nestedness & politics

Does some of the tension between humans on matters of group policy result from the fact that our social systems involve 6 layers of organization, but the individuals within them have only adapted (e.g. paleolithically) to do a good job with 4 or 5 layers at a time? If so, one consequence might be that unbalanced narratives are too easy to embrace.

Thus we've seen at various times tension between groups that prefer to focus their attention either inward or outward (but not both) from their boundaries of skin, family, or culture. For example looking only inward toward the interests of one's own culture, or looking outward too much toward questions of harmony between cultures, are both ways that this inward/outward balance sometimes fails.

On the adaptation of codes (molecular or idea) by trial and error i.e. concerning our approaches toward statistical inference, one might have also seen groups in which the above shortcoming manifests as a bias toward old data (as in tradition), toward new data (as in new opportunities), or in some cases even toward no data (as in "a mind made up").

What groups do you think of as falling into one of more of these unbalanced categories?

rights & blessings

Experience may be slowly telling us that citizenship is a privilege for all or for none, and not a right for only a select few.

Even the ability to choose between all, or none, may be a temporary blessing so we should treat it with care.

simple vs informed code

Another parallel between molecule-code and idea-code expression involves the tension between expression that is: (i) informed to many constraints (like that of regulated gene expression in eukaryotic metazoans) versus expression which is: (ii) oblivious to all except immediate goals (like use of twitter to manipulate others with no regard for the information's value in a larger context). Do these correlate, respectively, with the bloom and decline of multilayer complexity on our planet?

idea code DNA

Idea codes, stored digitally as either words or images, are the template for culture in much the same way that molecular codes, stored digitally in nucleic and amino acid chains, are the template for family. That means that we may want to take a bit more care with their archival value than some folks do with instant messages or with tweets. N'est-ce pas?

common sense

With help from a prodigious variety of "pre-analytic conditions", many already sense that metazoan life serves the preservation of layered complexity by means of work maintaining (i.e. fostering, nurturing, buffering) correlations between subsystems. In that context, task layer multiplicity (TLM) data simply examines the correlation layers (directed in/out from skin, family, and culture) to which attention is being directed by community participants.

scoring process-defocus

News media stories obsessed with a focus on organisms as agents (which naturally appeals to our paleolithic perceptions), with no mention of the processes eliciting organism behaviors, are taking us blindly down a path of decline for social complexity per capita, as obstacles to the support of healthy human communities unfold. Might we come up with some guidelines here for rating broadcasts according to this obsession, to perhaps help dispel some of the fog?

ideastream health

Folks in general model cause, effect, and opportunity in their environment in terms of fellow organisms. However the idea codes that we offer for replication (including those in joint-editing spaces like this) are the DNA of our future.

Anything we do to improve this awareness is perhaps worthwhile.

many words one idea

Just as there are many "units" for measuring ordered and/or disordered energy, like joules, calories, kilowatt hours, cubic feet of natural gas, and gallons of gasoline, so in the world of multilayer complex systems there are many names for correlations that look inward and outward from a boundary, as well as for the three broken-symmetry boundaries of most direct interest to metazoans.

In the latter case, for example with helpful suggestions from C. Robert Cloninger, consider the "trichotomy" of boundaries associated with metazoan life on earth i.e. in which organisms first learned to give special treatment first to self, then to family, then to culture:

Echoes of the 3 key "broken-symmetry" boundaries.

skin	family	culture
friends	community	profession
executive	legislative	judicial
self-directed	cooperative	transcendent
blaming ↔ responsible	asocial ↔ empathic	materialistic ↔ idealistic
insecure ↔ resourceful	hostile ↔ kind	conventional ↔ imaginative

Where else might one find this trichotomy being put to use?

For the in/out-ward looking subsystem-correlation direction, which recognizes a fundamental difference between tasks of interior nurturing and exterior taming, consider instead the dichotomy:

Echoes of the 2 key "boundary-related" directions.

inward-looking correlations	outward-looking correlations
yin	yang
self	friends
family	community
culture	profession
right	left
nurture	explore
religion	science
defense	offense

Different words, different boundaries, but the same underlying distinction. Perhaps the world is not as simple or as complex as we think, given that in each case the challenge is not "which column" but instead "how to strike a balance".

process before polity

What fraction of their time do folks in a given community get to spend on profession, culture, job, family, friends, and self? This question about processes going on may be worth asking, before we spend too much time making choices about policy or personality. What do you think?