able to grow in a variety of niches by adjusting its
bloom period including: India, Africa, South America; All lie in
a band 32-35 degrees south to 37 degrees north. It
requires greater than 50 degrees Fahrenheit in its growing
period, 20 - 25 inches of rain and no frost for 200 days.
90% of today's plants are grown from American Upland cotton
seed.
The cotton industry developed independently in three key areas:
- Indian cloth was of superior quality. From India
cotton was transplanted to China. Cotton displaced
Ramie was required for tax payments and was used to cloth
soldiers.
- Peru was the initiator of South American cotton
manufacture. A second center developed further north
in the Americas. Navajos and Hopi grew cotton as early
as 300 BC is Before Christ also reffered to as before common era (BCE).
.
- A few thousand years later Sudan initiated the development
of African cotton. From Sudan it was transplanted to
Egypt between 332 BC is Before Christ also reffered to as before common era (BCE).
and
395 AD is Anno Domini also referred to as common era (CE). . Islam spread
cotton further into the Middle East and West Africa teaching
spinning to girls and weaving to boys.
In all the areas growing and manufacturing cotton centered on
households. It was one of many crops used personally and
to support the community and rulers. Different communities
allocated the tasks of spinning and weaving differently.
But since spinning can be done intermitently it is well matched
to the other typical demands on 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.
women
in these early civilizations: parenting and
cooking. The supporting technologies evolved slowly,
constrained by poor transport infrastructure, self sufficiency
and lack of competitive forces.
Europe had very limited exposure to cotton until Marco Polo
reported on fine Indian cotton, Pizarro
attacked the Inca empire and Cortes attacked the
Aztecs.
Cotton proved an effective store of value and a medium of
exchange supporting the development of trade networks on all
continents, and stimulating the introduction of workshops
resulting in geographic concentration of traders.
Merchants invested 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).
to develop putting out networks enabling investment in new
technologies: the spinning wheel saved lots 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. Growers in the Levant
supplied Italian manufacturers via Venician ships. The
manufacturers leveraged their prior capital and experience
developed from working with wool. Beckert notes that this
network was a prototype of the future global system except the
Italian manufacturers had no power over the growers in the
Levant. Islam constrained and marginalized both Italian
and German activities and high taxes futher undermined the
Italian efforts.
Building war
capitalism
European capitalists and rulers slowly altered the global
networks over 200 years from 1600 to 1800:
Following Columbus arrival in the Americas (1492) Cortes made
war on the Aztecs persisting from 1518. Portugal followed
in Brazil, and French and British entered the New World after
1607.
Vasco De Gama reached India in 1497 obtaining direct trade
access to Indian cottons by 1498. Portugal made Goa their
trading outpost from which they enforced a monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
flow.
Europeans paid for India's high quality cottons with Gold and
Silver mined in the New World.
As the gold and silver mines depleted European settlers focused
on growing cash crops: tobacco, indigo, sugar and rice; on
plantations using land taken forcibly from the native
peoples.
By 1602 Dutch and British joint stock companies were chartered
to gain access to global trades. British agreed to split
spheres of influence with the Dutch, gaining control of Indian
textile flows to Europe. British used projected naval
power to control Indian trades with Asia and Africa. The
East India Company's 'triangular' operation traded Indian cotton
cloth for South-East Asian spices for consumption and to trade
in Africa for slaves. The slaves were transported and put
to work developing and operating the New World's emergent
plantations.
Plantations
were highly profitable with low cost land and labor but required
a huge labor force. African slaves from Senegal, Ghana and
Benin were paid for with cotton products. The Liverpool
merchants financing the plantations captured high profits.
They used the accumulating 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).
to develop an English commercial trade and shifted the center of
the cotton trade network from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic. They initially financed the development 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. of English
cotton manufacture developing a putting out network of home
workers.
The development of West Indian cotton plantations significantly
expanded the supply of raw cotton. The growth of a
European market for Indian cotton also stimulated interest in
European manufacturing and a desire to
understand the high quality processes the Indian manufacturers
were using. The British East India Company documented
Indian techniques so that England's nascent domestic industry
could copy them and improve its competitiveness. As the English
cotton manufacturing industry developed it worked with the
British government to build tariff barriers (1685) and
eventually an import ban on Indian cotton goods (1701).
Indian textiles were only allowed for trading for slaves.
The wages of war
capitalism
Samuel Gregg was an early example of an English textile factory
developer. He owned a sugar plantation in Dominica which
used slave labor until 1834 when Britain removed direct
involvement by abolition. Gregg was local to Manchester
where he used water power, and later steam uses heat to generate steam to do mechanical work. They have an external combustion source that burns wood or coal. Early instances include Newcomen's stationary beam atmospheric engine, and Boulton and Watt's more efficient beam engine. The steam engine was later used in railroads. , to drive
spinning machines thus increasing the productivity is the efficiency with which an agent's selected strategy converts the inputs to an action into the resulting outputs. It is a complex capability of agents. It will depend on the agent having: time, motivation, focus, appropriate skills; the coherence of the participating collaborators, and a beneficial environment including the contribution of: standardization of inputs and outputs, infrastructure and evolutionary amplifiers. of
spinning. He leveraged the global cotton trading network
through relatives who were merchants in Liverpool. This
provided necessary competitive advantages relative to artisans
working in Frankfurt, Calcutta or Rio. For example
plantations developed a number of 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. s including
cost accounting which he could use. A particularly
significant financial innovation he adopted was encouraging the
powerless: children and penniless females; to work in his
factory as wage laborers.
English manufacturers like Gregg were in a competitive race with
the Indian manufacturers. 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
they became more competitive with:
After two centuries of slow growth these developments finally
resulted in exponential growth for the English manufacturers and
their supply networks between 1780 (Cotton was 2.6% of economic 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. value add in
England) to 1800 (17%). By 1815 all rivals from non-Europe
had been eliminated. In India, which as part of the
British Empire was not able to erect protective barriers, the
result was extensive famine is declared when: - One in five households in a specific area face extreme food shortages
- More than 30% of the population is acutely malnourished
- Two people in 10,000 die each day
and death.
Capturing
labor, conquering land
Slavery was essential for reducing the plantation systems wage
costs. Previously farmers 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.
had grown cotton and it had been processed in the family
home. But for the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
manufacturing capacity to grow required more land and labor to
be dedicated to producing and operating cotton
plantations. Forced relocations ensured appropriate land
was available. Various sources were tried out:
- Africa, India were sampled but their cotton was being
traded for Chinese tea.
- Brazil - Portuguese encouraged cotton growing. There
was ample land and lots of slaves were imported. But
competition from sugar and coffee undermined the attempt to
develop cotton.
- West Indies cotton had to compete with sugar for slave
allocation, but with the provision of a quarter of a million
slaves, purchased with East India cloth, production was
built up. This labor was able to restructure the West
Indian countryside, which had been coercively appropriated
on a continental scale - that Beckert notes, was a key
institutional 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.
!
However after the rebellion of the slaves in Haiti the UK
shifted its focus to the US is the United States of America.
encouraging the deployment of the Haitian model there.
The result was an expansive and elastic cotton supply
network. West African economies 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. focused on
supplying slaves to the Americas.
In the US each new plantation had to be provided with
supplies. No infrastructure existed prior to 1780.
But with the loss of Haitian cotton supply the rising price of
cotton encouraged plantation development.
Slavery takes command
The American South had a perfect climate for cotton growing as
noted by both Washington and Madison. Development 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. was
encouraged during the revolutionary war with cotton imports from
Britain limited. Experience with tobacco, which requires
similar techniques also helped. And many Haitian slave
owners moved to the South after the revolt in
Haiti bringing an understanding of the plantation
methods. Finally by 1786 the South was planting
long-staple Sea Island cotton. By 1785 the US is the United States of America. started to export high
quality raw cotton. It rapidly became intrinsic to the US
and UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. economies 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. .
Production was ramped by importing huge numbers of slaves (18%
to 60% of the population). Since land used to grow cotton
was rapidly exhausted it had to be revitalized with: Guano,
which was prohibitively expensive, or switched to, legumes again
impacting profits or replaced. So more land was purchased
or taken from its current owners with a thrust south and west
into upland South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana
(purchased from France in 1803), Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas
(annexed in 1845).
The expansion was enabled by:
- Access to 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). .
Barings's loans were viewed enthusiastically by the British
Prime Minister Addington. Allowed development 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.
of
large plantations which had scale economies in: slave
control infrastructure, cotton gins, R&D is research and development. , and well developed
supply chains for obtaining slaves. Planters obtained
access to the capital by mortgaging their slaves.
- Political power and government agreement
- Labor
(slaves) which remained a key factor until mechanization in
1940. As demand increased with the development of
mainland European manufacturers planters adopted gang
labor.
- Alignment with goals of: farmers 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.
in west wishing
for access to the sea, manufacturers selling raw materials,
Britain's economic 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.
and political goals;
- Removal of Native Americans from their lands.
Abolition of slavery in the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
decoupled its political constraints from US is the United States of America. policy while leaving
Manchester and Liverpool unconstrained and leveraging US
actions.
In the US planters used political power to constrain
emancipation. Slave holding Presidents, Supreme Court
Justices and Congressmen ensured political support for
slavery. And the planters'
power over state governments
encouraged them to add railroads uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
which expanded the efficiency of plantations increasing their
competitive advantage over cotton growers in other countries:
Brazil, India.
America became the World's cotton supplier making the UK
manufacturers worried that they were again (as with Haiti)
becoming dependent on one slave based supplier. But even
as the UK tried to increase the supply of Indian cotton the US
competitive advantages locked out all other suppliers resulting
in the collapse of Asian producers in 1820s.
Industrial
capitalism takes wing
Entrepreneurs seeking profits and rulers seeking power responded
to the effects of the global cotton network. The
Manchester cotton manufacturing model was deployed around the
world between 1770 and 1830.
British inventors were described in journals, newspapers and by
learned societies. British traders carrying yarn and cloth
were seen offering unbeatable prices to the World's consumers
who switched from Indian to British goods. Artisans,
adventurers, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs embraced the new
machines and techniques.
Places that adopted the new manufacturing:
In contrast India, Japan, and Africa did not have these
conditions. India in particular was constrained by:
- Empire
- Inability to add rule of law, capital, military and
superior weapons needed to generate wage workers.
- Napoleon's blockade of England (1806 - 14) limited the
pressure to change within France and the rest of his Empire
and added to Britain's focus on India as a market.
The US is the United States of America. leveraged a hydra like
structure to be both the leading cotton grower, in the South and
a Manufacturer in the North. They limited, but could not
remove, the strategic conflicts by placing barriers between the
two parts and encouraging slavery in the South and markets in
the North.
Brazil's leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
viewed cotton as a threat to their traditional operations and
discouraged cotton manufacture.
Egypt failed to convert slaves into wage workers and so could
not develop internal markets.
Napoleon's invasion of Spain undermined its cotton industry and
weakened its control over its New World Empire destroying its
old supply advantage. The Dutch and French did leverage
their colonies and added infrastructure, markets, laws and
property rights. The industrialization supported
development of improved methods of making warfare but were not
dependent on it.
Mobilizing
industrial labor
Wage labor placed workers into an This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent
legal, social and infrastructural framework. It was an
additional strategy benefiting industrial societies.
By 1850, millions of workers streamed into factories to operate
the machines producing cotton. This was a new phenomenon:
- Discipline was maintained by fines and forced forfeiture
of contracts. But often the recruits ran away, died or
left.
- There were tiny numbers of wage laborers in the 1700s;
Working had been rhythmed by climate, custom, nature ... not
clocks and machines.
- Most people had been slaves, indentured or worked for
their own subsistence when they had some land rights.
It was essential to the development 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.
of the new cotton industrial The complex adaptive system (CAS)
nature of a value delivery system is first introduced. It's a network
of agents acting as relays.
The critical nature of hub agents and the difficulty of altering
an aligned network is reviewed.
The nature of and exceptional opportunities created by platforms are discussed.
Finally an example of aligning a VDS is presented.
VDS to
encourage these people to become wage laborers. This
required:
- Legal, social and political shifts
- Land enclosure removed the subsistence strategies that
inhibited adoption of wage labor.
- Power resting on statesmen and capitalists.
- Increased military, police and judicial power helped
force the transition. Pitt the younger's 'two acts'
(1795) disallowed gatherings of more than fifty and
outlawed trade unions.
- New laws forcing people to work (factory acts: 1802,
1833, 1847). 10,000 English workers were imprisoned
for breach of contract between 1857 and 1875.
- Ability for these powers to penetrate into all aspects of
life.
- Between 1792 and 1815 British authorities built 155
barracks in industrial areas.
Often workers were trying to survive until 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. work was needed.
Machines such as power looms undermined artisan work pushing
them into wage labor and forcing rural poor into cities.
Skilled artisans from cloth manufacturing took on the best
skilled and paid jobs. Manufacturers would recruit them
from other cities and countries.
Owners focused first on the weak and poor: orphan children, and
in Europe women paid low wages. Egypt and China would not
allow women to work.
Following the plantation
methods they started time keeping and stretched the work
day to 14 hours. Life expectancy is a measure of the average life time of a new born baby. Without public health assistance many children die in the first five years of life significantly lowering the life expectancy of the whole group. There are representational and data capture problems with the model: - Not knowing the risk of dying in the newborn's future, demographers use the risks present at that time to predict impacts in the future of the person. No adjustment can be made for increased wellbeing.
- Saving the lives of children has a far larger effect on increasing life expectancy than extending the lives of the elderly
- Impacts that occur in a particular year, such as a epidemic or pandemic, are treated as permanent effects for that years life expectancy even though they may be handled by public health strategies and hence be transients. For life expectancy calculations in subsequent years the impact is ignored.
- Programs that reduced the impacts of infectious diseases, such as antibiotics and vaccine deployment, have reduced the variability of life expectancy following their introduction.
- Vital registration systems gather accurate data for life expectancy. But most countries do not have the infrastructure and instead estimates are generated from demographic and health surveys.
dropped rapidly!
In 1867 the working class obtained the vote (1867 Parliamentary
Reform Act). This reduced the pressure from the state to repress workers and
unions. But the increased pay and better conditions
lowered the competitiveness of British factories.
Wage labor was remarkably well aligned to
industrialization. The enlightenment
had constrained the elites from enslaving their fellow
countrymen. And slavery did not match the boom and layoff
business cycle of the new factories.
Making cotton global
Liverpool merchants integrated: Wage labor and slavery,
Industrialization and deindustrialization, Free trade and
empire, Violence and contract;
Liverpool became the key hub for both trade and
information. From the docks cotton unloaded by Irish
workers from Atlantic sail/steam shipping was transported by
canal, and later rail uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust. ,
to Lancashire (Manchester).
The cotton
exchange was the 'brain':
The exchange was required to support the increasing complexity
due to transformation of the global countryside to mobilize more
labor, resources and markets. The exchange made everything
move.
Merchants spent most of their time:
- Writing letters,
- Talking to suppliers and customers,
- Travelling,
- Making calculations;
The exchange was built on: Credit, Trade, Information, Trust and distrust are evolved responses to sham emotions. During a friendship where no sham emotions have been detected trust will build up. , Connections, Profit;
In its early phase between 1760 and 1780 merchants helped
manufacturers get access to raw cotton. But with increased
volume general merchants specialized on particular bits of the
VDS and particular regions. They also switched from using
dealers to brokers.
Brokers don't own the
cotton they handle but instead charge a commission. They
standardized the trades. These changes increased the
flexibility of the network and ubiquity of the goods since the
cotton could come from anywhere growing the appropriate quality.
Standards allowed for the development 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. of futures
markets once information and samples could be sent ahead of the
main crop. Bills of lading supported transfer of
ownership.
Import merchants purchased cotton abroad or shipped it for a
commission from distant ports to Europe. These merchants
imparted the power of a hub to Liverpool. It was based on:
Eventually import merchants faced competition from US is the United States of America. firms. The largest was
Browns. Browns based in Baltimore originally specialized
in Irish linens. But by 1820 it was among the biggest
traders between US and Liverpool. From 1820 to 1850
Browns expanded into all aspects of the cotton trade: ships,
Finance (Banking: Brown
brothers & Alex Brown which is now part of Deutsche
Bank), Sold cotton on commission, and purchased it
outright.
Bankers such as Barings invested in cotton in 1812 advancing
loans to exporters. They built an information gathering 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, speculated and advanced
loans. By 1842 Barings was the largest importer of
cotton.
Credit allowed merchants the leverage to get land cleared,
planted and picked by slaves. They further invested in
local banks that could further catalyze business. They
used 'factors' to connect directly with planters in the
US. The factors provided planters with supplies and
food.
Between 1800 and 1860 cotton became the major trade item for
most 1st world economies 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.
leveraging the merchant's global network - A highly specialized
The complex adaptive system (CAS)
nature of a value delivery system is first introduced. It's a network
of agents acting as relays.
The critical nature of hub agents and the difficulty of altering
an aligned network is reviewed.
The nature of and exceptional opportunities created by platforms are discussed.
Finally an example of aligning a VDS is presented.
VDS of networked 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.
A war
reverberates around the world
Beckert explains that cotton agriculture catapulted the US is the United States of America. into the center of the world
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. . Cotton was
61 percent of all US products exported in 1860-61. And
Britain was dangerously dependent on these US exports: 77% of
the 800 million pounds of cotton processed in Britain, 90
percent of the supplies to France and 92 percent to
Russia. The global system
depended on slavery.
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). 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. premium was set higher
for the South than the North of US since it was assumed that
there could be a slave rebellion as previously occurred in
Haiti. The North resented the South's dependence on
Britain. The Southern leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. argued that it
was best to improve links to Europe and to secede from the
Union.
The civil war induced dramatic shifts in the global cotton
system: Aimed at forcing a British diplomatic recognition of the
confederacy. The confederate government banned cotton
exports and the North applied a blockade resulting in no exports
in 1862. With ample stocks in the supply chain the initial
effects were to increase profits and reduce over production. But
by the end of 1861 shortages were reducing imports into Britain
50%. Manufacturers shut 6 percent of factories, laid-off
workers and reduced shifts. By 1863 a quarter of
Lancashire's workers (500,000) were out of work resulting in
riots that required that the military be deployed. The
effect was similar across Europe. Merchants were able to
speculate for longer. UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ,
France governments became involved. Without slave based
competition India could finally grow cotton competitively.
Rapidly increased prices lubricated the Indian growers who
switched land used for food to cotton. Massively expanded
production and diverted cotton from other markets. UK
manufacturing supplied seed, cotton presses and planned railways uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust. . But
India's inability to complete infrastructure, or report the
situation accurately undermined the efforts. The UK
government looked at improving contract law and investing in
Railways to enhance the competitive effect. But the
British government also feared is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
another 1857 rebellion - India was too big to subdue.
Similar increase in production occurred in Egypt, Brazil,
Algeria, Argentina, Mexico and China. But it depended on
unsustainably high prices. The production techniques were
based on the post slavery US framework. Brazilian cotton
was of the same quality as US cotton and its volume ramped as
the US blockade was enforced. Egyptian cotton was of the
highest quality. Egypt coerced labor into growing the
crop. Capital was supplied by Europe and North America who
viewed increasing competition for growers as ensuring low
prices. The net result was the transformation of the
global countryside.
Europe
looked to the US is the United States of America. to rebuild a
low cost production platform is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents.
knowing that it is labor - not land which is the
constraint. Cotton capitalists looked for levers to ensure
free blacks would continue to produce low cost cotton.
Global reconstruction
Emancipation initially freed large amounts of labor from the
cotton plantations in the US is the United States of America.
South. The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. was very
concerned. Capitalists and government used credit, private
ownership of land, contract law, and Jim Crow to push labor into
share cropping and debt.
Initially Andrew Johnson pushed for the land to be transferred
back to its 'original' white owners. But after the top
union generals, and Northern allies of the former slaves
interceded land was made available to the freed blacks who
became share croppers. But after a cotton business down
cycle they were trapped again by contractual debt.
Capitalists in Europe and the North of US agreed with the
Southern States fully constraining the 'free' labor by making:
- Mobility and vagrancy offenses.
- Cotton pickers' children go to second rate
schools.
- The power structure white only - police, judiciary and
legislatures; and they allowed unpunished lynching.
Legislatures removed the share croppers' rights even as poor
white farmers 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.
were
driven into share cropping.
But plantation owners lost power as cotton prices fell, never to
regain it again consumed by debt and costly supplies. The
Northern manufacturers won out as the South had predicted they
would.
Destructions
The abolition of slavery 1865 to 1870 catalyzed the connection
of cultivators in India, Egypt, Brazil, West Africa and Central
Asia allowing competition to keep cotton prices low.
By this time powerful imperial states had the means to reach
deeply into once remote parts of the world via: Railways uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust. , telegraphs is a point to point signalling system. Electric versions were developed and deployed around 1840s. They were helpful supporting infrastructure for railway networks, banking and rapid news relaying. Each transmitted letter was encoded in the transmissions. Two main types were deployed: - Needle telegraphs which moved a needle to represent the signal. Often multiple needles were used in the encoding requiring multiple wires to be strung between the stations. Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph was of this type and was widely deployed within the British Empire.
- Armature telegraphs where a pulse generates a click at the receiver station. Samuel Morse developed a single wire (low cost) system of this type along with the Morse Code. German railways standardized on the Morse telegraph and it was deployed in the US supporting railway operation.
, and military
expeditions.
The result was creative destruction of: The old merchant
networks, Hand spinning, Hand loom weaving; Millions (of women)
gave up spinning and weaving. They lost the work that had
previously structured their societies.
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). and manufactured
goods moved into the world's countryside, including Asia.
The port of Bombay was connected through Berar's merchant base
where Indian 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 linked in the
producers in the countryside. This catalytic, an infrastructure amplifier. backwards
integration of the global network increased the power of the
imperial state. It allowed the replacement of the
previously constraining Indian brokers by merchants,
agents and manufacturers' capital.
Similar integrations occurred in Egypt, and Anatolia.
Statesmen leveraging their state's superior weapons, along with
manufacturers and dealers broke through the countryside's
remaining barriers between 1830 & 1860:
- Transport costs had been reduced by globally integrated
infrastructure.
- Impact of disease controlled.
- Tariffs and excise duties leveraged.
- Land rights were altered to force transition to wage
working consumers of global markets and allow the land to be
appropriated by the well connected.
The integration of the vast Indian and Chinese markets resulted
in the collapse of the livelihoods of native spinners and
weavers. In a social catastrophe is a dramatic breakdown in the operation of a CAS that results in general failure. Dorner in the logic of failure, sees the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as illustrative: typical human strategies were incorrectly applied by experienced operators, because they were overconfident and incorrectly modeled the current and immediate future state of the reactor. Beinhocker asserts positive effects generated in a large inter-connected network induce negative effects at other points in the network. Booch argues that increasing system complexity can overwhelm human designers, inducing catastrophe in software development. He recommends adopting object oriented hierarchy and modularity to limit complexity. But many CAS networks include huge number of agents, responding to internal and external signals, and effectively executing evolved, distributed schematic plans. Eventual loss of control, as in the case of cancers, is notable and highlights the effective agency of the more regular situation. Human developed systems suffer from complexity catastrophe. Democratic processes slowly search for representatives who will solve problems for the citizens, but Diamond in Collapse explains that democracy has struggled to cope with the tragedy of the commons. Cliodynamic cycles operate over multiple lifetimes leaving humans prone to fall into the traps that caught their grandparents. Evolved amplifiers support bubbles incenting dangerous deregulation, and encouraging broad participation, even though the rules ensure additional wealth accumulates to the legislative elite and aristocracy, who safely ignore moral hazard. Parasites undermine the detection of problems. RSS sees catastrophe enabled by a lack of rigorous schematic planning within most developed human systems.
millions of people were forced to become agricultural laborers
focused on growing cash crops undermining food security and
inducing widespread famine is declared when: - One in five households in a specific area face extreme food shortages
- More than 30% of the population is acutely malnourished
- Two people in 10,000 die each day
affecting more than twenty million people.
With the shift to growing cotton, producers became impacted by
gluts etc. The periodic collapse of prices pushed them
into debt.
In the USA is the United States of America. merchants pushed inland
displacing factors due to the better transportation and
communication infrastructure deployed after the war in the
American South. Railroads uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
integrated local towns removing the need for factors'
supplies. Manufacturers pushed for reduced
transaction costs. By standardization and formalizing the
operation of exchanges these market places could support both
trades and futures. Formal processes protected buyer and
seller and supported arbitration. Trust and distrust are evolved responses to sham emotions. During a friendship where no sham emotions have been detected trust will build up. and kin networks is a strategy of selfish genes, which aims to maximize gene survival & replication across all the bodies where a copy of the gene probably exists: relatives. Altruism is beneficial to gene replication in this situation. Love supports the agent's prioritization of appropriate altruistic strategies. E. O. Wilson was originally an advocate of kin selection but subsequently concluded that there is no mechanism by which it can operate. He abandoned kin selection and now asserts neo-group selection is responsible for the effects. Sapolsky describes an array of strategies used to identify kin: - Genetically shaped pheromonal signatures. Rodents leverage the immune systems MHC super variable gene regions to develop unique signals. The more similar the signals are the closer is the relative. Pregnancy triggers adult neurogenesis in the olfactory system of rat mothers to allow them to learn the smell of their newborn.
- Imprinting on the female whose birdsong a chick heard while still in the egg
- Degree of paternalism depending on likelihood of being the father in primates
- Humans use cognition
were no
longer required. Cotton could be traded as a commodity
allowing consolidation down to a small number of high volume
market places. A world price allowed speculation in
futures contracts and vastly increased trading volume.
Planters and factors lost power.
The new cotton
imperialism
In 1910 Japan occupies Korea. The Japanese aimed in part
to replace Japanese dependency on British Indian cotton.
Korean farmers 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. already
grew subsistence cotton. The Japanese aimed to recast this
farming in the British Indian model.
Cloning and mutation of the European colonial cotton CAS
occurred across the world. States leveraged power to
recast captured countryside. Using the US is the United States of America. cotton meme demonstrated by
the Egyptians and Ottomans, Korea, West Africa and Central
Africa were captured and transformed.
Using violence and coercion the new subjects were incorporated
into the cotton growing complex by:
- Constructing infrastructure
- Creating new labor regimes
- Recasting local social structures
Value captured from cotton then strengthened the colonial
state.
But between 1893 & 1913, as worldwide consumption grew (the
US consumed more of the product for example) and plants were
attacked by boll weevils in 1892, cotton prices rose for the
first time in 25 years. Additionally speculators
manipulated the market. Colonial states responded by
adopting the goal of raw material independence:
- Russia pushed into Central Asia in the 1860s, adding: Railroads uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust.
, Seed
plantations, Irrigation projects, Leveraged US seed, Built
gins and provided credit.
- UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. expanded control of
India and Egypt.
- US expanded into the hinterlands with new railways, and
moved west adding Texas, Arizona and California.
- Europeans focused on African expansion adding colonies and
cotton growing.
Colonizers had to apply labor to the appropriated land.
Unlike the basic US model
three methods were used:
- Indigenous farmers continued to grow cotton and then sell
it to western merchants (India).
- Settle formerly nomadic tribes (Central Asia).
Initially made them share croppers but eventually shifted
them over to wage labor.
- Settlers from elsewhere organized plantations of
indigenous people (Algeria, German East Africa, Mexico,
Argentina).
The colonizers recast the class structure and reduced investment
in local food crops resulting in terrible famines is declared when: - One in five households in a specific area face extreme food shortages
- More than 30% of the population is acutely malnourished
- Two people in 10,000 die each day
and 20% collapse in
the populations.
The return of
the global south
Beckert explains the impacts of the global network on
Ahmedabad. As its export dependent countryside was hit by
price reductions during the mid-19th century local bankers could
not lend money at low risk. Local merchants were locked
out of global markets. So around 1870 they shifted 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). into cotton
manufacturing. The investors in Ahmedabad were interlinked
by caste and religion.
By 1918 this shift to local manufacturing had developed fifty
one cotton mills with 35,000 laborers.
And this transformation was replicated across the global south
undermining the colonial home manufacturing industry.
Manchester reduced from 61% in 1860 to 34% by 1930 having failed
to overcome:
- Lost markets (India and China between 1918 and
1938).
- Higher wages driven by workers having the vote, and
focusing their power through trade unions. Beckert
notes that union power was a significant part of Russia's
1917 revolution.
- Old machines.
The US is the United States of America. and European
manufacturing nodes similarly collapsed in the 1930s. The
US demonstrated greater flexibility in its response. It's
state based structures and market
segmentation limited the development of union power. The
US shifted cotton manufacturing from the North to the Southern
states with their low costs and constrained labor.
The global south included manufacturing strategists who debated
how to resist the disruption.
The Chinese argued that industry was the best defense.
They aimed to join the game leveraging Western technology.
But the goal was difficult to achieve since there were competing
elite ideas including slave holding cotton growers.
The abolition of slavery provided the catalyst for a change in
Brazil in 1888.
Japan, like Brazil, faced huge cheap cotton textile
imports. While the political elite were not industrialists
they needed a new strategy to save their wealth 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 power. So
the Meiji restoration was aligned to leveraging new
technologies. The government promoted cotton
industrialization. They switched supply to low cost
Chinese cotton. They adopted new labor system that made
unmarried women available as low cost labor. They resisted
any protections for workers in the cotton industry. They
encouraged government bureaucrats to become entrepreneurs.
And they provided research and funding. Merchants
leveraged the new rules, infrastructure etc. and built factories
with huge scale. The government used war to gain colonies
with cotton and other valuables used to substitute shipping
industry and to replace revenues lost to raw cotton
imports.
Economic 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. elites working
within colonies had extra inhibitors to overcome. Egypt
could not remove these forces until tariffs were reformed in the
1930s to protect the cotton industrialists.
Indian industrialists leveraged merchant capital built up during
years of high cotton prices. Indian merchants pushed out
of the raw cotton industry by Europeans invested in industrial
cotton mills which had explosive growth between 1880 and
1929. But India was still molded by Britain and by 1880
80% of the yarn went to China.
Commercialization of the countryside created:
- New markets for industrial goods.
- Provided a low cost labor pool.
In response Manchester lobbied for laws to reduce Indian labor
competitiveness. Britain was keen to deindustrialize the
Indian countryside to increase the market for UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. products. Tata and the
other Indian Industrialists were joined by freedom fighters
including M. Gandhi. They pushed to limit the forces
Britain was deploying:
- Stopped the excise duty on cotton goods.
- Advocated consumption of domestically produced textiles
(1905).
Still, unlike the freedom fighters, the industrialists agreed
with the colonial goal of reforming the countryside as a market
for cotton products and a source of labor. The
industrialists could gain a home market by import
substitution.
The 1946-47 decolonizations allowed the radical integration of
state and capital:
- Egypt added barriers to trade. Nasser nationalized
the cotton industry in 1960s.
- India,
- China post revolution nationalized the cotton industry and
massively expanded it.
The weave
and the weft: An epilogue
By 1963 Europe's domination of the cotton CAS was over. It
was disrupted by US is the United States of America. global VDS is value delivery system. with World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
, IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities: - US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
, WTO is the World Trade Organization. , GATT the general agreement on tariffs and trades is a legal framework for controlling trading between nations. Part of the world-wide trading infrastructure put in place by the West after World War 2. , Wall Street 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). and Merchants
leveraging the low cost network of producers. US is the United States of America. and EU is European Union, the 1992 Maastricht Council of Ministers meeting agreed evolution of the ECSC & CAP cartels to include: - A single market across the members' countries supporting the transformation of the ECSC. It maintained the CAP transfers assisting French farmers.
- A fixed currency 'snake' that allowed the ECSC to operate, binding the deutschmark to the other currencies of participating members: a mini Bretton Woods exchange rate mechanism; that became a single currency, the euro, managed by an independent ECB (based on the independent German Bundesbank); but tax gathering was allocated to the states whose leaders control the Council of Ministers and no effective mechanism was provided to reallocate revenues. This has left Germany with an advantage supported by the aggregate valuation of the euro and not having to flow tax revenues to the weaker economies of the south.
use subsidies to reduce the
price of domestic cotton products which are pushed onto the
world market keeping global prices low.
The key players are now:
- Growers - China, India, Uzbekistan (forced labor
policies), Senegal; Typically growers lack power.
Communist states invested in irrigation, fertilizers and
machinery.
- Spinning and weaving: China, Turkey and Pakistan.
- Manufactured cotton goods: Bangladesh &
Vietnam.
- Retailers (Merchants): Wal-Mart,
Metro, Carrefour; which dominate the supply chain using pull
to control the flows. The merchants benefited from the
global countryside's new dependence on commodity production
and consumption. They have developed global brands,
sales channels and organization of production.
Beckert concludes the essential element is the ability to
adapt. Civilization and barbarity are linked at the
hip. The cotton CAS has been leveraging:
- The world's countryside to support its
transformations.
- Coercion and violence.
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.
CAS theory views the evolution of
the cotton trade over time as based on the This page reviews Christensen's disruption
of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and
business.
disruptive effects of global
interconnection of Europe to the early cotton nodes in Asia, Africa, and the
Americas.
- Building on John
Hawkins's deployment of a superior weapon system - the
race-built galleon, England and Holland developed
their expertise in rough sea shipping into a global
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 amplifier
supporting the 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.
flow and control
of goods between Asia, Africa, Europe and the
Americas. As is
typical superior weapons and accompanying strategic
shifts to leverage them reciprocate. Subsequently both
the weapon system and amplifier became the basis for
- Europe reengineering
the cotton trade into an
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.
evolved
amplifier: state
chartered privateers projected power to:
- Constrain the flow of cotton and revenues by use of
privateer and British navy race-built galleons with long
slim hulls and large gun decks.
- Steven
Johnson argues that imported high quality Indian
finished cotton goods became driving fashion items in
London as early as the 1690s, encouraging the development
of sales and marketing systems. RSS is Rob's Strategy Studio concludes Europe
leveraged
This page describes the consequences of the asymmetries caused
by genotypic traits
creating a phenotypic signal in males and selection activity
in the female - sexual selection.
The impact of this asymmetry is to create a powerful alternative
to natural selection with sexual
selection's leverage of positive returns.
The mechanisms are described.
sexual selection to
drive purchasing of highly attractive calico & chintz
adornments.
- Introduce a disruptive cotton growing system based on
flexible supply of African slaves to drive down costs and
rapidly expand the plantation workforce as demand
required.
- Use overwhelming military force to grab native land to
add capacity to the plantation system as
needed.
- Ships provide infrastructure amplifier to triangularly
transport labor, and goods.
- Superior product (cotton) and low cost drive access to
and development of European markets further expanding
profitability.
- 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). captured
by Liverpool merchants builds wealth 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. , influence and
alignment with English state and flexibility to invest in
development of markets and technologies.
- New state's laws: enclosure and factory acts; and
mechanisms of enforcement: army, police and prisons; were
used to encourage and coerce the population into aligning
with the needs of manufacturers, through:
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
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 frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 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 extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
education, wages, local
garrisons, enforcement of contracts and punishment of
debtors.
- Bootstrapping
English manufacturing required protection from the
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.
global network centered on
Liverpool's merchants. Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows. They can enforce
separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build
diversity. Examples of different types of barriers: physical
barriers, chemical
molecules can form membranes, probability based,
cell membranes can include controllable
channels, eukaryotes
leverage membranes, symbiosis, human emotions, chess, business; and
their effects are described.
Barriers
limit This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the
expression of new phenotypic
effects within an agent.
extended phenotypic alignment
allowing local competition to build differentiated This page discusses the benefits of geographic clusters of agents and resources at the center of a complex adaptive
system (CAS).
geographic clusters.
- The post
revolution US developed into a hydra-like superorganism is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents. The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson. These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche. Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains. He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity. So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity. For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions. And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy. It depends on inter-agent signalling. In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence. Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows. A superorganism has a development and operational phase. As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification. Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors.
.
- The Liverpool
cotton exchange developed a
This page discusses the interdependence of perception and
representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Hofstadter
and Mitchell's research with Copycat is
reviewed. The bridging of a node from a network of 'well
known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed
as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and
abstractly.
perception
and representation architecture. This allowed
the exchange to 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 and then
to integrate the Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.
This page reviews how these events become signals associated
with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS signals emerge from
the Darwinian information
model. Signals can indicate decision
summaries and level of uncertainty.
signals and 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.
actions from across the global
cotton network. This ensured brain like 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.
coordination and focusing of the
superorganism. Rather than oppose the direct thrust of some environmental flow agents
can improve their effectiveness with indirect responses.
This page explains how agents are architected to do this and
discusses some examples of how it can be done.
Indirection
was added to
improve the 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 and
throughput of the infrastructure amplifier. It also
ensured transactional robustness, using standardization
and insurance reduces volatility in standard of living by compensating for losses of income during periods of unemployment, for catastrophic losses from disaster, or death of a family income earner as described by Gordon. Insurance companies must set aside reserves to handle such claims. Britain initially required that insurance buyers also have an insurable interest. That is required in insurance markets to ensure buyers of insurance don't destroy their asset just to obtain the insurance. Health insurance is treated separately being unusual, since the subscriber is likely to know more about their state of health than the insurer is and the subscriber is more likely to purchase the health insurance when aware of their increased risk. This behavior collapses the risk pool by: forcing the insurer to increase the premiums, and encouraging healthy individuals to opt out of health insurance coverage. to
build ubiquity
of supply and payments.
This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the
expression of new phenotypic
effects within an agent.
Extended phenotypic alignment pressured
the US to return the freed slaves to low cost cotton
growing. The need to borrow 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.
merchant
capital to purchase crops and supplies soon trapped the
growers in debt as competition and weather removed
pricing power. 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.
In the USA Earl
Butts eventually replaced this corrosive process with
oil based fertilizers, food storage and minimum price
guarantees. Others
within the global network responded to the pressure
for alignment. Further strategies layered on top
ensured the continued alignment (Aug
2017):
- Housing was zoned with actions by Federal and state
officials along with realtors across the country limiting
access by blacks to housing in other areas. This
access constraint later became an amplifier of the
resource divide as a Federal
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
amplifier provided additional capital to those who
owned housing.
- Education was funded from local resources ensuring
poorly financed, illiterate areas remained so.
Bussing appeared to remove the constraint but the funding
for the education and bussing was drawn from the local
resources to be provided to fund the education and
transport. This 'black gold' further reduced the
resources of the poor areas ensuring that officials in
these areas would work to curtail the bussing
programs. This education based strategy is still
present in current US public education policy: ESEA is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 signed by LBJ. It is the framework later used to develop 'No child left behind'. ESEA's original titles include:
- Provides funding to local school districts to improve the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. The original authors worried that local and state authorities might use the federal money to replace rather than supplement their budgets to poor schools. When this was found to be the case Congress amended the act in 1970 requiring districts to spend Title 1 dollars on additional education for poor children (supplement), above and beyond what they already received from other sources (not supplant).
- Preparing, training and recruiting high quality teachers and principals
- Language instruction for limited English proficient and immigrant students
- Educational research and training
- Grants to strengthen state departments of education
- Aid to handicapped children
title 1 funding
allocation responses (May
2016).
- The
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.
justice system was
integrated:
- The global structures: IMF is the International Monetary Fund developed as part of the Bretton Woods agreements to provide liquidity to national gold denominated reserve banks at times of stress in the global financial network - a shortage of a particular currency which was inhibiting trade; in support of a broader Bretton Woods framework designed so as to ensure that currencies did not become misaligned with one another, and were a fair representation of what things were worth. The IMF removed the need for nations to depend on private loans from commercial banks, such as Britain's dependence on J. P. Morgan during the 1920s and 30s. The agreement required each Bretton Woods signatory to provide a capital investment or 'quota' into the fund which would subsequently correspond to the amount that the country could borrow from the fund in times of financial stress. The top four countries and their quotas were set by IMF architect, Harry Dexter White, to match FDR's priorities:
- US - $2.9 billion, an amount the FDR administration could transfer from Exchange Stabilization Fund without any need to ask for Congress for funds.
- UK - $1.45 billion
- USSR - slightly less than UK quota
- China - less than USSR.
,
World Bank was setup as part of the Bretton Woods agreements, as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to repair and reconstruct Europe after the Second World War and as the World Bank continues to provide reconstruction and development resources for projects in developing economies. It includes: - International Finance Corporation
, NGO is non governmental organization. s; used to support
Haiti after the 2010 earthquake further illustrate the
features of alignment. Most of the aid financing is
captured by western corporations used by the western NGOs
to execute on the aid plan. Underlying the process
is a core US is the United States of America. goal of
limiting the power and control that will flow to the
government in Haiti. The infrastructure of the NGOs
was designed with this goal in mind. The development
of cotton manufacturing using aid in a special zone should
support jobs for Haitians. But these are typically
very poorly paid. The low priced cotton goods
manufactured help keep the global prices low.
- The low cost business model created by the global cotton network
This page reviews Christensen's disruption
of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and
business.
disrupted the global South's traditional cotton
production system.
Beckert's exceptional and detailed book shows how the current
world power and financial structures This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emerged,
and developed into their current states. The
transformation catalyzed by cotton is a key demonstration of CAS
principles in action.
.
 Politics, Economics & Evolutionary Psychology |
Business Physics Nature and nurture drive the business eco-system Human nature Emerging structure and dynamic forces of adaptation |
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integrating quality appropriate for each market |
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