Home

Introduction

How about tracking the extent to which organisms manage to work on relationships that look inward & outward from the boundaries of skin, family & culture, i.e. in human terms to spend time on self, friends, family, hierarchy, culture & profession? Some organisms, like tulips and gophers, do not naturally focus on all six.

A long-emergent societal goal has been to empower humans for discretionary participation in all of these areas. Consideration of all layers at once suggests that this may incidentally nurture informed task-layer diversity, since all sorts of specialists and generalists might improve society's chances to successfully adapt. One might even think of this as a strategy to harness the power of our human fallibility to the greater good, esp. of social systems assembled via processes that exceed the capacity of any one individual.

This may sound trivial, until one realizes that policies which focus on a single layer of organization sometimes do great damage to other layers in the process of implementation. Moreover, integrative measures of community-health (like Gallup-Healthways 5) may be key to closed-loop balancing of strategy on important cross-disciplinary issues in the days ahead.

For more in the short term as this space gets up and running, check out our web pages (with links to recent papers) on task layer multiplicity, tabulating surprisals, and Bayesian data analysis.

Technical figures

Contest entries

Developments afoot

Articles, forms, links 

Postscript: We also have technical collaboration space available on campus and invitation-only media-wiki sites. If you are interested in access to the latter, let us know.