Tuesday, March 24, 2015

The Deeper Meaning Of Entrepreneurism ... Aggregate-Entrepreurism

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

If a collection of cells (you) can act entrepreneurially, why can't a collection of 330 million citizens act as a team? They can? How? How often WILL they? And why not all of the time, or at least more often than we have been cooperating recently?

How do we get our nation to explore it's aggregate options?

First, recruit an electorate to recognize and explore their BIGGEST options? Please tell me, if you know where to start, and how to do that. Clearly, there are many options. How do we most productively explore those aggregate options?

Now THAT is an interesting topic!

How can a RAIDLY EXPANDING auto-catalytic aggregate continuously reform both its internal-feedback sensing AND external-scouting strategies to constantly re-extract adaptive, aggregate context modeling from its (exponentially expanding? factorially expanding?) "option space?" (More plainly, simply explore its rapidly expanding options.)

Why, that would make us an Entrepreneurial Aggregate! That would be a whole far greater than just the sum of our individual entrepreneurs, "entrepreneurially" sequestering resources back and forth FROM one another! :(

This is truly the "Evolving Aggregate's Task." In fact, it's quite obviously every aggregate's #1 task, by far.

Making aggregate option explorations a snap? Now that would be exciting. Much more so than just trivial tactical tasks.

That's obviously what happens when agile teams explore contexts. It's the most important task facing national aggregates, and probably the most neglected. That's what Context Nomads do, and we are all Context Nomads, all the time, whether we know it or not.

The deeper meaning of entrepreneurism is to occasionally turn away from frictions and sequestering existing resources FROM one another, to the rarely practiced activity of exploring aggregate options for creating not just more resources ... but actually creating a pool of resources another order of magnitude larger than what we could previously access. Total teamwork? What a mundane, but ignored, concept! :(

The simple truth is that we as an aggregate are always capable of creating more wealth than any of us can currently imagine. Yet instead, for spurious reasons, we spend most of our time hoarding what we've already got ... FROM one another, instead of optimally provisioning our most valuable asset, our aggregate teammates! That is embarrassingly dumb, and the opposite of being entrepreneurs.

How much of available aggregate information do we need, in order to perceive emerging, aggregate context? Not as much as we initially imagine. It's clearly a matter of data-sampling methods and context-modeling methods and option-exploration methods. Surely that's not to hard to practice, aka, between wars, not just during world wars?

A method to simplify pictures makes chemistry calculations a snap

We actually have mathematicians patenting algorithms for extracting data images from complex data sets.

Why patent? Exactly so we can constrain the adoption rate of the application of the advanced method just invented, for narrow vs aggregate gain. And thereby slow our aggregate adaptive rate? Do tell! When is too much of one method (patent protection) too much to bother with as an aggregate? When it's time to adjust, can we DISCERN when to make aggregate adjustments fast enough to keep from harming our aggregate selves? Do we have ways to even sense that, soon enough to matter? Or only long after the damage has been done?

And why slow the population penetration of new inventions at all? Do we really know what we are doing? Is too soon ever too soon?

Since those two tolerance limits change, how do we stay safely between them, and pursue that moving target?

Our application of our emerging knowledge parsing methodology is too timid.

Our emerging methods are too useful to be limited ONLY to compartively trivial applications such as medical imaging or molecular modeling.

What about modeling our own cultural context, and our our aggregate adaptive rate?

Really? What if we tried being an effective NATION? What would motivate us to try that? I mean, something other than another war?

No one person can supply adequate answers, but we can start asking more challenging questions of one another.


Peter Pan said...

We live in a socio-economic system where individuals and groups of individuals (businesses) compete against each other.

Competition takes place in a market where commodities (goods and services and labor) are exchanged for money.

For the producer, these exchanges are made in the hopes of obtaining profit.

Activities that do not yield profit are discouraged, limited, abandoned or are never undertaken.

The current model of commodity production has come to dominate our decision-making and our culture. Much of our time is spent sustaining this model, which in turn sustains our material needs, albeit inequitably.

The extent to which commodity production dominates the activities of our daily lives is the extent to which we are limited in exploring and realizing alternatives.

The incidence and scope of poverty among aggregate units (human beings) is also a limiting factor.

The extent to which our current systems waste human potential is an indication of the improvements that could be made.

Efforts made towards obtaining improvements through social engineering have failed disastrously.

Roger Erickson said...

Flat worm logic Bob?

You could have said that about any system anywhere in the universe, at any time during the last 13 Trillion years.

Don't get caught up in what is. The whole point is that what comes next always does. It always has, so far.

Peter Pan said...

Then why write about it?

Futurists write about what could be.
Historians write about what was.

You don't strike me as being either.

I'm comfortable criticizing the status quo. I enjoy wasting my time being a critic, but only up to a point. I suppose the reason I spend any time at all is because these are the conditions I am able to observe. What comes next after I die I can only wonder about.

Just how long do you expect to live?

Activists and hand-wringers amuse me. People seemingly driven to action or driven to writing about what ought to be. They are so caught up in 'what is' that they devote relatively little time to simply experiencing life.

And now we have a new word describing an old habit, the meme seekers. Evolution is too slow a process for them, so they look for a shortcut, a spark, that will set their dreams into motion. If they succeed, fame and fortune and recognition are sure to follow.

What happens if you succeed in articulating your thoughts to enough people? Will we get evolution at warp speed?

Tom Hickey said...

Another excellent posts, Roger. It should be the basis for developing a transition policy to a new economy based on it.

Comes down to two things, The first is the level of collective consciousness and the second is the general level of education. These are based to a great degree on the availability of leisure.

Freedom from constraint is the basis for freedom to choose, and freedom to choose is the basis for freedom for self-actualization.

The enduring question has been and remains, what is the good life in a good society. This is matter of individual unfolding of potential and also social unfolding of collective potential.

An ideal individual in an ideal society seeks to maximize both simultaneously since they are interdependent.

The first step is reducing the obstacles, and the greatest obstacle to individual development is ignorance and the greatest obstacle to social development is narrow self-interest.

Ignorance is removed by knowledge and self-interest is broadened by realization the potential of interdependence.

This is pretty basic stuff and not difficult to convey but the scale of the challenge means it needs to be institutional, and given the iron law of institutions that means overcoming a lot of prior investment in it not happening based on deeply entrenched ignorance and narrow self-interest.

Roger Erickson said...


Not exactly sure what you mean by "warp" - but yes, sustaining Adaptive Rate is what we call evolution. It's been going on for as long as we can tell. It's not clear what our reference for evolutionary "speed" is, but yes, we have more interdependencies to adjust all the time. More complex systems require more adjustments per moment & per unit, just to stay alive.

If we communicate enough, our descendants stay in the game.

Do YOU have kids?

Tom Hickey said...

Take a look at the timeline of history. With the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, and cheap abundant energy, economic growth went exponential.

Unfortunately, human development hasn't kept pace.

Now that is resulting in huge challenges that threaten economic setback and population culling.

Roger Erickson said...

Bankers & economists; were they born in a barn?

Choosing The Right Economic Policy In Real Time (Why That Is Not Easy)


Boo hoo. If it's so hard (for them), then they should have stepped aside back in the feudal age, and let more intelligent people take over.

Peter Pan said...

I don't have children Roger. Why do you ask?

Roger Erickson said...

I asked, since it would be a plausible explanation for your lack of affinity for subsequent generations.

Matt Franko said...

I would point out that we of mankind are now over 7B and counting...

Demonstrating the difference of the (post flood) surplus society more than anything imo...

Peter Pan said...

My affinity for subsequent generations is on par with a parent's affinity for other people's children.

Now compare that to the affinity of American society, and of the human species, towards subsequent generations.

Compare it to our treatment of our environment and its ecology.

And you're worried about maintaining adaptive rates.