There comes times when the situation is outside of the navigator’s experience and training. In those times, the old navigator may be incapable of opening his mind to fully pay attention to what is actually happening. Some times call for a younger mind that is learning in real time, absorbing the recent observations with youthful wonderment. Those are usually times of the most severe crises.
I enjoyed the preparatory work of arranging data into a presentable form. The surprise was when I was then put in a position to present this to a critical audience. I accidentally experience the ability to handle surprising questions. I was addicted. The addiction was to the conversation. The conversation happened to involve the language of data, a vast collection of individual datum.
This trend of upsetting the normal arrangements will continue. While this is happening there will be more shortages. Supply chains will dwindle due to government restrictions and due to the lack of labor. The supplies that are delivered will have inflated costs due to high demand or due to the need to pay for the higher labor costs. The ultimate result is high inflation.
The fact that we have achieved a population life expectation that is at this number provides proof that this is the right number, or a least a lower limit to what the right number should be. I wonder whether it might have been just an accident of history. The high life expectation was a deviation from the normal value. Perhaps it will be inevitable that we will revert to a much lower norm.
In this blog site, I frequently discussion my own fantasy government that I called a dedomenocracy. One key feature of this government is that instead of asking the population to democratically choose policy, it asks the population to demographically define how to measure the greater good. When some future crisis occurs, what does the population prioritizes and what is the population willing to sacrifice. In such a government, I can not imagine that we would agree to sacrifice our younger people (and especially not our young women) for the benefit elderly people (and especially not old men). We do not live in a dedomenocracy.
The government must quit. Certainly there will be new cases, and new deaths. The rate will fluctuate over time, location, and demographic. The important information is whether the population is tolerating this, and whether they are adapting. To get this information, the government needs to stand down and watch.
This navigation reminds me of the hyperspace short cuts in science fiction. In both cases, the ship is in a short cut where spatial properties are different from more routine conditions of open seas in deep waters. In both cases, the navigator must rely on information he had when he entered the short cut. The navigator has very little if any relevant measurements of what will really matter to the outcome of the journey.
I envision a distant time when a dedomenocracy has been operating for multiple generations so it has good data about human responses to crises. That data should tell the algorithm that humans are prone to fear reactions. It will also tell the algorithm that an over protected population lacks the experience of handing real fears.
A dedomenocracy fears nothing while a democracy fears everything. In this context, everything refers to the collective library of scientific knowledge. Nothing refers to the empty space that may harbor plans that we will can only learn by paying close attention to the present, allowing observations to contradict theories we accepted in the past.
There is a benefit to opening our processes to the possibility that the reality may be changing, where the changing is from an evolving intelligence or even from a plethora of competing intelligences that have transitions of power much like our political systems. Admitting dark data into our algorithms blinds us to this possibility, especially when we allow dark data to have priority over observations.
Hypothesis Discovery 