Marcus wrote: > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > In my experience those societies that have some homogeneity also are > > the most tolerant and therefore diverse ideas do emerge. Sweden and > > even Poland. > > > Make the group like the individual and vice versa and then > self-preservation is group-preservation, and vice versa. > It risks making the group slower moving, but a collective > cognition is a > potential economy of scale. Does one want to optimize for > diverse ideas > or strong execution on a few ideas? The latter can be very > profitable > and have excellent survival characteristics, especially in the United > States.
I think the developed world is a really remarkable new thing on earth. It's huge, but still doubles in size and complexity approximately every 20 years. Clearly one of the things it prospers from is an incredible tolerance and need for all different kinds of skills and interests. When you earn money, you have no idea what your customer will do with the product you give to them and neither do they know what you'll do with the money you're paid. It's a marvelous and essential fact of how things work in an economy, that every exchange essentially has no purpose, because the next person in the exchanges of the usual 'earning-spending chain' is entirely free to do whatever they like with what they take away from it. What it does produce is the kind of well oiled machine that no one in a billion years could possibly design, or even actually understand. What takes a while to see is that we are actually in danger of loosing that, because of a certain intolerance built into the other form of economic exchange, the 'saving-investment chain'. That's the one with exponential strings attached to each transaction that form a rigid behavioral requirement for the recipients. You must add a percent to the pile if you're to remain in business. It may well be that settled and cohesive societies that have low social barriers and general tolerance for individual differences, treating everyone as an equal, will more readily respond to change and successfully answer threats to their survival. I think I observe something of the kind in the response of the low crime areas of New York City to the crack epidemic in the 80's. The curves clearly show that they responded much earlier and much more effectively to the scourge that overtook the 'wild cowboy' neighborhoods of East New York, Brownsville, Harlem and the South Bronx. Social structure does matter, but 30 doublings, a reasonable estimate of the multiplication of wealth since the modern age of growth began, is more than the acceleration of a meter per second, a nice slow walk, to the speed of light. The plan for the earth is to keep doubling the size and complexity of our own lives and impacts on the planet every 20 years or so, forever. We call it 'stability'. The question is, what sort of mind notices such curious things? Is it an efficient one, skipping all the non-essential tasks? Is it one that's comfortable with the way things are, is tolerant and helps people get along? Or is it one with a habit of poking around and shaking things up? I observe nature is a mix, and if you don't know all three of those ways of getting along, you're not up to speed. > David Breecker wrote: > > If Paul is correct, this is fascinating. Perhaps there is some > > minimum threshold of confidence in the integrity of our > "self," beyond > > which we can afford to be tolerant of the "other" > Not just integrity of self, but more-seriously the reliability of the > leadership of the collective. There's no point in serving an ideal > that isn't individually beneficial if the ideal it serves has been > compromised by corruption. It seems to me a society (or > organization) > with sufficient wealth to nurture the development of complex > skills, and > a culture that valued full utilization of the individual, > could be very > healthy and still protect itself from competing strategies. However, > it's not clear that psychological health and performance are tightly > correlated. I mean, even if corporate workers are miserable, it > depends whether they are operating at 20% or 80% mental efficiency > compared to their peers in a more Utopian system. Self-esteem is very hard to come bye sometimes, and it's equally difficult for others to nourish in an individual that is an unknown commodity. My 19 year old son is in that in-between world, where there's relatively very little evidence of his taking charge, so that his parents are apt to leap at any small sign. It certainly helps to remember that I was a lot worse, though, so I also sympathize with the parents who were prodigies and have normal kids. 'Finding one's self' is not an efficient process, and steadily doubling the amount of learning required for basic functioning in the 'collective' is problematic. I think the 'leadership of the collective', as Marcus puts it, is showing a peculiar negligence in this regard. We're simply not making a world that's possible to operate in a huge variety of ways. Our leaders today are the kind who drive the ship of state off an obvious cliff and then crawl out of the wreck on the barren canyon floor talking confidently about how they're finally getting the knack of steering. It could almost make one intolerant... ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
