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From the Strategy Conference…..

I found this interesting. It is science and technology journalist Micheal Specter at TED where he is blasting “science denial”:

I may be wrong, but I suspect that Specter’s political and perhaps, economic, views, are to the left of my own. That’s ok – he has a scientific-empirical-rational epistemology, which means there’s an intellectual common ground where debates can actually be resolved or final conclusions arrived at that can be recognized as sensible, even if disagreement based on value choices remained.

More and more, I run across people on the Left and Right using magical, tribalistic, emotionally atavistic or other variations of irrational thinking to justify their positions. Worse, this intellectual equivalent of grunting tends to be coupled with a churlishly defiant refusal to honestly consider the costs (monetary or opportunity) involved or the logical, and still less, the unintended, consequences. Am I just getting old, or is this social phenomena getting rapidly worse?

Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of because we are all, in varying degrees, ignorant about many things. The important choice as individuals and as a society is adopting an epistemology of rational-scientific-empiricism that, if steadily applied, allows us to chip away at our ignorance and become aware of our errors and solve problems.  On the other hand, adopting a posture of belligerent, stubborn, defense of our own ignorance by evading facts, logic and the conclusions drawn from the evidence of experience is the road to certain disaster.

Our epistemic worldview matters.

Oligarchy is not good.

 ….But as soon as the people got leaders, they cooperated with them against the dynasty for the reasons I have mentioned; and then kingship and despotism were alike entirely abolished, and aristocracy once more began to revive and start afresh. For in their immediate gratitude to those who had deposed the despots, the people employed them as leaders, and entrusted their interests to them; who, looking upon this charge at first as a great privilege, made the public advantage their chief concern, and conducted all kinds of business, public or private, with diligence and caution.

16    But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants.

                                                       – Polybius

I have made, from time to time, the observation that the elite in American society is trending in its favored policies toward conscious promotion of oligarchy. Over at The Committee of Public Safety, Joseph Fouche quoted a theorist, retired CIA analyst Patrick E. Kennon, who is a delighted advocate of a coming technocratic oligarchy:

“Now, as we enter the twenty-first century, the future of the nation-state is much in doubt…Indeed, tribalism has revived with a brutal savagery from Rwanda and Cambodia to the newly dissolved USSR and the newly unified Germany…At the same time, a kind of shadow empire…is being embraced by elites around the globe. UN bureaucrats and Greenpeace activists, Carlos the Jackal and Mother Theresa, Toyota and Amnesty International, the Cali drug cartel and the World Bank, people who worry about the dollar-yen ratio and people who worry about the ozone layer, all of these consciously or unconsciously look to empire for their profit or salvation. All of these have largely given up on the nation.”

Oligarchs elevate self-interest and class interest over national interest, it’s the signature of oligarchy, be it the Thirty Tyrants or the Soviet nomenklatura. Milovan Djilas knew what the hell he was writing about as much as did Thucydides.

What to do?

The proto-oligarchical class in America, the elite who are the product of “the good schools”, tend to embrace and celebrate progressive taxation and diversity as high moral principles. What if we applied them?

The gateway to membership in the elite and opportunities for fabulous wealth and power runs through the admissions offices of our best universities, the Ivy League and a few other select intitutions and a handful of old, highly exclusive, liberal arts colleges. What if we put a special surtax on the purchase of tuition on a sliding scale that correlated with how many generations that members of a family have matriculated at such schools? Plus a few other tweaks here and there.

For example, a student who is the first in their family to go to college and was accepted by Yale would not be taxed at all, perhaps instead, they would be subsidized with a free ride for four years. But someone like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, a Dartmouth grad who was the son of a Dartmouth grad and a Ford Foundation executive, his kids might face a steep penalty, maybe a $ 250,000 per annum fee on top of tuition, then an additional surcharge to their income tax rates if they entered government service or certain professions like, say, hedge fund management, for the next couple of decades. Entering a different field, say becoming a social worker, a bowling alley manager or a policeman would not incur any income tax surcharge.

We can argue about the appropriate level of progressive taxation but the basic idea is that we could make it increasingly expensive for a family to continue to perpetuate itself, generation after generation, at the political and economic heart of American power. Not impossible, that would be un-American, but very, very expensive.

The net result would be far greater “diversity” at our flagship educational institutions – far more white ethnics whose last names end in vowels, Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Southerners, Midwesterners and Westerners, people hailing from small towns or blue collar socioeconomic backgrounds. Currently favored demographic groups might be markedly reduced under such a system but since most of them come from long established UMC to UC families with great connections, they’ll be ok even going to Big State U. and getting a third tier school degree.  No worries.

Thoughts?

Two items:

RAND emeritus David Ronfeldt called my attention today (thanks David!) to this article by futurist David Brin:

Forgetting our American tradition:The folly of relying exclusively on a professional protector caste

Today we face (but largely ignore) a major historical anomaly. From our nation’s birth all the way until the end of the Vietnam War, America’s chief approach to dealing with danger — both anticipated threats and those that took us by surprise — was to rely upon a robust citizenry to quickly supplement, augment and reinforce the thin veneer of professionals in a relatively small peacetime warrior-protector caste.  Toward this end, society relied primarily upon concepts of robustness and resilience, rather than attempting to anticipate and forestall every conceivable danger. 

This emphasis changed, dramatically, starting with the Second World War, but accelerating after Vietnam. Some reasons for the shift toward professionalism were excellent and even overdue.  Nevertheless, it is clearly long past-time for a little perspective and reflection.

Over the course of the last two decades, while doing “future threats” consultations for DoD, DTRA, NRO, CIA, the Navy, Air Force, etc., I have watched this distinction grow ever-more stark — contrasting an older American reflex that relied on citizen-level resilience vs. the more recent emphasis on anticipation and the surgical removal of threats.  Inexorably, the Protector Class has increasingly come to consider itself wholly separate from the Protected.  In fact, our military, security and intelligence services have reached a point where – even when they engage in self-critical introspection – they seem unable to even ask questions that ponder resilience issues.

Instead, the question always boils down to: “How can we better anticipate, cover, and overcome all conceivable or plausible threat envelopes?”

While this is a worthy and admirable emphasis for protectors to take, it is also profoundly and narrowly overspecialized.  It reflects a counterfactual assumption that, given sufficient funding, these communities can not only anticipate all future shocks, but prepare adequately to deal with them on a strictly in-house basis, through the application of fiercely effective professional action…..

Read the rest here.

Secondly, I wanted to highlight that Don Vandergriff, a student of John Boyd’s strategic philosophy and the pioneer of adaptive leadership training , recently received a glowing mention in Fast Company magazine:

How to Buck the System the Right Way

….What GM is doing is mining the talent of its leaders in the middle. To lead up effectively, there are three characteristics you need to leverage.

Credibility. You must know your stuff especially when you are not the one in charge. When you are seeking to make a case to senior manager, or even to colleagues, what you know must be grounded in reality. At the same time, so often, as is the case at GM, you need to be able to think and act differently. So your track record reinforces your credibility. That is, what you have done before gives credence to what you want to do in the future.

Influence. Knowing how to persuade others is critical for someone seeking to effect change. If you do not have line authority, how else but through influence can you succeed? Your influence is based on credibility, but also on your proven ability to get things done. Sometimes persuasion comes down to an ability to sweet talk the higher ups as well as put a bit of muscle on colleagues (nicely of course) in order push your initiative through.

Respect. Mavericks, which GM said it was looking for, may not always be the most easiest people to get along with on a daily basis. After all, they are ones seeking to buck the system. But mavericks who succeed are ones who have the best interests of the organization at heart and in time earn the respect of thier colleagues.

One maverick I know who has been pushing to change the way the U.S. Army trains and promotes its officer corps is Don Vandergriff. A former Army major and twice named ROTC instructor of the year while at Georgetown, Vandergriff has tirelessly badgered the Army’s senior leadership to institute changes that would recognize and promote officers who knew how to lead from the middle.

And now, after more than a decade of his writing and teaching, it is paying off. West Point has become the latest but perhaps the most prestigious Army institution to teach principles of adaptive decision making that Don developed. Many of Don’s students have implemented such lessons successfully under combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest here. 

Don’s methods excel at getting students to think creatively under the constraints of limited information, situational uncertainty and time pressure ( making the cognitive effect somewhat akin to the effects produced by the Socratic method and complex game playing).

ADDENDUM:

This would also be a suitable post to remind readers that Dr. Chet Richards has moved his blogging operations to a new site, Fast Transients.

Adjust your favorites and blogrolls accordingly.

Frequent commenter T. Greer had an outstanding post on historical analogies and cognition at Scholar’s Stage:

Musing – ‘Cognitive Consequences of Historical Metaphors’

You can summarize the history of the Second World War in two paragraphs. Squeezing the causes, campaigns, and countries of the war into these paragraphs would be a gross simplification, but it is possible. This does not hold true for the Thirty Years War. It is one conflict that simply cannot be related in a paragraph. The number of actors involved, the myriad of motivations and goals of each, and the shifting alliances and intrigues between them all are simply too complex to be stripped down to a single page.* Piecing together the events of the Thirty Years War inevitably takes up much more time and effort than single page summaries allow.

….The implications of this are worth contemplation.

The great majority of policy makers are familiar with the Second World War. If asked to, I am sure that most folks in Washington concerned with foreign affairs and security policy could provide an accurate sketch of the countries and campaigns involved. Indeed, we conceptualize current challenges from the standpoint of World War II; allusions to it are the lifeblood of both popular and academic discourse on foreign affairs. Pearl Harbor, Munich, Stalingrad, Normandy, Yalta, and Hiroshima are gifts that keep on giving – they serve as an able metaphorical foundation for any point a pundit or analyst wishes to make.

Most of these metaphors are misguided

Agreed. Read the rest here.

Actually, we have two cherished analogies: hawks look at a situation and see Munich, but doves see the same conflict and exclaim”Vietnam!”. Neither does much for recognizing unique circumstances or complexities. These analogies are political totems signifying group affinity; or are rhetorical weapons to bludgeon the opposition in debate.

Metaphors and analogies are extremely powerful cognitive tools. But like all forms of power, they can be used for good or ill, well or poorly. Those that capture the essence of previously unrecognized similarities are the basis for generating novel insights from which innovations are derived and problems are solved. Poorly constructed but attractive analogies or metaphors capitivate our attention and transmit misinformation that is efficiently remembered and stubbornly retained, at times in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.