I don't agree with Keith's seven points.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of michael gurstein Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2011 10:54 AM To: 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; 'Ed Weick' Subject: Re: [Futurework] 2NYTimes.com: Where the Jobs Aren't Keith, To reply to your 7 pointers below. To talk about something being "status-driven" is really not very helpful. The notion of "status" is complex and multiple and the closer you get to it the less it tells you. It is one of those "portmanteau" terms which means everything and nothing--rather like the terms "intelligence"and "race". In fact, one could quite easily substitute either of those terms into your use of "status" with little loss of deeper meaning/comprehension although there would of course, be different affects and even quasi-political implications depending on the current orthodoxies. Best, (the other) Mike -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 11:39 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, ,EDUCATION; Ed Weick Subject: Re: [Futurework] 2NYTimes.com: Where the Jobs Aren't Ed, I didn't specifically mention groups with "underlying motivational belief systems" but they were implied by the seven pointers. For example, Pointer 1 suggests that we shouldn't be surprised by the existence of smaller groups within the much larger nation-state societies of today. Although I didn't mention belief systems specifically, Pointer 4 implies that they will be taught (and created) in children before the age of puberty. Thus, groups which are isolated, or at least spend a great deal of their social time together, will readily form distinctive cultures of their own. And, allying this with Pointer 6, such cultures can persist for generations. So, yes, I agree with you that the Mennonites, Hutterites and so on can supply valuable benefits to their members when the larger governing system is deficient. I expect we'll see the emergence of many more distinctive groups in the coming years as the Great Recession deepens and grinds most of the population down in the advanced countries. Keith At 16:03 07/09/2011, you wrote: Keith, I don't disagree with your with your "seven pointers as to human nature", but one thing thing that is missing is the possibility of an underlying motivational belief system that drives people to work cooperatively and in each others' interests and can even, in some cases, trump self-interest. I've seen such systems at work in Mennonite, Hutterite and other strongly religious communities. I saw such a system at work in central Costa Rica when I did some work there a few years ago. Many of the important things -- electricity distribution, coffee grinding, banking, health, etc. -- were looked after by cooperatives. In wondering why, I had to conclude that the enormous Catholic churches in the middle of each major town must have had something to do with it. IMHO, belief systems are vital to human behavior whether that behavior is cooperative or based on self-interest. In capitalist society we generally operate out of self-interest and if we are asked why, we usually explain it in terms of the economic principles and paradigms founded by Adam Smith and other early economists. In societies in which cooperation tends to trump self-interest, the rational is often based on something like Acts 4 in the Bible in which the disciples put all of their personal possessions together because they had decided that they belonged to the common good. In the current world, cooperatives were typically founded by religious people. The largest cooperative in the world, the Mondragon system in the Basque country of Spain was founded by a Catholic priest. In Canada, during the Great Depression, we had the cooperative movement founded by Father Coady in the Maritime provinces. At the time, the cooperative movement was also strong on the prairies, pushed by people like Tommy Douglas, a Baptist Minister. Later, Douglas became a founding father of our universal health care system. I'm not saying that the seven pointers you list are not real or important, but I do think that people have shown that they can be transcended and that we can be much larger than they make us appear to be. Ed From: Keith Hudson <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; "RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, September 7, 2011 1:54:31 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] 2NYTimes.com: Where the Jobs Aren't Mike, A superb piece of writing if I might say so. There's only one place where I would disagree with you. You write:: <<<< (MS) But economic and social systems -- large, complex systems the elements of which are people, families, voluntary congeries and collocations of people, the abstract entities people engender (sovereign states, money, religions) -- exceed, not just our computing power but, so far at least, our intellectual power to model in a way that takes into account the human, civic, social and experiential aspects of the world. >>>> In the last few decades, the human life sciences, and particularly that of evolutionary biology, are now giving us some clear pointers as to human nature. Here are seven of them which can be stated as firmly as any of the other scientific "truths" which we use so far in shaping our cultures and daily lives: 1. Humans work best in small groups; 2. Human societies, whether small or large, are status-driven; 3. Sexual partners (and the instinctive need for parenthood) are generally driven by female choice, and females generally choose males of higher social rank within their available culture; 4. The educability and level of curiosity of the human brain, and concomitant personality traits, are almost completely set by puberty; 5. The homeostatic setting of human emotions is set wider than any other mammal, thus we are capable of swinging between extreme cruelty and extreme altruism; 6. Proportionately we have far more non-coding DNA than genes and this gives a far wider (epigenetic) susceptibility to environmental conditions than other species and this, too, is heritable (though not as permanently as discrete genetic inheritance); 7. Humans are the only species that has discovered the benefits of trading between disparate cultures and thus gaining mutual survival benefits. Because the above have arrived relatively late in the scientific scene, they are barely understood, never mind being accepted, by more than a relative minority at the present time. It will likely take another generation or two before these start to register as guiding principles for human governance. Keith At 08:25 07/09/2011, you wrote: Ray wrote: > The question of the design of large systems is at the root of it. > I've brought that up several times here to a deafening silence from > everyone. You don't believe it, or you don't understand? Well, Ray, the "design of large systems" is pretty general. What direction do you thing we should take with it? Or prime model for large, complex systems that work -- that work nearly magically -- is biology and the biosphere. But the reticular dynamic system of living things was designed by an evolutionary process red in tooth and claw; "ruthless" if you like to anthropomorphize it; utterly stochastic if you don't. We have way to duplicate the evolutionary process and if we did, it would defy and defeat our purposes; social Darwinism deserves its bad name. The evolutionary process doesn't care about individual organisms, species or biomes. What happens happens and what survives is what is. If we're designing large complex systems for society, we accept (or most of us claim to do so) additional restraints imposed by our notions or human worth, human equality, civility and even kindness. It is, however, noteworthy that human worth, kindness and similar humanistic considerations don't show up in most economic theory and often not in more general policy analyses, which latter often descend, through a sort of economic reductionism, to what mathematicians might call "degenerate" cases, cases in which the single variable of monetary value is the only determining factor. So we have a problem with the practice of designing such systems from the start: capitalism, economics and finance trump moral or humanistic considerations. So what would you like us to go from here? Wisdom, whether that of Native Indian shamans [1], that of Solomon or of other famously wise leaders, remains nonpareil but, first, apparently somewhat in short supply and, as well, inadequate to deal with large complex systems. The best, brightest and, yes, wisest among us can no longer take care of us. That's because wisdom is the expression of intuition -- thinking that occurs below the objective, articulate level of awareness -- that emerges from objective knowledge and reflection. Only in large, complex systems, no single brain can encompass enough of the system for the traditional mechanisms of wisdom to work. Okay, where intuition and wisdom fail, we -- since the enlightenment -- are inclined to turn to theory, hypotheses about the nature of large complex systems in general. We have a number of such theoretical avenues: modeling [2], catastrophe theory [3], complexity theory, self-organizing systems [4], chaos theory [5], adaptive systems [6] among others. All of these have proven to be useful. Why, then, haven't they fixed us up, addressed your concern? Because they've proved useful in particle physics, in fluid dynamics and aeronautics, robotics, weather prediction, at the cost of enormous effort on the part of scientists able to master the math, program the computers, imagine the algorithms and intuit directions for experiment. These systems are composed of atoms, molecules, clouds, data bits -- indiividual elements any one or any million of which are, in themselves, insignificant, dispensible. But economic and social systems -- large, complex systems the elements of which are people, families, voluntary congeries and collocations of people, the abstract entities people engender (sovereign states, money, religions) -- exceed, not just our computing power but, so far at least, our intellectual power to model in a way that takes into account the human, civic, social and experiential aspects of the world. Indeed, I have some fear that the emergence of theoretical success with large, complex systems will lead, sooner or later, to subverting all of those aspects that we would like to preserve. Advertising, propaganda, "public relations" and related trades have, in fact, already exploited the psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science and other achievements of the last 100 years to sell us crap, make us believe foolishness, ignore what's on the ends of our forks, conform to pernicious social paradigms and more. Jeez, Ray, Skinner was a bumbling jerk, Bernays was an anachronistic outlier and Hitler got all distracted and off-message because of his personal demons. And those guys didn't have any good theoretical base for large, complex systems. What are the Next Guys with good theory, good software, correct systems concepts and all that -- what are *they* going to do for us? > The question of the design of large systems is at the root of it. > I've brought that up several times here to a deafening silence from > everyone. So here you go: non-silence. > You don't believe it, or you don't understand? I believe it. What don't we understand? I barely understand the references cited infra. Where do you suggest we go from here? - Mike [1] Pardon me if that's the wrong, or even a politically incorrect, term. Priest? You know what I mean. [2] E.g. "Discrete Event System Specification", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEVS [3] E.g. see ch. 17 of Catastrophe Theory and Its Applications, Tim Poston & Ian Stewart, 1978, Dover Publications. [4] E.g., see The Origins of Order, Stuart Kauffman, 1993, Oxford U. Press. [5] E.g. see Chaotic Dynamics: an introduction, G.L. Baker & J.P. Gollub, 1990, Cambridge U. Press [6] E.g. see Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity , John Holland, 1995, Addison-Wesley -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ <http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A 0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0> ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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