If you listen, you can hear the sound of the Kingdom of God in the air as no generation has ever before. Economic differences, however, are not as important as they may seem. The “good time” of society’s upper strata is the fun model for those not yet able to pay for it while earnestly hoping for that happy eventuality—and the “good time” of the less affluent strata is increasingly more surrounded around family and home entertainment. There can sometimes be differing costs from the affluent, but the quality may be very similar. Variation provides the raw material for adaption. However, for an agent or population to take advantage of what has already been learned, some limits have to be placed on the amount of variety in the system. This leads us to consider, what is the right balance between variety and uniformity. When considering the workings of major mechanisms that affect balance, we treat Complex Adaptive System as a population of agents, and we begin by assuming that the agents are not all the same. Indeed, the variety within a population is a central requirement for adaptation. The surprising dynamics that occur in complex systems are often consequences of such variety, as when a long-reigning political coalition collapses with the arrival of what seemed to be a minor new participant. And the novelty or innovation that we may want to encourage will often stem for such variety, as when ideas about unmet customer needs and ideas about new technical possibilities come together in the conception of the new product. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

It is often tempting to assume that the agents of a system are basically all the same—all the birds in a flock, all the employees of a particular company, all the citizens of a foreign town. Such assumptions simplify subsequent analysis. So we mass-produce kitchen tables on the implicit assumption that the population of buyers are all about the same height. Manufacturers know this makes some problems for people who are actually very tall or very short, but ignoring those issues allows the manufacturers to attain production efficiencies without fears of incompatibility with standard chairs. If there are some resulting difficulties for end users, the seriously affected individuals can respond to them with custom modifications. Similarly, if an average family in a community has two children, it can be convenient for some analyses—say, of projected demand for schooling—to make forecasts by assuming that all families are the same. For many purpose, however, such an assumption would be a mistake. What if families of different ethnicity had different sizes? Then a change in neighbourhood ethnicity could change school demand even though the number of household remained constant. The designer of a new product, such as a video recorder or a bicycle, seeks a resign that most customers will use in conventional ways that will engender no usual problems. However, to design the product, its packing, and its instructions as though all its buyers will use it identically is generally not the best strategy. Designers need to anticipate multiple categories of use and then either target the new product to a single category or design it to meet multiple requirements. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The Complex Adaptive Systems approach, with its premise that agents are diverse, is well suited to design projects such as the video recorder and the bicycle. It builds in the default assumption that there is a variety within a population that could matter. Simplifications still can be made, of course. However, the issue of variation is at the forefront of the analysis rather than in the background. The actions available to policy maker and designers who want to shape the behaviour of a Complex Adaptive System often work not just by accommodating variety; they can also work by actually increasing (or decreasing) the variety of agents in the population, or the variety of product design ideas under discussion, or the ethnic variety of housing purchasers. Variety turns up repeatedly in complex systems as a crucial factor in their development. However, the situation is not always so simple as saying that homogeneity is bad and variety is good. In an ever-changing World, agents that are not currently best may be a resource for the future. Parts of them may be crucial at a later time. For example, monoculture takes a great risk by eliminating the genetic variety in a crop. Without genetic variety, the introduction of a new parasite can wreak havoc. Even if the environment is unchanging, if the vest agents in the population up to this moment are far from the best possible, variation in agents may be valuable. In both these cases when the World is changing or the current agents are far from the best possible, variety can have value, and homogeneity may be a hinderance. A designer or policy maker confronting a Complex Adaptive System should therefore ask a central question: What is the right balance for uniformity? #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Focusing on variety in this way requires additional assistance to clear thought. Real families in a community or real product users can present wildly varying blends of characteristics. Some of these matter and some do not. Which characteristics matter is partly a function of what goals are being pursed. The variable heights of video recorder buyers are presumably not consequential. However, height could matter for a bicycle. Variation in ethnicity of buyers may not matter much for the design of a bicycle, but it may matter for the written instructions on how to program a new video recorder if variation in ethnicity entail differences in languages. When variety is significant, we need to be able to talk about subpopulations. We need to analyze their differences without losing track of the possibility that there are many other differences we are temporarily ignoring. Some of the potential buyers of our new video recorder may only want to play movies with it, while others might only want to record daytime shows for evening viewing. Some might be native speakers of Japanese. Some might know English as a second language. A type is a category of agents within the larger population who share some detectable combination of features. The notion of type facilitates the analysis of variety that our framework so often requires. Commonly, we distinguish types by some aspects of the agents’ properties or behaviours that are observable, either by other agents in the population or by outside analysts. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Examples of types: tall, average, or short customers for a consumer product; individuals who have not been infected by a particular virus, who have the symptoms of the disease, or who have recovered and are immune; molecules with a shape that matches a receptor on the surface of a group of biological cells, and molecules lacking that shape; viewers of a cable weather channel who are “forecast drop-ins,” “general-weather-interested,” or “storm obsessed”; invasive computer programs that are classified as “viruses,” “Trojans,” “droppers,” or “worms.” It is possible that some computer viruses may even be naturally manifested in outer space because of interferences from the electromagnetic field. Many type distinctions are endogenous—actively developed and used within the population by member agents themselves. In our disease example above, the general public may detect two types, the symptomatic and asymptomatic. Using these types, an individual agent may gain tremendously because its action can be conditional. Contacts with those who are obviously symptomatic can be avoided, significantly reducing the chances of acquiring the infection. However, notice that this works only if the individual can use symptoms to pick out those to be avoided while interacting with the rest. Rarely can a person make such discriminations perfectly. The symptoms a person can detect are, after all, only approximate indicators for the actual condition of other individuals. (Some with the flu may be trying valiantly to get through the day without appearing sick.) So the concept of detectably symptomatic individuals induces types in the population that are correlated with benefit to the individual, but not perfectly correlated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The spread of the infectious microbe induces an observer of the system, such as a public health official, to subdivide the population into three types: those who have not been infected but can be, those infected, and those who have recovered and have immunity. Types are not given from on high but are defined by actors within the system. To take another example, police would like to pick out drivers they cannot be sure of that intoxication before an accident occurs. Blood levels of alcohol cannot be observed as traffic passes by. Erratic driving can be observed, so those cars can be stopped. Some stopped cars with a high-blood alcohol driver will pass by. The police officer’s test, erratic driving, divides the population into types, those who can be stopped and those who cannot. It predicts blood alcohol levels only imperfectly. For example, some drivers may perform unsafely with blood alcohol concentrations below the legal limit (which may cause the driver to be cited for driving under the influence, which can lead to them being arrested). Here we have a tangled set of categories used by the actors within the system. Each of the working categories (or type definitions) only approximates the issues of actual concern. Many examples of complex systems have the property that the population contains at least some agents, such as the disease-avoiders or police officers, whose actions are conditional on aspects of the other agents that they can detect. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

At a border crossing the detection of a fraudulent passport can spell the difference between freedom and prison. This is an example of how a small difference related to a condition can or trigger a large difference in subsequent actions. For this reason, conditional action can result in consequences that are not smoothly proportional to causes, so-called nonlinear dynamics. So far we have used examples in which agents in the population or outside analysts employ similar distinctions to divide populations into types. Distinctions can also be made that are completely external to the population. They may be suggested because they correspond usefully to some differences in the population that matter, even though the actions of agents in the population may not necessarily be conditional on the differences. So, for example, a product designer might want to suggest that there could be two types of buyers for the proposed video recorder: perhaps “movie renters” and “time shifters.” The designer need not content that real consumers classify themselves this way. The distinction may be offered to highlight that these different kinds of users have different kinds of uses have different needs for the controls on the device. A pure movie watcher might have no need for the elaborate systems to program recording that begins and ends automatically, nor even for a clock. A pure time shifter might need those capabilities and many more. Designers might debate if these are useful types to distinguish, whether or not consumers make the proposed distinction themselves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

And though real consumers might rarely fall into one of the pure categories, the distinction may help designers think about the potential market. Perhaps they will want to consider introducing a cheaper, simplified machine that only plays prerecorded films. In the surprising World of contemporary consumer electronics, the low-end version might just be the full-featured machine with some features disabled. This can be a way of charging different types of customers different prices. Such price discrimination can rise profits even when the more cost-effective machines cost somewhat more to manufacture with turned-off features. Whether this will work requires designers and marketers to analyze the detailed pattern of consumer types. Here are the five important aspects to the notion of types: Types are generally defined by some detectable features of the agents in the population; many other dimensions of variety in the population may persist in the population without being recognized as types by the agents themselves; the features that distinguish types usually provide only an imperfect indicator for the actual differences in action among the agents in the population; types are often endogenous in complex system—agents within the population may detect types and act conditionally (and even change type definitions if the system is adaptive); and types can be exogenous as well—defined only in the minds of those analyzing a Complex Adaptive System the outside. The notion of type will help us to analyze the sources and contributions of variety by considering how systems create, destroy, and modify types. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Conduct a poll around the globe, and you will find a vast number of people who believe that America’s great wealth has been squeezed or stolen from the World’s poor. This assumption can often be found behind the slogans chanted by anti-American and anti-globalization protestors. However, the same questionable premise also lies behind a recent torrent of seemingly scholarly books and articles claiming that the United States of America is new Rome—the latest example of classical imperialism—or that it is, as the Chinese prefer to put it, the new hegemon. The problem with these analogies is that they do not fit the twenty-first century model of the United States of America. If America is such a rich and powerful hegemon, how come nearly 33 percent of the U.S. Treasury bonds were owned by other nations as of November 2022? Was that the case when Rome ruled much of the World, or when England did? Why has not the United States of America sent permanent settlers to the various countries that it presumably dominates? Rome did. The Spaniards did. The British, French, Germans and Italians did, all across Africa. The Japanese did in Asia. Exactly what America university trains an elite class of colonial administrator to spend their lives ruling over remote regions, as Oxford and Cambridge did? And where is there a clamour among Americans for a long-term military occupation of another country? The United States of America is powerful and surely makes its weight felt around the World. However, there is something wrong about the way America—and the World—is pictured and understood here. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Critics are still thinking in terms of the agrarian and industrial past. With the increased of knowledge-intensivity, the entire global game has different rules and different players. And so has the future of wealth. It a recurring theme in the cartoon strip “Peanuts,” Lucy holds a football on the ground and invites Charlie Brown to run up and kick it. At the last moment, Lucy pulls the ball away. Charlie Brown, kicking air, lands on his back, and this gives Lucy great perverse pleasure. Anyone could have told Charlie that he should refuse to play Lucy’s game. Even if Lucy had not played this particular trick on him last year (and the year before and the year before that), he knows her character from other contexts and should be able to predict her action. At the time when Charlie is deciding whether or not to accept Lucy’s invitation, her action lies in the future. However, just because it lies in the future does not mean Charlie should regard it as uncertain. He should know that of the two possible outcomes—letting him kick and seeing him fall—Lucky’s preference is for the latter. Therefore he should forecast that when the time comes, she is going to pull the ball away. The logical possibility that Lucy will let him kick the ball is realistically irrelevant. Reliance on it would be a sort of remarriage, a triumph of hope over experience. Charlie should disregard it, and forecast that acceptance will inevitably land him on his back. He should decline Lucy’s invitation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The essence of a game of strategy is the interdependence of the players’ decisions. These interactions arise in two ways. The first is sequential, as in the Charlie Brown story. The players make alternative moves. Each player, when it is one’s turn, must look ahead to how one’s current actions will affect the future actions of others, and one’s own future actions in turn. The second kind of interaction is simultaneous, as in the prisoners’ dilemma tale we discussed in the past. The players act at the same time, in unenlightenment of the others’ current actions. However, each must be aware that there are other active players, who in turn are similarly aware, and so on. Therefore each must figuratively put oneself in the shoes of all, and try to calculate the outcome. One’s own best action is an integral part of this overall calculation. When you find yourself playing a strategic game, you must determine whether the interaction is simultaneous or sequential. Some gams such as football have elements of both. Then you must fit your strategy to the context. The story of Charlie Brown is a preliminary way of ideas and rules that will help one play sequential games. Stories are not for great importance in themselves, and the right strategies are usually easy to see by simple intuition, so the underling idea stand out that much more clearly. During the years spent working as a factory and foundry worker, we put in time on an auto assembly line. Even now, more than a third of a century later, it is impossible to forget what it felt like—especially the harrowing impact of the speedup. Every day, from the moment the bell started our shift, we workers raced to do our repetitive jobs while desperately trying to keep pace with the car bodies moving past us on the clanking, fast-jerking conveyor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The company was forever trying to accelerate the line. Suppressed rage so filled the plant that every once in a while, for no apparent reason, an eerie wordless wail would issue from the throats of hundreds of workers, swell into a keening, ear-knifing sound as it was picked up and passed from department to department, then fade away into the clatter and roar of the machines. As the cars sped past we were supposed to prepare them for the paint shop, hammering out dents and dings, and grinding them smooth. However, the bodies flew by before we could do a good job. After they left us, they passed in front of inspectors who chalk-circled the remaining problems to be cleaned up afterward. Eight or ten hours a day of this was enough to numb us to any calls for “quality.” Somewhere there were “managers”—men in white shirts and ties. However, we had almost no contact with them. The power of these men in white shirts came not merely from our need for a paycheck, but from their superior knowledge about the factory, its goals, procedures, or plans. By contrast, we knew almost nothing about our job, except the few preprogrammed steps necessary to do it. Apart from exhortations to work harder, we received almost no information from the company. We were the last to find out if a shop or plant was to be closed down. We were given no information about the market or the competition. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

We were told nothing about the new products soon to be introduced, or new machines. We were supposed to take on faith that our superiors knew that they were doing. We were expected to show up on time, work, keep our muscle moving and our mouths shut. Even with a strong union in place, we felt powerless. A faceless “they” had us in their power. They were the men in white shirts. Managers. We were, during our work shift, citizens of a totalitarian state. We are reminded of these experiences as reports arrive almost daily describing the newest plants now going up. For power is shifting in the workplace, and things will never be the same. Building large objects is basic to solving problems of housing and transportation. Smart materials can help. Today, buildings are expensive to construct, require a big-budget to replace, and high-cost to make fireproof, tornado-proof, earthquake-proof, and so forth. Making buildings tall is pricey; making walls soundproof is costly; building underground is exorbitant. Efforts to relieve city congestion often founder on the high cost of building subways, which can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. Building codes and political permitting, nanotechnology will make possible revolutions in the construction of buildings. Superior materials will make it easy to construct tall (or deep) buildings to free up land, and strong buildings that can ride out the greatest earthquake without harm. Buildings can be made so energy-efficient and so good at using the solar energy falling on them that most are not energy producers. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

What is more, smart materials can make it easy to build and modify complex structures, such as walls full of windows, wiring, plumbing, data networks, and the like. For a concrete example that shows the principle, let us picture what smart pipes could be like. Let us say that you want to install a fold-down sink in the corner of your bedroom. The new materials make fold-down sinks practical, and in a house made of advanced smart materials, just sticking one on the wall would be enough—the plumbing would rearrange itself. However, this is an antiquated, pre-breakthrough house, so the sink is a retrofit. To do this home-handiwork project, you buy several boxes full of inexpensive tubing, T-joints, valves, and fixtures in a variety of sizes, all as light as wood veneer and feeling like soft rubber. The biggest practical problem will be to make a hole from an existing water pipe and drainpipe to where you want the sink. Molecular manufacturing can provide excellent power tools to make the holes, and smart pain and plaster to cover them again, but the details depend on how your house is built. The smart plumbing system does help, of course. If you want to run the brain line through the attic, built-in pumps will make sure that the water flows properly. The flexibility of the pipes makes it much easier to run them around curves and corners. Low-cost power makes it practical for the sink to have a flow-through water heater, so you only need to run a cold-water pipe to have both hot and cold water. All the parts go together as easily as a child’s blocks, and seem about as flimsy and likely to leak. When you turn it on, though, the microscopic components of the pipes lock together and become as strong as steel. And smart plumbing does not leak. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Smart plumbing is one example of a general pattern. Molecular manufacturing can eventually make complex products at low cost, and those complex products can be simpler to use than anything we have today, freeing our attention for other concerns. Buildings can become easy to make and easy to change. The basic conveniences of the modern World, and more, can be carried to the ends of the Earth and installed by the people there to suit their tastes. There are a hundred other things to remember that may help one to warm to the United States of America, including the fact that it has been, and perhaps always will be, a series of experiments that the World watches with wonder. Three such experiments are of particular importance. The fist, undertaken toward the end of the eighteenth century, posed the question, “Can a nation allow the greatest possible degree of political and religious freedom and still retain a sense of identity and purpose?” Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, a second great experiment was undertaken, posing the question, “Can a nation retain a sense of cohesion and community by allowing into it people from all over the World? And now comes the third—the great experiment of Technopoly—which poses the question, “Can a nation preserve its history, originality, and humanity by submitting itself totally to the sovereignty of a technological thought-World? If there is an awareness of and resistance to the dangers of Technopoly, there is a reason to hope that the United States of America may yet survive its Ozymandias-like hubris and technological promiscuity. Which brings me to the “resistance fighter” part of my principle. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

 Those who resist the American Technopoly are people: who pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked, and why; who refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations; who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical powers of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgement, or precision as a synonym for truth; who refuse to allow psychology or any “social science” to pre-empt the language and thought of common sense; who are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not regard the aged as irrelevant; who take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honour, and who, when they “reach out and touch someone,” expect that person to be in the same room; who take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth; who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity’s sake.; who admire technology ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human achievement. A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted at part of the natural order of things, that every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural. I can say no more than this, for each person must decide how to enact these ideas. However, it is possible that one’s education may help considerably not only in promoting the general conception of a resistance fighter but in helping the young to fashion their own ways of giving it expression. Education is very important, but also so are political action and social policy in offering opposition to Technopoly. There are even now signs that Technopoly is understood as a problem to which laws and policies might serve as a response—in the environmental movement, in the contemplation of legal restrictions on computer technology, in a developing distrust of medical technology, in reactions against widespread testing, in various efforts to restore a sense of community cohesion. However, in the United States of America, whenever we need a revolution, we get a new curriculum. School, to be sure, is a technology itself, but of a special kind in that, unlike most technologies, it is customarily and persistently scrutinized, criticized, and modified. It is America’s principle instrument for correcting mistakes and for addressing problems that mystify and paralyze other social institutions. The center of gravity of the intellectual center is in the brain; the center of gravity of the emotional center is in the solar plexus; the centers of gravity of the moving and instinctive centers are in the spinal cord. It must be understood that in the present state of scientific knowledge we have no means of verifying this statement, chiefly because each center includes in itself many properties which are still unknow to ordinary science and even to anatomy. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

It may sound strange, but the fact is that anatomy of the human body is far from being a completed science. So the study of centers, which are hidden from us, must begin with the observation of their functions, which are quite open for our investigation. This is quite a usual course. In the different sciences—physics, chemistry, astronomy, physiology—when we cannot reach the facts or objects or matters we wish to study, we have to begin with an investigation of their results or traces. In this case we shall be dealing with the direct functions of centers; so all that we establish about functions can be applied to centers. All the centers have much in common and, at the same time, each center has its own peculiar characteristics which must always be kept in mind. One of the most important principles that must be understood in relation to centers is the great difference in their speed, that is, a difference in the speeds of their functions. The slowest is the intellectual center. Next to it—although very much faster—stand the moving and instinctive centers, which have more or less the same speed The fastest of all is the emotional center, though in the state of “waking sleep” it works only very rarely with anything approximating to its real speed, and generally works with the speed of the instinctive and moving centers. Observations can help us to establish a great difference in the speeds of functions, but they cannot give us the exact figures. In reality the difference is very great, greater than one can imagine as being possible between functions of the same organism. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

With our ordinary means we cannot calculate the difference in the speed of centers, but, if we are told what it is, we can find many facts which will confirm not the figures but the existence of the enormous difference. So before bringing in figures, I want to speak about ordinary observation which can be made without any special knowledge. Try, for instance, to compare the speed of mental processes with moving functions.  Try to observe yourself when you have to perform many quick simultaneous movements, as when driving a car in a very crowded street, or riding fast on a bad road, or doing any work requiring quick judgment and quick movements. You will see at once that you cannot observe all your movement. You will either have to slow them  down or miss the greater part of your observations; otherwise you will risk an accident and probably have one if you persist in observing. There are many similar observations which can be made, particularly on the emotional center, which is still faster. Every one of us really has many observations on the different speeds of our functions, but only very rarely do we know the value of our observations and experiences. Only when we know the principle do we begin to understand our own previous observations. At the same time, all the figures referring to these different speeds are established and known in school systems. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The difference in the speed of centers is a very strange figure which has a cosmic meaning, that is, it enters into many cosmic processes or, it is better to say, it divides many cosmic processes one from another. This figure is 30,000. This means that them moving and instinctive centers are 30,000 times faster than the intellectual center. And the emotional center, when it works with its proper speed, is 30,000 times faster than the moving and instinctive centers. It is difficult to believe in such an enormous difference in the speeds of functions in the same organism. It actually means that different centers have quite different time. The instinctive and moving centers have 30,000 times longer time than the moving and instinctive centers. Do you understand clearly what “longer time” means? It means that, for every kind of work that a center has to do, it has so much more time. However strange it may be, this fact of the great difference in the speed of centers explains many well-known phenomena which ordinary science cannot explain and which it generally passes over in silence, or simply refuses to discuss. I am referring now to the astonishing and quite inexplicable speed of some of the physiological and mental processes. For instance—a man drinks a glass of water, and immediately, in no more than a second, he experiences many new feelings and sensations—a feeling of warmth, relaxation, relief, peace, contentment, well-being, or on the other hand, anger, irritation, and so on. What one feels may be different in different cases, but the fact remains that the body responds to the stimulant very quickly, almost at once. There is really no need to speak about water or any other stimulant; if a human is very thirsty or very hungry, a glass of water or a piece of bread will produce the same quick effect. Similar phenomena representing the enormous speed of certain processes can be noticed, for instance, in observing dreams. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Sunday night football 🏈 hits different when your living space accommodates a sectional sofa of this size!

It’s all part of the deal when you choose #Havenwood Model 3! This floor plan is the largest of the single story homes offered in our community, boasting 2,287 square feet.

When you’re working with four bedrooms and an optional fifth (just convert the den!) you’re sure to have room for the whole family. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-three/

Head over for a visit – no appointment needed! #CresleighHomes