Application XVII: Policy determination and budgeting
Policy determination and budgeting say a lot about how and what we think about behavior. They map a future for us. Such maps grow, and grow more useful, as mapping capability grows. There is opportunity here, specifically opportunity to develop the Dynamic Profile Assay (DPA) into a mapping technology to improve the conduct and content – i.e., consequentiality — of policy making and budgeting for solving our problems, as individuals and communities, and especially our behavioral problem … apart from but together with our many situational problems (, ).
DPA, given its principled foundation (, ) can begin to work without a detailed calculus, progressing from simple technologies (App. VII) of tools and/or procedures and advancing to ever more effective and efficient technologies. That principled foundation derives from the Nature of Things and its Balance requisite for behavioral entities. When behaviorally relevant conditions (e.g., body and step as foci of attention, learning and knowing capabilities) are imbalanced, dysfunctional dynamics result … and they handicap behavioral effectiveness by the neglect or abuse of independence, interdependence and complementarity.
The DPA can comprise as many observed components as indicated by needed functionality concerns. Profile suggests that more than one should be involved. But even one set of relevant conditions and findings can be telling – although almost surely it will implicate others as happens here with the related implications of BFPS. For the sake of illustration, let’s start with just one, the balance status of body and step, which for both observing and the observed is at the heart of BFPS – and which we have seen to be severely out of balance in both regards.
The assay can appear deceptively simple at first acquaintance because the measures seem very simple given the obvious potential for assessing degree of imbalance in more precise mathematical terms. Consider this first stage of an assay for body and step:
DPA, given its principled foundation (, ) can begin to work without a detailed calculus, progressing from simple technologies (App. VII) of tools and/or procedures and advancing to ever more effective and efficient technologies. That principled foundation derives from the Nature of Things and its Balance requisite for behavioral entities. When behaviorally relevant conditions (e.g., body and step as foci of attention, learning and knowing capabilities) are imbalanced, dysfunctional dynamics result … and they handicap behavioral effectiveness by the neglect or abuse of independence, interdependence and complementarity.
The DPA can comprise as many observed components as indicated by needed functionality concerns. Profile suggests that more than one should be involved. But even one set of relevant conditions and findings can be telling – although almost surely it will implicate others as happens here with the related implications of BFPS. For the sake of illustration, let’s start with just one, the balance status of body and step, which for both observing and the observed is at the heart of BFPS – and which we have seen to be severely out of balance in both regards.
The assay can appear deceptively simple at first acquaintance because the measures seem very simple given the obvious potential for assessing degree of imbalance in more precise mathematical terms. Consider this first stage of an assay for body and step:
B/S: (Check as applicable) |
0 |
>1 |
<1 |
1 |
Where: 0 marks an absence of independence: a difference that makes a difference has not been observed; <1 and >1 mark an imbalance in one direction or the other; 1 marks a balance.
Stage 2 of the assay applies to all three non-0 entries, because there are imbalance considerations pertaining to interdependency, whether the first stage revealed imbalance or balance. For example:
Stage 2 of the assay applies to all three non-0 entries, because there are imbalance considerations pertaining to interdependency, whether the first stage revealed imbalance or balance. For example:
B=>S/S=>B: (Check as applicable) |
>1 |
<1 |
1 |
Stage 3 of the assay applies to non-0 entries from both earlier stages, simply to inquire whether (in this case, B and S) they are seen as complementary. (They should be jointly contributing to problem solving.)
Profile extends across conditions of consequence (differences that make a difference) that need to be assessed for their contributions – or lack of them – to effectiveness in problem solving. In BFPS we have called attention to many of them (e.g., XI's preliminary listing). Profile also extends across time, such that changes can lend a hand to how we go about making and taking policy and budget steps.
BFPS explains why it is that these modest metrics have such tremendous potential for improving operating systems: we ourselves and other operating systems. Any indication of an imbalance provides leverage for behavioral modification. This tool, along with the profile's across-time procedural feature, gets us going right away in the use and improving of our mapping approach to bring us closer to an accord with the Nature of Things. The key to continued improvement in operating systems is to continually bring them into closer accord with the Nature of Things. The DPA calls our attention to needed improvements in functionality. The Nature of Things has no teleological message to convey. Functional equivalence is acceptable – albeit with the caution to test our essays for pragmatic equivalence. What seems unacceptable is for us to neglect the minding resources of the requisites and imperatives (behavioral principles) implied by the Nature of Things. The Balance requisite, on which DPA is based, is one of those principles.
(Boating provides a convincing illustration of the need for achieving and maintaining balance as we pursue a course.)
Initial usage of DPA can draw from among many candidate pairs. Some of these may be extracted from triads. Thus, for example, in our forthcoming discussion of policy determination and budgeting, we usefully begin with the (BFPS-mapped) dynamics of functionality: the balance of policy emphases re the triad of needed functionality (F-1), developing functional capability (F-2), and assessing exercised capability for consequentiality (F-3). (See). Where do these stand in relation to each other?
The same pairing option can be seen for the triad of ADEPT, ADOPT AND ADAPT (App. IV: 3A's) – which figures so consequentially in educational policy. Where the balance of learning /knowing, of elementary/basic and of primary, secondary and tertiary TELLS and READs also come into question. For any policy domain, we can construct a DPA of pertinent paired conditions.
In any policy domain, where problem solving demands attention to "all that it takes" to bring about the criterial change, the option arises of pairing for DPA analysis any or all the components of ATIT – with perhaps special attention to capability developments needed within each of the eight agency requisites and imperatives – as, for example, the imbalance of the inside-outside relation and the before-after relation for ideational mechanics. But between paired requisites and/or imperatives, special attention is needed too. Consider, for example the technological neglect of the Singularity requisite's non-singularities relative to developmental efforts on behalf of other requisites and imperatives. We could do much more with what "conscience" is talking about.
Experience in this or that domain can help practitioners to help construct an appropriate DPA. For example, in the health field, we should want to assay the help/support pairing from among the possible ATIT pairings. In this or any other field of policy and/or practices, we should want to assay the effectiveness/efficiency and control system/operating system ratios.
BFPS provides a very large reservoir of potential pairings, running into the hundreds. ATIT's nine sectors alone, not counting its within-sector possibilities such as the six requisites and imperatives for agency, offers 36 possibilities. Obvious candidates are where conceptual usage has not fully distinguished differences that make a difference – such as seen re help x support. For mapping optimization, a complete inventory is not to be dismissed. But for individuals and communities seeking to become more effective problem solvers, any contribution that brings them more in accord with the Nature of Things is a mark of progress. Efforts to improve the dynamics of balanced behavior are also efforts to improve our knowledge.
Any DPA profile that covers even a modicum of pairings will bring clots and clogs in minding to the surface. We noted in Topic XI that some imbalances appear to be related, such as those of elementary/basic and learning/knowing in education. They suggest clots and clogs of dysfunctionality, such as those which make much more difficult our climbing the escarpment of minding's dysfunctional methods and products (: S-P; ). What we should dread most is a quagmire of clots and clogs … and we may very well find ourselves there. It seems we are with respect to the behavioral problem.
Who should conduct DPA's? Should they be self-conducted – as a variant of "Know thyself"? Should external conductors be brought into play? "Yes," probably, on both counts. Many need to be helped. Many need to help. Many need to be helped to help (See App. I). There are many glaring gaps in Help efforts, such as those coming after medical treatments. Care is not complete. A conductor role seems to recognize that a functional capability needs to be developed to bridge that gap.
The leverage obtained by an observed imbalance is great enough so that continued exercise of the DPA affords us power even while we go about strengthening our capabilities to deal with our problems -- especially the behavioral problem. That we might come to develop measurement tools and procedures to estimate imbalance more precisely is not something we have to wait on.
***
Policy determination and budgeting demand a functional capability that is respectful of the Nature of Things. Both deserve a thorough initial and continuing analysis of that minding capability. "Bottom line," "Sunshine laws," and "pay as you go" do not come close to the needed functionality. Both should employ a DPA whose pairings represent the behavioral implications of the Nature of Things.
Let's start with pairings drawn from the above-mentioned triad of functionality:
Beyond these pairings we have noted another that needs to be up front in a DPA for policy determination and budgeting. This pair addresses the Nature of Things relative to the order of things. It's hard to conceive of a more crucial dynamic concern. Consider, for example, that an emphasis on the order of things may assert that observed effects, F-3, should be criterial for setting out our future path forward. This is fine, as far as it applies. But the Nature of Things subsumes the order of things, so that leaves more to be discovered. (And partial order calls for making, not just finding, our way. It also says that our path forward should be in accord with the Nature of Things. Any "found" order of things is included, but to be seen together with needed functionality and capability development, F-1 and F-2, as implied by the Nature of Things' behavioral principles – which pertain to our making orderings of things … which leads to another, different kind of discovery and of knowledge.
NofT/ooft should be in balance … and it is not. This is why HAS discipline (App. XV) – another triad ripe for DPA pairing – argues for balancing development and research with research and development … the making as well as the finding of conditions of consequence. To borrow from the Camelot narrative, we must make Excalibur, not hope to find it (before it has been forged?) … make it by hammering it out, stroke after stroke, like DPA's approach to reaching accord with the Nature of Things.
DPA results help us in the manner of observed non-singularities. They tell us to stop, then to do something about the observed dynamic discrepancies. (The Balance requisite acts in the role of an elicited criterion. See comment on "conscience" above.) Preferably we will do something that will bring us in closer accord with the Nature of Things' messages regarding solution of the behavioral problem. DPA, whether employed by ourselves or by others, raises the surveillance function to a much higher level.
Much remains of unfulfilled needed functionality, to break free of our minding-binding maps, but DPA gives us a helpful technology to get us started. Yet to come are technologies that fully grasp and involve the possibility inherent in composing behavioral molecules: in the act of composing, as here, in the making and then in the taking of the steps that we have constructed.
***
What we contemplate here is a principled two-fronted (see grasping by involving) attack on effectiveness from both before the fact and after the fact. The mapping implications of the Nature of Things add a second minding resource (re needed functionality and capability development) to the limited implications of effects as a mapping resource.
The mapping implications of the Nature of Things are needed to relieve what is otherwise like a weak thumb (for grasping): our not having solved the behavioral problem -- not for individuals and not for communities, and leaving us unprepared to develop a productive individual-community interdependence. (The Psit/Pbeh imbalance is dreadful, beginning with our failure to distinguish them as independent problems … and ending with the loss of potential help from a Pbeh solution which would aid in solving all Psit's.)
Continuing the metaphor: Viewing the use of terminal effects as fingers (for the grasping), there is weakness there as well. There are consequents to be found during our composing of a solution, not just consequents of finished performance. (Especially not just "bottom line" consequents, which neglect all the prior consequents unmeasured during capability development and [problem] solution composition. See App. IX: EHAC for a more constructive approach.)
Previous maps of the Nature of Things are minding-binders. They have given us a crippled hand for grasping, a weak hand for the composing we eschew at our peril.
***
WARNING: DPA has focused on the Balance requisite's dynamics to help provide a positive, forward-looking approach to mapping. There is, however, one more aspect to these dynamics to which policy must ever be vigilant.
When imbalance is very severe and effects are dismayingly negative … then management efforts may revert to emphasizing just the opposite (e.g., strict vs. permissive training) … then only to discover that the effects are no better. The door opens to oscillatory behavior, then to trauma. There's a lesson here then from the internal behavior of bodies. Trauma can be fatal.
(c) 2013 R.F. Carter
FOOTNOTES (RELATED MATERIALS):
Profile extends across conditions of consequence (differences that make a difference) that need to be assessed for their contributions – or lack of them – to effectiveness in problem solving. In BFPS we have called attention to many of them (e.g., XI's preliminary listing). Profile also extends across time, such that changes can lend a hand to how we go about making and taking policy and budget steps.
BFPS explains why it is that these modest metrics have such tremendous potential for improving operating systems: we ourselves and other operating systems. Any indication of an imbalance provides leverage for behavioral modification. This tool, along with the profile's across-time procedural feature, gets us going right away in the use and improving of our mapping approach to bring us closer to an accord with the Nature of Things. The key to continued improvement in operating systems is to continually bring them into closer accord with the Nature of Things. The DPA calls our attention to needed improvements in functionality. The Nature of Things has no teleological message to convey. Functional equivalence is acceptable – albeit with the caution to test our essays for pragmatic equivalence. What seems unacceptable is for us to neglect the minding resources of the requisites and imperatives (behavioral principles) implied by the Nature of Things. The Balance requisite, on which DPA is based, is one of those principles.
(Boating provides a convincing illustration of the need for achieving and maintaining balance as we pursue a course.)
Initial usage of DPA can draw from among many candidate pairs. Some of these may be extracted from triads. Thus, for example, in our forthcoming discussion of policy determination and budgeting, we usefully begin with the (BFPS-mapped) dynamics of functionality: the balance of policy emphases re the triad of needed functionality (F-1), developing functional capability (F-2), and assessing exercised capability for consequentiality (F-3). (See). Where do these stand in relation to each other?
The same pairing option can be seen for the triad of ADEPT, ADOPT AND ADAPT (App. IV: 3A's) – which figures so consequentially in educational policy. Where the balance of learning /knowing, of elementary/basic and of primary, secondary and tertiary TELLS and READs also come into question. For any policy domain, we can construct a DPA of pertinent paired conditions.
In any policy domain, where problem solving demands attention to "all that it takes" to bring about the criterial change, the option arises of pairing for DPA analysis any or all the components of ATIT – with perhaps special attention to capability developments needed within each of the eight agency requisites and imperatives – as, for example, the imbalance of the inside-outside relation and the before-after relation for ideational mechanics. But between paired requisites and/or imperatives, special attention is needed too. Consider, for example the technological neglect of the Singularity requisite's non-singularities relative to developmental efforts on behalf of other requisites and imperatives. We could do much more with what "conscience" is talking about.
Experience in this or that domain can help practitioners to help construct an appropriate DPA. For example, in the health field, we should want to assay the help/support pairing from among the possible ATIT pairings. In this or any other field of policy and/or practices, we should want to assay the effectiveness/efficiency and control system/operating system ratios.
BFPS provides a very large reservoir of potential pairings, running into the hundreds. ATIT's nine sectors alone, not counting its within-sector possibilities such as the six requisites and imperatives for agency, offers 36 possibilities. Obvious candidates are where conceptual usage has not fully distinguished differences that make a difference – such as seen re help x support. For mapping optimization, a complete inventory is not to be dismissed. But for individuals and communities seeking to become more effective problem solvers, any contribution that brings them more in accord with the Nature of Things is a mark of progress. Efforts to improve the dynamics of balanced behavior are also efforts to improve our knowledge.
Any DPA profile that covers even a modicum of pairings will bring clots and clogs in minding to the surface. We noted in Topic XI that some imbalances appear to be related, such as those of elementary/basic and learning/knowing in education. They suggest clots and clogs of dysfunctionality, such as those which make much more difficult our climbing the escarpment of minding's dysfunctional methods and products (: S-P; ). What we should dread most is a quagmire of clots and clogs … and we may very well find ourselves there. It seems we are with respect to the behavioral problem.
Who should conduct DPA's? Should they be self-conducted – as a variant of "Know thyself"? Should external conductors be brought into play? "Yes," probably, on both counts. Many need to be helped. Many need to help. Many need to be helped to help (See App. I). There are many glaring gaps in Help efforts, such as those coming after medical treatments. Care is not complete. A conductor role seems to recognize that a functional capability needs to be developed to bridge that gap.
The leverage obtained by an observed imbalance is great enough so that continued exercise of the DPA affords us power even while we go about strengthening our capabilities to deal with our problems -- especially the behavioral problem. That we might come to develop measurement tools and procedures to estimate imbalance more precisely is not something we have to wait on.
Policy determination and budgeting demand a functional capability that is respectful of the Nature of Things. Both deserve a thorough initial and continuing analysis of that minding capability. "Bottom line," "Sunshine laws," and "pay as you go" do not come close to the needed functionality. Both should employ a DPA whose pairings represent the behavioral implications of the Nature of Things.
Let's start with pairings drawn from the above-mentioned triad of functionality:
- F-1/F-2: Is there an imbalance (say F-2/F-1 = >1) that suggests more concern for technological improvements of what is now done relative to poorly understood – and neglected -- functionality needs and innovative technology on their behalf?
- F-1/F-3: Is there found to be an imbalance (F-3/F-1 = >1) that suggests more concern for the results of what is being done relative to an analysis of what needs to be done?
- F-2/F-3: Is there an imbalance found here (F-3/F-2 = >1) that suggests more concern for the results of what is being done relative to developing capabilities to do that (or something else) better?
Beyond these pairings we have noted another that needs to be up front in a DPA for policy determination and budgeting. This pair addresses the Nature of Things relative to the order of things. It's hard to conceive of a more crucial dynamic concern. Consider, for example, that an emphasis on the order of things may assert that observed effects, F-3, should be criterial for setting out our future path forward. This is fine, as far as it applies. But the Nature of Things subsumes the order of things, so that leaves more to be discovered. (And partial order calls for making, not just finding, our way. It also says that our path forward should be in accord with the Nature of Things. Any "found" order of things is included, but to be seen together with needed functionality and capability development, F-1 and F-2, as implied by the Nature of Things' behavioral principles – which pertain to our making orderings of things … which leads to another, different kind of discovery and of knowledge.
NofT/ooft should be in balance … and it is not. This is why HAS discipline (App. XV) – another triad ripe for DPA pairing – argues for balancing development and research with research and development … the making as well as the finding of conditions of consequence. To borrow from the Camelot narrative, we must make Excalibur, not hope to find it (before it has been forged?) … make it by hammering it out, stroke after stroke, like DPA's approach to reaching accord with the Nature of Things.
DPA results help us in the manner of observed non-singularities. They tell us to stop, then to do something about the observed dynamic discrepancies. (The Balance requisite acts in the role of an elicited criterion. See comment on "conscience" above.) Preferably we will do something that will bring us in closer accord with the Nature of Things' messages regarding solution of the behavioral problem. DPA, whether employed by ourselves or by others, raises the surveillance function to a much higher level.
Much remains of unfulfilled needed functionality, to break free of our minding-binding maps, but DPA gives us a helpful technology to get us started. Yet to come are technologies that fully grasp and involve the possibility inherent in composing behavioral molecules: in the act of composing, as here, in the making and then in the taking of the steps that we have constructed.
What we contemplate here is a principled two-fronted (see grasping by involving) attack on effectiveness from both before the fact and after the fact. The mapping implications of the Nature of Things add a second minding resource (re needed functionality and capability development) to the limited implications of effects as a mapping resource.
The mapping implications of the Nature of Things are needed to relieve what is otherwise like a weak thumb (for grasping): our not having solved the behavioral problem -- not for individuals and not for communities, and leaving us unprepared to develop a productive individual-community interdependence. (The Psit/Pbeh imbalance is dreadful, beginning with our failure to distinguish them as independent problems … and ending with the loss of potential help from a Pbeh solution which would aid in solving all Psit's.)
Continuing the metaphor: Viewing the use of terminal effects as fingers (for the grasping), there is weakness there as well. There are consequents to be found during our composing of a solution, not just consequents of finished performance. (Especially not just "bottom line" consequents, which neglect all the prior consequents unmeasured during capability development and [problem] solution composition. See App. IX: EHAC for a more constructive approach.)
Previous maps of the Nature of Things are minding-binders. They have given us a crippled hand for grasping, a weak hand for the composing we eschew at our peril.
WARNING: DPA has focused on the Balance requisite's dynamics to help provide a positive, forward-looking approach to mapping. There is, however, one more aspect to these dynamics to which policy must ever be vigilant.
When imbalance is very severe and effects are dismayingly negative … then management efforts may revert to emphasizing just the opposite (e.g., strict vs. permissive training) … then only to discover that the effects are no better. The door opens to oscillatory behavior, then to trauma. There's a lesson here then from the internal behavior of bodies. Trauma can be fatal.
(c) 2013 R.F. Carter
FOOTNOTES (RELATED MATERIALS):
- Topics: Introduction - Quality of Life
- Topic I: Two problems, two solutions
- Topic III: The Nature of Things
- Topic XI: Balance Requisite
- Topic XI: Balance Requisite
- Topic XI: Balance Requisite
- Topic XI: Balance Requisite
- App. X: The Psychlotron Protocol
- App. IV: Education
- Topic II: All That It Takes (ATIT)
- Topic X: Construction Imperative
- Topic VIII: Singularity Requisite
- App. I: Helping
- App. V: Health
- Topic XI: Balance Requisite
- Topics: Introduction - Quality of Life
- App. XII: The future of history
- App. I: Helping
- Topic III: The Nature of Things
- Topic III: The Nature of Things
- Topic XI: Balance Requisite
- App. XVI: At work in the frontier
- Topic III: The Nature of Things
- Application XV: HAS discipline(s)
- Topic VIII: Singularity Requisite
- App. IX: EHAC & Operating System Development
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