While reading NNT's perceptive insights, reflect upon the ecological differences between venture capital and our mainstream banking system (which has blown up).
"Why are these people so healthy?" Good question (one that gains more importance every day):
Native foods of the ancestral fitness tradition imply the importance of proximity and localism to our health states (hunting and gathering for food faced physical travel limitations). However, our modern environments are largely devoid of these ancestral nutritional roots: chips have supplanted berries in our current vegetative landscape. Thus, the strategy is to search locally for practical ways to live, eat, sleep, and exercise according to ancestral (power-law) patterns, as much as possible. What this strategy looks like concretely in action will depend upon each individual's local bottom-up tinkering:
I shop at Trader Joe's ("your neighborhood grocery store"), for example.
Locality has far-reaching implications. The physical constraints of space and time, minimally, in conjunction with some upper bound in brain storage capacity, imply that we can only interact effectively and maintain stable relationships with a small (this definition has some flux, or course) cluster of people. Dunbar's number (thanks to
Navanit Arakeri ) provides a valuable way to conceptualize this limited real-world social network (at some point, you simply do not have enough time to meet with, talk to, email, or connect with anymore people and still call these interactions 'social bonds' with substance):
Hunter-gatherer societies benefitted from cohesion and formed stable relationships by maintaining effective group sizes (of note, this relates to the 'bureaucracy' we often feel in contemporary social institutions that grow too large). Granted, in our modern environments, the internet, cell phones, and other communication tools allow us to connect globally with people in beneficial and valuable ways (talking to distant relatives on Skype for free or communicating through facebook chat, for instance); however, these social interactions cannot replace the power and importance of face-to-face bonding (you cannot shake someone's hand, hug a loved one, nor engage a host of other socially benevolent gestures via digital connections).
Ancestral (tribal) governance (a concept I am developing on the back-end) emerges as an interesting application of Dunbar's number to the notion that we are local animals living in an increasingly global world that we do not understand. Bill Kauffman, an original thinker (Dave Lull tipped me to him, thankfully), speaks to what I envision as ancestral governance in contemporary times.
Bill understands local ecology and its importance in our lives: he thinks and acts locally, which, given the fractal construction nature of our global structures, is quite sophisticated: cells operate and respond in similar fashions to build bodies of magnificent form, complexity, and function.
Robert Putnam, author of
Bowling Alone, discusses declining social capital and shares Bill's concerns about the loss of neighborhood interactions (and accountability), small-scale social infrastructure (he notes the decline in the number of bowling leagues in the US, for example), and close familial bonds (research shows we spend less and less time with family each year). To counteract this decline in social capital, Robert helped launch
Better Together to reconnect people with their local environments and address social issues and challenges in these personal settings. At their cores, Bill and Robert both embrace bottom-up approaches to social justice and innovation; they despise top-down social engineering from on high: When was the last time a political leader cooked you dinner when you were sick? We need to rethink social impact and how to effectively achieve it in our world. Ancestral governance respects Dunbar's number, placeism and localism, as well as the value of diversified social capital -- like ancestral fitness, ancestral governance is a concept I hope to develop further.
GoDo Good
"Go Do something that has never been done before ... GoDoGood"
www.go-do-good.com (Web construction completing soon)
As I have eluded to before, GoDoGood is a social justice and innovation platform to empower local grassroots community involvement efforts for various issues. It is my best attempt to operationalize
my Jesuit educational foundation and respond to Robert Putnam's concerns about declining social capital and Bill Kauffman's call for placeist leadership and localism. With epistemic humility and evolution as our guiding, foundational premises, Brian and I hope that GoDoGood can nurture human creativity in the right ecological manner to ignite the entrepreneurial engine that turns iron into gold, out of thin air, and produces innovative solutions and resources that address the social challenges that many people want to Do Good about but lack the execution frameworks needed to facilitate and harness their energy, efforts, and spirits. I admit that I have no clue what will emerge from the GoDoGood social scaffolding platform we are building, but that is exactly the point: create an open social infrastructure that incubates positive Black Swan hits.
Read Nassim Taleb's latest Edge essay; he discusses the demise of centralized banking by humans. While reading NNT's perceptive insights, reflect upon the ecological differences between venture capital and our mainstream banking system (which has blown up).
I touched on this topic in a novel way (as far as I know) awhile back in my essay, "An argument from physiology," that applied the multi-fractal complex dynamics of healthy human hearts to banking and to healthcare finance (click here to read).
My main goal is to live as a local animalancestral fitness style as much as possible each day.
Native foods of the ancestral fitness tradition imply the importance of proximity and localism to our health states (hunting and gathering for food faced physical travel limitations). However, our modern environments are largely devoid of these ancestral nutritional roots: chips have supplanted berries in our current vegetative landscape. Thus, the strategy is to search locally for practical ways to live, eat, sleep, and exercise according to ancestral (power-law) patterns, as much as possible. What this strategy looks like concretely in action will depend upon each individual's local bottom-up tinkering: I shop at Trader Joe's ("your neighborhood grocery store"), for example.
Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, discusses declining social capital and shares Bill's concerns about the loss of neighborhood interactions (and accountability), small-scale social infrastructure (he notes the decline in the number of bowling leagues in the US, for example), and close familial bonds (research shows we spend less and less time with family each year). To counteract this decline in social capital, Robert helped launch Better Together to reconnect people with their local environments and address social issues and challenges in these personal settings. At their cores, Bill and Robert both embrace bottom-up approaches to social justice and innovation; they despise top-down social engineering from on high: When was the last time a political leader cooked you dinner when you were sick? We need to rethink social impact and how to effectively achieve it in our world. Ancestral governance respects Dunbar's number, placeism and localism, as well as the value of diversified social capital -- like ancestral fitness, ancestral governance is a concept I hope to develop further.