Acuity multiscale

One statement in favor of awareness on more than one scale is this old adage: Think globally, act locally.

Objective balance?

Wouldn't it be nice if folks with diverse perspectives could agree on integrative elements of an approach to regional policy, regardless of disagreements about how to weigh and accomplish those goals. What if this approach also: (i) puts the full range of issues on the table, (ii) outlines ways to objectively monitor progress toward those goals, (iii) helps explain past difficulties at coming to agreement, and (iv) has deep roots in more than one field of science and mathematics?

Layered-niche network models, that track correlations with respect to skin, family and culture, may be able to do all of these things. However, it will take critical input from all perspectives to put them to use. If you want to hear more, or better still to inform these approaches to your perspective, now is a good time to speak up.

Question etiquette

Is it a good idea to answer any question asked by the media? My answer to this question is no, since the idea-set that underlies the question may not be well chosen.

The above question IS hopefully worth answering. Ideas now travel the globe in very short times. Those who reinforce bad idea-sets by obediently manning any side of a weak or ill-posed question both: (i) help the bad idea propagate and (ii) falsely legitimize un-informed pursuits by those lined up on both sides of the question.

Do people ever make this mistake? It seems to me that among others, "stereotypers" (who cartoonify folks and often champion single-scale causes) and "progressives" (who attempt in sometimes muddled ways to address challenges on more than one scale) both make the mistake frequently. The latter often do it thereby aiding the former with their xenophobic labels, while the former often do it thereby aiding stereotypers against whom they discriminate.

What are some examples of this? I'll offer two. According to linguist George Lakoff, progressives often take the wrong side of a bad issue (like whether to set a date in advance for withdrawal from some conflict or election) instead of attacking the poor choice of question while offering a better one. This may require standing up to mono-scale cartoonifiers (including media reps) who claim that arguing against a bad question is beating around the bush. Such reframing of bad questions had thus better be done clearly and succinctly.

Another example involves possible responses to non-government violence against citizens. The strongest narrative may not involve "wars against terror by an axis of evil", especially if such phrases help groups with no (or poor) track record at governance to act like governing adversaries either militarily, or in their ability to bring order to the lives of everyday folk. Instead it might be better, for example, to ridicule those making the neolithic claim that "it's OK to treat others as subhuman" and to demonstrate that we can better help sustain folks' lives on multiple levels than can they.

Monkey missions

Depending on your point of view, you might think of the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV as EITHER a bad thing for kids OR as cutting-edge information technology. Regardless a comparison of "missions" in GTA4 to the primate activities illustrated by David Attenborough in the "Social Climbers" episode of BBC's Life of Mammals might convince you that the economic success of GTA relies on the creative placement of neolithic stereotypes (and projectile weapons) into a jungle rich in modern human structures and styles.

Before being hasty and turning up your nose up at such marketing strategies, you might want to consider the universal primate-appeal of other aspects of your behavior. From competitive social hierarchy, through family loyalties and play with friends, to the enthusiasm for a good meal, our communities are built on niche structures familiar from primate communities, as well as on commitment to loftier cultural and scientific goals.

One step toward moving beyond such strategies may be to recognize the legitimate basis for their appeal. That is, moving past our neolithic limitations may be helped by recognition that we have them to begin with.

Collaborative coding

Wiki collaboratives are one of various new and important processes that are evolving as I write this, on the back of emerging technology for electronic communcation. To see what I mean, create a user ID on Wikipedia and add pages of interest to your watch list so you can monitor developments and discussion about them from day to day.

The evolution of these processes is exciting (and problematic) because they could help to organically regulate the expression of idea codes, much as metazoan cells regulate the expression of molecule codes, by informing them to processes operating on multiple scales. There is still a long way to go on this, however, and each spare neuron that we can offer counts!

Taking the bait

One of those neolithic buttons, that globe-trotting ideas push, triggers xenophobia. Taking the bait means that, once pressed, the drumbeat that "subhumans threaten" competes for attention with sustainability issues like community health.

For instance "lose-lose" situations now unfolding in Africa suggest that taking the bait is a long-term recipe for state failure, through oscillatory cycles of indiscriminate response and reactions thereto. Jared Diamond points to older examples in his book "Collapse". Have you noticed other examples say in the past 100 years?

Unfortunately focus on community health is not a useful sound byte, since it involves multiple scales of time, space, and organization. Nonetheless avoiding the bogeyman button could help us do what we can to strengthen all communities involved.

Dollars and longevity are not the whole story. The most robust measure of progress (or its lack) may be niche-layer multiplicity i.e. the extent to which individuals in a community are able to: (i) stay fit, (ii) cultivate friendships, (iii) care for a family, (iv) function as a citizen, (v) participate in a culture, and (vi) contribute as observer to our understanding of the world around.

What fraction of your time have you managed to spend on each of these things in the last week? If your ability to do some of these things is starting to suffer, then perhaps you too will benefit from a collective effort to make these things possible for all. How can I help?

Monoscale thought

James Fallows' November 2002 article in The Atlantic Monthly on Iraq as "The fifty-first state?" described the long-term commitment that later materialized. Institutions making sub-prime loans at this time were also selling long-term commitment while thinking on only one scale.

The arguments given at the time did little to inform resulting decisions to the consequences they would have in other places, at other times, and on other levels of organization. Considering more than one opinion in these cases may have helped.

Such examples might also say this about second opinions: If those who disagree with you look like cartoons, then you may be mistaking the world that you live in for a cartoon world. The real choices that we have are seldom so simple.