Small is Bountiful

The smaller the group, the bigger its exposure. That is why people say there is safety in numbers. But safety is not always a virtue; it is a state in which the individual is not in danger of enduring or suffering some phenomenon X.

This is where it's important to identify X. If X is responsibility, then a large group enables people to avoid individual responsibility by distributing it into the collective. That's where 'everybody does it' and other famous excuses for reprehensible behaviour come in.

Conversely, the larger the group, the less nimble it is. That is why you increase the rate of chemical reaction or the flexibility of a business by breaking a large bloc down into smaller units. The activity of a catalyst is much enhanced by distributing it more evenly in smaller particles.

When I look at social phenomena like mobs and megachurches, I think a lot about this. It is all too easy for those embedded in a large body to be insulated from the reactive environment; it is all too easy for those at the edge to have no connection or communication with those at the centre.

The human mind is meant to be part of a network, with strong connections to very few other nodes and weaker connections to a few others. When the group is too large, the human mind turns in on itself to consolidate its 'picture' of the network.

This gives us a natural size for group effectiveness — it's the number of people-concepts that typical members can hold in their own individual brains at any one time, because that's how humans interact, by simulating other humans and their reactions (the 'What Would X Do?' idea). That's the basis of empathy.

So yes, small is better, unless you want to diminish individual responsibility, or hide something, or make a large bunch of people who don't really know or feel for each other. That's your call.

The Paradox of Elite Education on a Small Island (Part II)

Let us take the same island, all five million souls. Think about what an elite is: it is that group of individual people who are 'the best', the aristocracy (how ever defined) of the population.

The problem is that if you want to control everything that is useful to an artificially sustained environment, you need a lot of controllers. That's because in a natural environment with natural buffers, a lot of natural feedback loops exist. Couple that with the problem of having a small environment (and hence less buffer space and room for error) and you have to have a lot of 'elite' in various grades.

That is why an education programme designed to develop the gifted elite of the island must be extended from the top 0.1% to the top 0.5% to the top 1% and so on to the top 5-10%. This is the only way to cast your net wide enough to pull in the necessary 'elite'. Of course, now that your 'elite' are taken from the top 10% of population, they are only 'elite' in a very (ahem) broad sense.

Think about it; if you are graduating 50,000 secondary school students a year (aged 16 or so) — or to make your net smaller, say 35,000 high school/junior college students a year — your elite will be drawn from somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 promising young people every year. In 40 years (say from 1969 to 2009), allowing for different populations and programmes and rates of loss each year, you must have extracted at least 50,000 people (1% of present population) to be the elite of the nation.

The true elite number about 250 (0.5% of that 1%, or the top 0.005%). But at this point, they are fairly homogeneous, having been selected more or less by the same set of filters and criteria and encouraged to stay in the same social circles (and bond, and get married, and be fruitful and multiply). It is the tip of the pyramid, so to speak. It is a very narrow tip, almost a tipping point.

And you know what? Everyone in that group receives (broadly speaking) the same briefings. They all believe the same things and will say (or not say) the same things. They also believe that they are broad-minded enough to not say (or not not say) the same things, because they are all the same kind of people.

In some ways, this is a refutation of the idea that education broadens the mind. In fact, it is possible that by having elite education on a small island, you are actually neutralizing the effects that education is supposed to produce.

Outsourcing doesn't help, because the 'elitely educated' go to the same overseas institutions for further polishing. They all smirk the same way, if you catch them on video. It is a bit like watching an Asian post-colonial version of the British government, but with an overlay of pseudo-Confucian superiority.

How do I know all this? It's by watching too many of them, people that I know, go down the same road. Some, to their credit, are able to remain unshackled. Most bind themselves in contracts of the mind as powerful as the one that dragged Faustus to his doom. And as their minds contract, so too does the future reality of a small island.

Plagiarism

The funny thing about uncritical perception is that it leads to a kind of groupthink on the part of whole groups of students. If you have ten students, that's not so bad; if you have 400, that's going to be a large clump; and if you have 400 elite students (or socioculturally elite in a meritocratic plutocracy or plutocratic meritocracy) then that is a large clump with a huge potential societal impact.

There are several such novitiates in Atlantis. They practise the practice of reflection — that is, they reflect because they are told to do so, and most of the time, when they are illuminated, they just reflect the illumination and feel good about it.

The problem with this light-scattering effect is that it eventually looks a lot like plagiarism when it isn't really so. This is because the entire armamentarium of these novitiates has become standardised. They all wear the same kind of armour, use the same kinds of weapons, follow the same sort of drills. Then they customise these things for their own personal ambition and comfort, but as in most cases, customisation amounts to a 5% difference (or less) between morphologies.

My next paper will therefore be one on the morphology of mass customisation. It is a lot like that ubiquitous computer game, Spore.