Education's (Unintentional) Structural Role In Caste Formation

In this post I'm going to probe a rather ambitious topic: the role of education in relation to caste formation.  What makes it even more ambitious is that in lieu of descriptor based approach, I'm going to see what's required to get there via ground-up evolutionary theory.  

I'll skip evolution theory basics and start of by referencing David Sloan Wilson's 2x2 matrix comparing self-effects vs. group-effects in religious and homo economicus groups.  Transition between two stable moral equilibria leads to between-group heterogeneity (different morals for different within-societal groups).  

Next, I'll try to reduce things down a manageable game-theory scenario. This will involve a fair bit of  variable filtering.  Reduction will occur via cultural transmission tools and some basic organizational theory.  Cultural transmission will then be used a second time to analyze the likely evolution of surviving scenarios. This will yield a set of quasi-stable states that describe commoner (producer) - coordinator (elite) morality and behavioural expression.  

At the end I'll tie things back to education.  This will be done by verifying whether "education" has the potential to mediate stable state tensions.

But watch out, the process is long, and at this stage of the game, lots of hand-waving is involved.  The purpose isn't to prove things academically... it's to see what evolution theory can potentially say about caste formation, particularly in terms of the physics to which institutionalized public education is subject.



MUSE
This last summer I got the chance to climb around a number of Mayan ruins in Belize.

 This got me thinking about the role education might play in caste formation.  I mean, how can you not help but think in terms of castes with a civilization  (and its pyramids) so structured around physical separation...

Questions that came to mind were:

• Are there structural differences between aristocratic education and commoner education?  If so why? What might these differences entail?
• Why do we expect our own education system not to fall into (or perpetuate) historic types of social dimorphism?  
• Does education respond to, drive, or simply resonate class separation?

Over the last year, I strongly suspected these questions were impossible to answer.  Perhaps they are.  However, Wilson's recent book, Does Altruism Exist, had a chapter that, I think, filled in enough holes for me to naively imagine a way through an exceedingly complicated causal quagmire.

In this post I'll layout a rough sketch to see if my thoughts are plausible.  The intent is to see to what extent the dynamics described by multi-level selection theory illuminate deep educational questions that otherwise are stuck in the realm of speculative sociology.  Along the way we'll hit some interesting points about elite (coordinator) - commoner (producer) dynamics.  In fact, most of the journey will focus on establishing a solution space from which to quickly and superficially jump into the educational caste question.

The whole process will have a number of interesting tie-ins with Peter Turchin's secular cycle work.





PROBLEM
The work David Sloan Wilson did using multi-level selection theory (MLS) to understand religion showed that evolutionary tools have promise for social analysis.  Evolutionary tools provide a first principle approach to social system tensions.  The problem is, how far can we take these tools.  Specifically, what do these tools reveal about caste formation, education, and education's uncertain role in caste formation?

Part of Wilson's background work in this field involved analyzing Hutterite belief structures (a luddite Christian sect which emigrated from Germany to western North America).  He used a 2x2 matrix to characterize expressed social beliefs in terms of individual vs others benefit.  This was done via inferred measures of relative fitness.  Here's the table he produced.

	effect	on	self
effect		-	+
on	+		brotherliness community faithfulness love mutual help obedience sacrifice
others	-	arrogance ego greed individuality pride selfishness self-interest

Table 1: classically religious "altruistic" groups

The interesting finding was that other successful, stable religions had no mixed benefits: world views  (morality) were either win-win (+ for self & + for others) or lose-lose (- for self & - for others). Indeed a Templeton conference on the topic found that leading scholars from the major world religions said that their religions' beliefs did not meet classical definition of altruism: altruistic actions were, in effect, transactional (albeit often on a supernatural plane for future imagined rewards).

Wilson then applied his matrix to homo economics.  For poetic justice, he used Ayn Rand's philosophy of self-interest.  Luckily, not all pointed comedy sacrifices validity. Rand's quasi-religious tenets match quasi-religious expositions of Amway and other similar self-interest-as-good organizations.  This includes the cut-throat world of self-justifying Wall street finance.  Here's what Wilson found via a textual analysis of Atlas Shrugged:

	effect	on	self
effect		-	+
on	+		egoism honesty independence logic pride rational self-interest self-esteem selfishness
others	-	altruism collective faith self-denial unselfishness blind desires hedonism irrational values

Table 2: Randian "self-interested" groups

A similar black & white solution emerged.   Wilson explains this with a functional analysis.

Most enduring religions are functionally similar in their ability to create highly motivated and well-organized groups - but the proximate mechanisms that evolve in any particular case are hugely variable... 

An adaptive worldview has two requirements.  First, it must be highly motivating psychologically.  Ideally, it should cause people to rise out of bed every morning brimming with purpose. Second, the actions motivated by the wolrdview must outcompete the actions motivated by other world views. - p. 86

Mixed solutions are unstable because they have lower relative fitness: they are either not motivating & hence don't succeed in the between-group selection world, or they are too costly & hence don't succeed in the within-group selection world.  In other words, mixed cases don't thread the eye of the multi-level selection needle*.  



MIXING
Let's take Wilson's findings at face value and assume both the classical religious (table 1) and Randian (table 2) position are different proximate solutions to the same ultimate functional problem  -group coordination in the context of between-group & within-group selective tension.  Of course, there can be an infinite number of proximate solutions to any ultimate problem.  However, in terms of highly moral systems, Wilson's empiricism (which certainly isn't a census of possibilities) has only provided two.  

We'll go with what we have.  To compensate for this first source of potential error, well 'd our best to accommodate some looseness as we build up our structure.  

If these two moral states exist within a society, it's interesting to explore societal heterogeneity via homogeneous sub-groups. This will be our major focus for the day.  Of course, we shouldn't just jump to our preferred case.  We'll start off by exploring some different ways these moral states can mix in a multi-level world.  This will involve looking at 

• individual moral transitions
• within-group heterogeneity
• migration
• between-group heterogeneity.

Individual Transitions
Individual switching from one state to another can produce within-group heterogeneity.  Are these conversions possible in human moral groups?

I can't see why not.  Self interested Wall streeters have become religious: religious people have become self-interested Wall streeters.  However, common observations suggest conversion rates aren't high*. 


Within-group Heterogeneity
Does low conversion/migration lead to within-group heterogeneity?  For a major orientation like group-interest vs. self-interest, the answer seems to be no.  Exploitive freeloading seems to be the major dynamic at play in this type of human group.  Migration is perhaps a second order term.  More on this later.  Right now we'll just talk about Wilson's empiricism.

Wilson's empirical altruist vs. self-interest moral matrixes are about as mutually exclusive as you can get.  (Even Trump might not be able to reliably espouse them both).  However, by definition, non-zero conversions/migrations do lead to some level of heterogeneity, for some period of time. However, within-group heterogeneity is dampened by cultural norm enforcement (which would be extremely high in cases of mutually exclusive morals) and other within-group pressures.  

The whole scenario is yet another instance of between-group selection vs. within-group selection tension.  Wilson's empiricism suggests that in this case the tension only produces binary morals (at least morals which are stable).  Here's how this plays out.  


Between-group Heterogeneity
There is some very well-established work simulating how slight preference biases lead to polarized landscapes.  Polarized equilibria emerge in conditions where slight preferential differences can propagate.  The resulting landscape is divided, even though across-group averaging doesn't reveal purity pockets.  (One of MLS's strengths is getting past the across-group averaging other evolutionary theories struggle with.)

There's been lots of work exploring the mechanisms by which polarization propagates.  For instance, Timothy Ryan's 2013 paper on the political consequences of moralized attitudes suggests that moralized attitudes reorient behaviour from maximizing gains to adhering to rules.  (I'd add, that nothing per se prevents these rules from being either altruistic or Randian).  Ryan's work, like many other's, suggests moralized attitudes lead people to oppose compromises and punish the opposition. 

In conclusion, a multi-level approach often sees within-group heterogeneity as a case of separate lower level homogeneities.  Within our theoretical (and real) society we have groups of classically religious altruists and groups of Randian self-interesters.  Therefore our societal group level is morally heterogeneous, but at a lower level we have morally homogeneous groups. While reduction ad naseum is possible, we'll leave things here.  Interested folks are directed to Mckelvey, Lichtenstein & Andriani's excellent scale free organizational theory work.


More on Migration
As was mentioned, migration is one way to maintain within-group heterogeneity in environments which otherwise lead to single state equilibria (see Okasha or Wilson, or any of a heap of other evolution biologists here).  Wilson backs this fact up with a number of fairly conclusive experimental studies which show that migration levels need to be fairly "high" to maintain heterogeneity between "altruists" and "self-interesters".

As already mentioned, in a case of two mutually exclusive moral states, it is expected that migration rates would need to be very high to overcome the damping effects of norm compliance against polar opposites.  Thus, in our world of classical religious altruistic morals, Randian self-interested morals, and observed rates of migration between them, migration is unlikely to be a source of substantial within-group moral heterogeneity. (standard distributions will of course still apply, sigmas will just be tight).

The more homogeneous a group is, the more potential benefits there are for corruptive freeloading.  However, norm enforcement becomes commensurately stronger.  A lone altruist can infiltrate a group of self-interesters and outcompete them by forming a sub-level between-groups.  A lone self-interester can infiltrate a group of altruists and outcompete them by freeloading.  This is done by successful within-group competition.



THE COMPETITION CONUNDRUM

Function at a high level of selection requires the minimization of lower level competition.  Conflict minimization can enable heterogeneity (albeit temporarily if there are fitness differences and no balancing tensions).  What proximate solutions minimize this ultimate constraint?

One solution is to suppress any tools that could be used for exploitive self-interest.  However, in a modern globalist world, forced suppressions (strong man dictators) tend to be unstable over time.

What about a mutually agreeable rule-of-law strong-man?  Evidence shows this solution is gaining ground, and perhaps facilitating a cultural move to a higher level of selection (a socially-progressive-open-border world, aka supranationalism).  However, as a stable suppression tool, 2nd amendment gun debates and migration crises certainly show this particular  move to a higher level of selection doesn't have the strength to fully minimize within-group competition (...yet).

But there are certainly other means to minimize exploitive self-interest.  Here are two:

• Extreme dependence.  The more dependent people are on each other, the less likely they are to destroy their mutually supportive environment.  I believe MacIntyre's networks of giving and receiving is a trendy treatise in this direction (at least among economic philosophers).  He supposes that mutually dependence can stabilize virtuous behaviour.
• The Hillary email scandal. One set of rules for the little folk, another set of rules for the important folk.  

Dependence
Extreme dependence is facilitated by role specialization.  In uneducated situations, roles need not require lots of proprietary skills, just the appearance of such.  Medieval guilds come to mind here.  Skills were largely thought to be non-portable.  Perhaps they were, at least to a number of people, or to a level or artistic mastery.  But they certainly weren't to everyone, nor to a "good-enough" level.  Especially not to the extent guilds would have had people believe.  I suspect the same is true of today's CEO and political elites.

Roles are essential, but interchangeability between roles, is perhaps artificially or purposefully dampened.  This is the educational tie in we'll eventually get to.


Hypocritical Standards
As Haidt's moral relativism studies highlight, people are pretty good at justifying moral dissonance.   Without referencing any particular works from this field, memory suggests that the justification of "different rules for different people" is fairly contingent upon:

• people's differentiability (clothes, station, behaviour, etc),
• perceived utility gains (trickle down economics, differential innovation, role specialization, etc.),
• the degree to which this confers prestige to the greater society & the degree to which that confirmation is internally valued,
• the acceptability of castes (either meritocracy or hereditary) 

So, in a case of low migration, between-group selection, and within-group selection, we get a society with multiple homogeneous moral groups.  Conflict between these distinguishable groups can be minimized by extreme dependence and/or distinct rules (and perhaps other mechanisms not discussed).

Another interesting point here is Gunia and Kim's (2016) recent paper of the behavioural benefits of other people's deviance.  Other people's deviance surprisingly increases the work levels of conformists.  Conformist dissonance is decreased as deviator distance / perceived separation is increased.


Caveats & Limitations
We're interested in exploring commoner (producer) - coordinator (elite) interaction. Most societies have minimal migration between these groups.  Rather than rigorously verifying if commoner-elite migrations levels in societies are enough to match the high biological migrations levels necessary for heterogeneity, we'll stick with common sense empirics and reasonably assume that migration levels are "low" enough to keep within-groups homogenous "enough".

Right now, we have binary moral options:  classical religious "altruism" and Radian self-interest.  We're relying on Wilson's empiricism that mixtures of these moralities are unstable.  But, we can't discount other different stable moral states.  Finding & categorizing them is just beyond scope.  So perhaps we should call this entire argument a first order approximation...



WHAT TYPE of HETEROGENEITY is SUSTAINABLE
While we've made a cursory case for societal heterogeneity via within group homogeneity, I think it behoves us to explore it in more detail.  This time, let's look at it from the perspective of time stability.

Empiricism provides a strong answer to this question. Wilson's empirically observed a number of religions.  Their morals were similar.  While the n was very small, experience backs up his findings: religions value community and abhor self-interest.  Indeed, academics like Norezayan have argued that religion was the key cultural evolution change that facilitated the emergence of beyond-tribe civilization.  Facilitation happened via imaginary moral big brothers, their 3rd party moral standards, and their imaginary supernatural enforcements and rewards.  The result was enough self-interest suppression to allow (group) selection at a higher level.

Let's go to the moral enforcement literature for some more support for within-group moral homogeneity.

Moral enforcement literature, like that by Ryan above, suggests within-group heterogeneity with respect to fundamental moral rules is, generally, unstable.  Groups which can't judge/punish individual moral behaviour lack the conditions necessary to be adaptive units at the between-group level of selection.  Judgement aggregation work by List & Pettit suggests groups bias actors via the emergence of group morals.  Norm enforcement occurs in terms of acquiescence to group moral intentions, not to specific propositions.

Let's explore what evolutionary transition theory has to say with regard to competition and levels of selection.  Macho & Roze (2000) summarize the evolutionary transitions literature from a multi-level perspective.

The basic problem in an evolutionary transition is how and under what conditions a group becomes a new kind of individual. Initially, group fitness is taken to be the average of the component lower level units, but as the evolutionary transition proceeds, group fitness becomes decoupled from the fitness of its members. Indeed, the essence of an evolutionary transition is that the lower level units must in some sense “relinquish” their “claim” to fitness, that is to flourish and multiply, in favor of the new higher level. This transfer of fitness from lower to higher levels occurs through the evolution of cooperation and conflict modifiers that restrict the opportunity for within group change and enhance the opportunity for between group change. Until eventually, the group becomes an evolutionary individual in the sense of having heritable variation in fitness at its level of organization and in the sense of being protected from the ravages of within group change by adaptations that restrict the opportunity for non-cooperative behaviors 

So, to rehash our case,

• There is pressure for moral homogeneity within groups.  
• However, populations tend to be normally distributed.  In free-loading terms, this means pure moral homogeneity is an illusion.  However, as we've already argued, standard deviations are likely to be small and directly related to the quasi-relgious nature of the group (whether the quasi-religion be supernatural, atheistic, or agnostic in doctrine).  
• But, mixed morality within a group doesn't match up with Wilson's findings.  It doesn't do well in game based multi-level selection accountings based upon individual and group benefits.
• Therefore we have two groups, which, while distinct are fairly homogeneous within each one.  If the group is large enough, this homogeneity can polarize into distinct sub-groups.

ONTO SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONAL THEORIES
Again, at this point we have up to two homogenous groups distinguished by their mutually exclusive moralities.  Migration levels minimally disturb homogeneity.  We've discussed two ways to minimize between group conflict: extreme dependence and different rules/morality for different distinguishable groups.  Now we'll flush out group-size effects.  This is necessary because our aim to is explore the commoner (producer) - coordinator (elite) dynamics which might relate to caste formation.  As we'll soon see, (relative) size matters.

Coordination
Anthropologists suggest elite hierarchies solve the coordination problems of larger-than-tribal-sized societies.  Instead of expounding on the anthropology literature though,  I'll cite something from the group dynamic literature. This also ties things back to our previous discussion on within-group pressure for homogeneity. Kessler & Cohrs' (2008) state:

The development of arbitrary conventions by the tendency to conform to the majority has the additional effect of solving coordination problems in social interactions (e.g., driving on the left or the right side, signs of approval and disapproval, or making contracts; see Skyrms, 1996). According to Alvard and Nolin (2002), such solutions to coordination problems are necessary for successful mutual cooperation. Several studies showed that common knowledge serves such a coordination function (e.g., Metha, Starmer, & Sugden, 1994) and is necessary for individuals to assume (indirect) reciprocity, which again facilitates cooperation (Yamagishi, Jin, & Kiyonari, 1999). 

Network theory tends to express the co-ordination problem in terms of complexity science.  Kauffman's Santa Fe approach to complexity summarizes a basic network proposition:

"some connections-not very many, actually- among agents improves system fitness, but that fitness deteriorates as the number of connections between each agent and various other agents increases toward the maximum." (Kauffman, 1993, p. 45)    

With respect to leadership, organizational theory, anthropology, group dynamics, and network theory agree that leadership (formal or informal) is essential for large groups to survive.

In anticipation of flat hierarchy critiques, let me just say the flat organizations simply increase informal - emergent leadership at the expense of formal role-based leadership.  Leadership doesn't disappear, it just becomes more fluid.

Group Size vs. Corruption
Larger groups face the tensions of between-group and within-group selection.  Large groups are facilitated by relaxing norm enforcement.  This enables group size to increase.  However too much looseness causes group implosion: corruption costs exceed group related individual benefits.



GAMING IT OUT

We now have a bunch of factors at play:

• Coordinators (leaders) are essential,
• Large groups must tolerate moderate corruptive freeloading (to enable growth to their size),
• Different rules for different groups require individuals from between the groups to be differentiable,
• Between group migration stabilizes between group heterogeneity,
• Between group dependencies stabilize between group heterogeneity.

Now let's look at all our variable to see if estimating the "cost/benefit" of each is feasible.  The intent is to "game" a least cost solution.

Variables

1. Coordination
2. Corruption
3. Group size
4. Within group norm enforcement
5. Between group norm enforcement
6. Between group conflict costs
7. Between group dependency
8. Migration

Unfortunately, this leads to 8! permutations.  Gaming is rather pointless in this landscape.  But, this isn't the least of the problems....  Some variable are not binary.  Also, all factors can vary within each of the two groups.  Plus, a number of variables are recursively related (for instance corruption, group size, migration, dependency, etc.)

Some back-of-the-envelope logic might filter things a bit.  

1.  Organizational theorists make a pretty good case that coordination is essential.  

2 & 3. Equation based modelling suggests group size is directly correlated with corruption levels: positive with low corruption, negatively after a corruption threshold. Thus small groups either have low or high levels of corruption while large groups have moderate levels of corruption (I'm obviously ignoring non-steady states....).

Coordinator (elite) group size is all but guaranteed to be smaller than commoner (producer) group size.  Food pyramid logic applies.  

4 - 6.  Norm enforcement is related to corruption and hence group size. Low corruption scenarios probably just have low individual costs associated with norm enforcement.  Norm enforcement may be proactive.  This minimizes costs while maximizing adherence.  Similarly, high corruption scenarios probably have high individual norm enforcement costs.  Who wants to tell their Mafia neighbour to be nice?  This probably leads to reactivity: only putting out necessary fires.  Of course high cost norm enforcement strategies also facilitate weaponized enforcement: you can dump lots of costs into punishing an "innocent" competitor and sell it as group oriented altruism...

The take away is that norm-enforcement correlates with corruption which correlates with group size.

7.  Recursion between group dependency, coordination and group size also helps a back-of-the envelope approach.  The larger the group, the more coordinators and followers (producers) will depend upon each other.  Role specialization is likely.

8.  Malthusian logic suggests coordinators should be fairly sensitive about immigration, but not too concerned about emigration.  Two percent migration from 100 coordinators into 10,000 commoners will have little effect.  Two percent migration of 10,000 commoners into 100 coordinators will have significant effects.

Observations of elite - commoner migration suggests it happens, albeit to different levels.  Meritocracies tend to have more migration between elite and commoner classes than mature hereditary systems.  As previously mentioned, migration is unlikely to substantially effect within-group homogeneity.

Additionally, cultural evolution work by Richerson and others illuminate the role of prestige bias, vertical transmission and horizontal transmission.  The relevant take-a-way is that success gets copied.


Winnowing Down the Solution Space Even More
We've now obtained a feasible solution space by introducing lots of biased filtering and losing a good deal of validity. However, things are now manageable.  Here's what the filtered space looks like:

Coordinators

• small group size (relative to commoners)
• low or high corruption with low or high norm enforcement. A high corruption state likely has high individual norm enforcement costs and is likely reactive.  A low corruption state likely has low individual norm enforcement costs and is likely proactive.
• vertical transmission, within-group horizontal transmission, content bias, guided variation, oblique transmission 
• immigration sensitivity

Commoners

• large group size (relative to coordinators)
• mid level of corruption
• prestige bias from coordinators, vertical transmission within-group horizontal transmission, content bias, guided variation, oblique transmission 

It's probably good to point out that I'm going to simplistically assume commoners have less prestige than coordinators.  For example, actors have high prestige by aren't what one would normally think of as a coordinator.  So let's just expand our definition of coordinator to include individuals that don't just coordinate the work of subordinates (a typical leader), but also coordinate sociality. In other words, were I to use a functional definition of coordinators, it would be in terms of their dependency upon commoners (producers) for survival.

Now the type of cultural transmission within each group, while an interesting speculation is superfluous for staging game based assessments.  Similarly we don't have to worry about relative group sizes much - as mentioned there is a negligible chance that a society will be able to support more coordinators than commoners (producers).  This leaves corruption and moral orientation as primary terms.  Our back-of -the envelope logic has reduced our solution space down to two dimensions!

We now have a number of scenarios to shoehorn into Wilson's "effect on self - effect on others" approach. But we can filter things a bit more...

GAMING IT OUT AGAIN

A low corruptive state is only likely to exist with altruistic morals.  Despite Ayn Rand's assumption that pure-self interest can be societally stable, actual research suggests it exist in pockets of limited size.  Radical self-interest facilitates high levels of corruption.  It does not facilitate low levels of corruption.  Thus:

• low corruption only goes with altruism
• mid corruption can go with either altruism or self-interest
• high corruption only goes with self-interest

This brings the number of cases we need to look at down to six, as can be seen below.

Cases 1-3: Low coordinator corruption

Case 1
Case 1 is the utopian state: everyone is altruistic (albeit commoners more in a lip-service way than coordinators).  The classic downfall of utopian altruism is its neglect of the exponential advantage cheating has in increasingly homogenous groups.  Thus the cheating payoff for individual coordinators acting in exploitively self-interested ways is high (cases 1-3).

We should note however, utopian like altruism can be stable if there are strong: 

• perpetually increasing norm enforcements, 
• highly costly commitment displays, 
• highly persuasive (and usually imaginary) Big Brothers, 
• convincing post-mortal transactional trades, and 
• meritocratic advancement from the commoner class via selection for the most altruistic.

Commoner Evolution
Altruistic commoners (case 1) can switch to self-interest (via a case 1-3-2 progression).  Prestige bias from altruistic coordinators to commoners should mildly dampen commoner progression to self-interest.  The main damping factor though, is probably commoner's own norm enforcement. People have exquisite freeloading detection heuristics concerning those who dip their feet in the world of freeloading. 

Of course some people can cover themselves better than others. What you therefore get is case specific instances of self-interest covered by superficial adherence to group morals (one form of case 3).  In the freeloading world, self-delusion is a strong evolutionary strategy (e.g. the insurance company expects me to inflate my claim a bit, hence the deductible.)  As freeloading by an individual accrues, observations suggest there's a commensurate switch from exception-based altruism to a disguised self-interest.  Basically, individuals cut off moral guilt and the risks of its ingrained tells by fully rationalizing strong self-interest. 

A quick commoner phase change from altruism (case 1) to self-interest (case 2) largely skipping heterogeneity (case 3) is also possible.  This is probably reflective of a collapse into anarchy via rapid norm enforcement swamping.

Case 2
Case 2 just seems unstable.  Common sense suggests that self-interested commoners should, generally, have a low probability of stabilizing at mid-corruption levels without some pressure or strong selective force for altruism.  Moderate corruption and self-interest prime moves to high "corruption".  Indeed, our whole discussion started off with Wilson's findings that morals stabilize around transactional altruism or pure self-interest.  Case 2 is, according to Wilson's findings, empirically unstable.

However, we can't rule out the potential case where a strong rule of law (and effective technocratic legal system) might keep case 2 (commoner self-interest & mid corruption) devolving to destruction.  It just seems likely that, over time, coordinators would game themselves into a commensurate level of corruption (case 5).  We'll touch on this weak argument a bit more later.  Right now, we'll assume (with weak support) that case 2 will likely devolve into case 5.

Case 3
What all this suggests is that the likely scenario with respect to low coordinator corruption is stabilization at case 3 (mixed commoner morals) via the emergence of pockets of altruistic commoners and pockets of self-interested commoners (remember the literature I cited on polarized landscapes...). High rates of corruption quickly lead to catastrophe, but, some corruption is required to enable large group size.  

Another alternative is for coordinator prestige bias to dominate commoner's shift to self-interested morals.  In this case, prestige bias dominates over the strength of within-group competition.  Commoners don't cheat because they see successful coordinators acting altruistically and mimic that supposedly fitness enhancing behaviour.  This would lead to a case 1 end state.  (I have my doubts though, that such a case is stable in a non-self selected group of a large size without high religious-like dynamics.).  Or, if tensions just balance, case 3 stability.  

If case 3 balances, equal tension with between-group selection and within-group selection should produce complex cycling.  See Okasha here.


Conclusion

• Case 1 stable if prestige bias + norm enforcement (& quasi-religious coherence) > within group selection for self interest
• Case 2 unstable
• Case 3 stable

Cases 4-6: High coordinator corruption
Coordinators increase their corruption levels by quickly jumping past mid level corruption to high level corruption.  This gets them past the Malthusian trap induced by moderate corruption's large-group enabling tendencies.  

Because coordinator numbers have to be much less than commoner numbers, population crises are a destructive constraint.  Only high or low corruption levels (or low birth rates and no immigration) enable low coordinator numbers.  Thus, over long periods of time, one would expect to see selection for rapid coordinator phase changes.  Those that don't change rapidly enough exceed coordinator carrying capacity and, if Peter Turchin's structural-demographic theory is right, this precipitates total societal collapse.  

The degree to which selection for such rapid phase changes has historically  happened is, of course, completely uncertain.  Continual societal collapses ala Turchin's elite overproduction evidence suggests phase change rates are too slow.  But the durability of larger-than-tribe groups suggest the things are not ubiquitously catastrophic.  However, such speculative will have to remain tangential.
  
One thing that is certain though is that in two group scenarios, high corruption levels among coordinators need not be as destructive as that predicted by single group models: coordinators can after all, parasitically freeload off commoners.

So general discussion on case 4-6 leaves us with the following conclusions:

• case 4-6 commoners are more (prestige) biased toward corruption than case 1-3 commoners
• coordinator phase changes from altruism to self-interest should be rapid (but this is certainly not definitive).

Case Analysis
Now, let's look at how cultural transmission affects cases 4-6 (self-interested coordinators).  

We've already discussed many of the dynamics around commoner moral progression.  The main difference between cases 1-3 and 4-6 is that in cases 4-6, coordinator prestige*** bias pushes commoners to self-interest rather than away from it.  

This basically suggests that either case 4 (the doppleganger of case 1's altruistic commoners) is unstable, or that commoner norm enforcement is strong enough to dominate over both coordinator prestige bias and within-commoner-group selection for self-interest.

• Case 4 stable if norm enforcement (& quasi-religious coherence) > within group selection for self interest + prestige bias

This is certainly possible.  Conflict between commoners and coordinators is likely (they have opposite morals).  Unless, of course, something like 'different rules for different' groups can justify the all-but-inevitable coordinator freeloading.  Without such de-escalating mechanism, another possibility is commoners pushing coordinators into a case 1 (coordinator altruism) mode.

What's more likely in case 4 though, is that coordinator prestige bias plus within-group selection for self-interest dominate norm enforcement stability.  Noise in these values facilitate temporary periods of norm enforcement weakness.  Pockets of self-interest creep-in, and a case 6 scenario emerges (self-interested coordinators and mixed commoners).

Case 5 just seems inherently unstable.  The combination of highly corrupt, self-interested coordinators prestige biasing self-interested moderately corrupt commoners spells doom for group stability.  Commoners should quickly change to high corruption levels lowering the group carrying capacity.  Fully self-interested groups are unfit in between-group competition with altruists.

Case 6 suffers from 3rd "world-itis".  Coordinators are corrupt. Pockets of commoners are corrupt.  Top-down change is unlikely.  Individual commoner survival is likely based upon alliance with strong-man coordinators or strong sub-groups. Between-commoner selection is likely a strong factor.  To get out of the likely evolution to case 5's implosion, between-commoner selection must favor altruists.  If not, bias from coordinators all but ensures case 6 turns into case 5 and then implodes.

Conclusion

• Case 4 stable if norm enforcement (& quasi-religious coherence) > within group selection for self interest + prestige bias.  This is unlikely.
• Case 5 is unstable
• Case 6 is unstable unless between-commoner selection favours altruistic commoner sub-groups.  Empirical evidence of human groups suggests selection favouring altruistic sub-groups is likely.

End States
All this means we only have four cases to look at for possible end-behaviour.  

• Case 1, if commoner norm enforcement (& quasi-religious coherence) + coordinator to commerer prestige bias > within-commoner-group selection for self interest
• Case 3 which is stable
• Case 4, if commoner norm enforcement (& quasi-religious coherence) > within group selection for self interest + coordinator to commoner prestige bias
• Case 6, if between-commoner selection favours altruistic commoner sub-groups over self-interested commoner sub-groups

Case Analogies
At this point we might as well see what value we've gotten for all this work.  The methodology of agent based simulations indicates outcomes must be rigorously filtered for empirical coherence before you start probing implications.  We might as well do the same...

Case 1
Case 1 captures the scenario where coordinators are less corrupt than commoners.  This mimics conditions of moral meritocracies.  Interestingly enough, religions are usually moral meritocracies.  There are lots of stable religions.  Of course, not many of them have to run countries.  Therefore we really can't know how stable religions are in the between-group selection world of nation state competition.  Self-selection into the religion and self-selection out of the religion enable a level of purity probably not attainable in nation states.  (Of course, nation states could just expel freeloaders, but that creates another set of group dynamic headaches.)

Case 3
Case 3 may capture the scenario where altruistic leaders are trying to lift their citizenry up to higher levels of altruism.  I suspect historic periods of this dynamic have been at least partially responsible for human evolution to ever-higher levels of selection.  The problem with this, which we'll explore in more depth later, is that long periods of altruistic coordinators in environments of mixed moral commoners is unlikely.  Cancerous coordinator self-interest is hard to resist.

Case 4
Case 4 seems to be the modern re-interpretation of feudalism: honest peasants are abused by a self-interested nobility.  Again the obvious problem with case 4 is why would peasants put up with this?  You'd expect pockets of self-interest to develop.  Or, you'd expect conflict between commoners and coordinators to come to a head.

Case 6
Case 6 seems most similar to pessimistic perspectives of modern society: Commoners are a mixed bunch and coordinators see how far they can stretch their own self-interest.  3rd world manifestations of this state likely have weak technocratic enforcement mechanisms.  1st world manifestations of this state likely have strong technocratic enforcement mechanisms.  The presence of a rule-of-law Big Brother or equivalent quasi-religious Big Brother is key for case 6 stabilization.  1st world countries tend to rely on rule-of-law.  3rd world countries tend to rely on religious or quasi-religious (e.g. tribal culture) Big Brothers.

Conclusion
We've now shown that each end-case meets a minimum standard for potential reality.  We'll now analyze our four cases using two different methods: 1) suppositions of long term change paths, 2) behavioural differentiation costs.




Change Path Analysis
As already mentioned, our cases do not allow the possibility of mixed moral coordinators.  This was due to size considerations (Large groups are only possible with moderate corruption.  Small groups are only possible with low or high corruption.)

However, altruistic homogeneity is unstable.  Technically the instability occurs in instances of within-group selection.  If there is a non-zero chance of spawning a self-interested actor who can game norm-enforcement mechanism, then self-interest should expand cancerously (undetected one-off freeloading always has high relative fitness).  We can of course, assume within-coordinator norm enforcement can dampen this.  However, with two groups can within-coordinator norm enforcement dampen coordinators who may freeload off the commoner group?

I suspect the chances are low (or at least lower than within coordinator norm enforcement).  After all, there is little immediate benefit from such action.  Norm enforcement has costs.  As separation from the other group increases, personal norm-enforcement pay off decreases.  Another way of saying this is that the "leakiness" of norm-enforcement is proportional to the distinctness / differentiability between groups.  This suggests self-interested co-ordinators are probable because they can parasitically freeload off another group.  But let's look at each case in more detail rather than jumping to a rather large conclusion.

As a reminder, the cases we're dealing with are

• Case 1, 3, 4, 6

We'll start at each case and just like in soft-sociology we'll uncritically predict each case's change path.  In lieu of rehashing all the old supporting arguments, I'll keep things brief.

Case 1 Change Path
Undetected self-interest is very advantageous in homogenous groups of altruists.  Thus, I'd personally predict an evolution from

• case 1 (coordinator = altruist, commoner = altruist) to 
• case 4 (coordinator = self-interest, commoner = altruist) which leads to 
• case 6 (coordinator = self-interest, commoner = mixed)

Case 3 Change Path
Same reasoning as case 1

• case 3 (coordinator = altruist, commoner = mixed) to 
• case 6 (coordinator = self-interest, commoner = mixed) 

Case 4 Change Path
Due to prestige bias and commoner self-preservation

• case 4 (coordinator = self-interest, commoner = altruist) to 
• case 6 (coordinator = self-interest, commoner = mixed) 

Case 6 Change Path

While case 6 seems stable, the most likely change path is to case 5: implosion.

There is also non-zero probability of miraculously flipping to a case 3 scenario (coordinator = altruist, commoner = mixed).  There is also a non-zero probability of moving to case 4 (coordinator = self-interest, commoner =altruist).  Although, this latter move seems very unstable.



Conclusion
Case 6 (coordinator = self-interest, commoner = mixed) is a natural well.  This is both intestesting and problematic because case 6's most probably change path is to case 5: implosion!

Other change paths are certainly possible.  For example it is entirely possible for environmental conditions to favour a move against the entropy of self-interest.  Indeed that's a fundamental tenet of multi-level selection which suggests between-group selection balances within-group selection (despite naive 1970's thinking otherwise...).

While I won't make the case for it in this blog post, I suspect we'd see complex cycling around case 6: there would be fluttering between case 3, 4 and 5.

We've also discussed how the following factors can stabilize our cases:

• commoner norm enforcement (& quasi-religious coherence),
• within group selection for self interest,
• coordinator to commoner prestige bias,

Behavioural Differentiation Analysis
We've mentioned how between group distance (specifically differentiability / distinctness) is (inversely) proportional to norm-enforcement leakage.  Norm-enforcement leakage is often fitness enhancing if you're successfully transitioning to a higher level of selection (aka becoming a super-group).  Norm enforcement leakage is often fitness decreasing if you're moving away from a higher level of selection (aka tribalizing).  

Norm enforcement has costs.  Detection costs and false-positive false-negative frequencies are higher between dis-similar individuals than between similar individuals.  Let's call this idea of distance / differentiability / distinctness, 'behavioural differentiation'.

This gives us two components

• behavioural differentiation
• moral similarity

We'll make a liberal assumption that mixed morals don't result in necessarily distinguishable behaviors. 

We'll also devise some assumptions about norm enforcement costs.

1. distinguishable behavioural signals with similar morals will have minimal norm enforcement costs. (low x low = low)
2. distinguishable behavioural signals with different morals will have moderate norm enforcement costs.  (low x high = moderate)
3. non-distinguishable (similar) behavioural signals and similar morals will have moderate norm enforcement costs. (high x low = moderate)
4. non-distinguishable (similar) behavioural signals and different morals will have high norm enforcement costs.  (high x high = high)

Here's the reasoning.  Distinguishable behavioural signals make it easy to determine who's in your group and who's not.  This lowers the cost of norm enforcement.  You're erring in trying to norm enforce people outside of your immediate group.  Similarly, identical moralities lower norm-enforcement costs.  This is because of better insight into your own type of morals.  

You get the following table (which explores the situations where behaviour is and is not distinct/distinguishable).

But now we have to multiply by the enforcement costs of altruism or self-interest.  Self-interest will have lower norm-enforcement costs because when everyone is expected to go their own way, there are fewer norms to enforce.  Mixed states will have the highest norm enforcement costs.

We'll use the following math for multiplicative norm cost enforcement (the first term)

• low x altruism = 1 x 2 = 2
• low x altruist self interest mix = 1 x 3 = 3
• low x self-interest = 1 x 1 = 1
• moderate x altruism = 2 x 2 = 4 
• moderate x altruist self interest mix = 2 x 3 = 6 
• moderation x self-interest = 2 x 1 = 2 
• high x altruism = 3 x 3 = 9
• high x altruist self interest mix = 3 x 3 = 9
• high x self-interest = 3 x 1 = 3

Our table now looks like this.  Of particular interest is that behavioural distinguishability greatly reduces the norm enforcement costs for both commoners and coordinators in every case.  Of course, this is an artifact of our a priori assumptions to the same....  Nonetheless, its interesting to see what type of landscape this produces.

Case 1  has the lowest net norm enforcement costs (for both the distinguishable and non-distinguishable scenarios).  Case 6 also has low net norm enforcement costs.  If norm enforcement costs are the prime concern, then coordinators should favour case 6 with distinguishable behaviours.  Commoners should favour case 1 with distinguishable behaviours.



Last Filter
The last filter to apply is migration.  As mentioned before, coordinators are expected to be sensitive to immigration.  Thus, distinguishable behaviours and distinct moralities should be favoured (they increase migration costs).

This favours case 4****, which we're labelling (extremely loosely) feudalism.  Not far behind are case 3, benevolent builders and case 6, modern society.

Case 3's trajectory results in gradual increases to coordinator immigration.  This happens as commoners become more altruistic like their coordinators.  This lowers emigration costs (commoner to coordinator) because of the similarity rule.  Altruists immigrating into a group of altruists is minimally problematic.  Altruism is weakly subject to within-group competitive factors.

Case 6's trajectory (the most probable of which is to case 5 - dual self-interest) is also towards similarity. Commoners are becoming more self-interested like their coordinators.  This is problematic.  It increases within group competition.  Self interest is strongly subject to within-group competitive factors.

Additionally, some recent research shows that people in power tend to be prejudiced towards those not in power.  Coordinators should be biased against commoners.  This increases the chance that coordinator freeloading is directed at commoners rather than their own group.

SUMMARIZING 
So far this post has covered a lot of ground  made a lot of assumptions and relied on more speculatory hand waving than is healthy.  Luckily personal academic blogs are about teasing out improbable ideas to see what sticks.  So far, here are this journey's highlights:

1. Group morals stabilize around either altruism or self-interest.  Mixed states don't seem empirically stable unless they occur via within-group pockets.
2. Function at a higher level of selection requires the minimization of lower level conflict.  Thus stable societies have ways of minimizing conflict between its constituent groups.
3. Coordinating roles are essential in large groups.
4. Large groups are facilitating by moderate amounts of corruption.  But too much corruption quickly decreases group size.
5. While lots of variables should be explored to game coordinator-commoner Nash equilibria, a feasible approach requires reduction down to 1st order terms. These seem to be corruption and moral orientation.  This widdles the solution space down from more than 8! cases for a full problem down to 6.
6. Potentially stable states are
1. case 1: a moral meritocracy. 
2. case 3, which is a temporarily stable situation of benevolent coordinators lifting up their corrupt commoners (temporality is due to random noise).
3. case 4: something like feudalism where too-good-to-be true altruistic commoners put up with coordinator parasitism.
4. case 6: 3rd world societies or pessimistic views of modern 1st world societies.  Rule-of-law or strong moral-big-brothers maintain societal coherence.
7. Case 6: modern society is a landscape well.  However, entropy favours decomposition to societal implosion (case 5) as within-group competition (which favours self-interest) outcompetes between-group competition (which favours altruists).  
8. Case 4 feudalism is favoured by coordinators on immigration grounds.  

THE EDUCATIONAL TIE-IN
So now we've reached our final theoretical destination.  The most robust solution is

• different behavioural norms and moral orientations between commoners and coordinators
• commoners who have pockets of altruism and self-interest and coordinators who are self-interested and direct their freeloading to the commoner group.

If this is really a stable solution, we should expect to see multiple repetitions of its emergence across societies.  We do.  If it is stable, one should also look for social structures which facilitate this differentiation.  I'd propose that education is such a vehicle.

Vehicles stabilizing the case 6 well (coordinator = self interest, commoner = mixed) should:

1. focus coordinator self-interest on commoners
2. rationalize this behaviour in a way that is maximally convincing for commoner
3. minimize coordinator self-interest against their own group
4. minimize immigration of commoners into the coordinator group
5. foster distinguishability between coordinators and commoners
6. favour altruism amongst commoners
7. maintain a coordinator knowledge base of know how to direct/coordinate commoner effort.

There are probably an infinite number of solutions to this problem.  Thus we should take any "just-so" solution with a very big grain of salt.  Just-so solutions do not show that a solution will happen.  It only shows that a solution is not implausible.  Thus the highest degree of certainty we can get for the following educational argument is 'not implausible'.  This is a pretty low bar! (And one that precludes using these results for anything.)


Solutions
We'll have to deal with two cases here.  One situation is where each group has the opportunity to create their own vehicle to preserve their desired stabilization.  Tension between the case favoured by each group leads to case 6 stabilization.  The other situation is where both groups rely on the same vehicle.

Different Vehicles
Again, our analysis suggests commoners are likely to favour a mixed states for themselves (case 3 or case 6).   Case 3  (coordinator = altruistic, commoner = mixed) is obviously better than case 6 (coordinator = self interest, commoner = mixed).

Pluralism enables a mixed state.  Social equity pulls back the between-group competition which occurs within pluralism. So commoners solution is to facilitate pluralism but to do so in a way to values altruism and equity.  Wilson's classical religious morals do this (as would the equivalent secular and non-supernatural alternatives).

Coordinators are likely to favour self-interest directed at commoners (case 4) in a way that is minimally antagonistic to commoners.  The obvious solution to this is to convince commoners that coordination requires a certain level of graft.  Education should also re-enforce the impossibility of commoners fulfilling coordinator roles.  Aristocratic priest craft seems like a good solution here.  I'd expect oblique transmission from priest to laity with unnecessary opaque and symbolically heavy messaging focussed on the value of individual sacrifice and group unity.  Again, Wilson's classical religious morals seem to do this.  The only caveat would be some additional messaging enabling co-ordinators to rationalize graft: something like "prosperity theology" works.

Common Vehicle
As already mentioned, the aggregate solution for commoners and coordinators is case 6.  The challenge with a single common vehicle is having a single message that is interpreted in different ways.  This speaks to a hidden curriculum.

Imagine a single educational system that encourages altruism and equity.  But in practice its benefits are differentiated by socially opaque norms and threshold dependent benefits.  Those with the social background and opportunities to benefit do so really well.  Those who don't pass this threshold are entrenched into thinking they can't function as coordinators and that there is something they just can't "get" about that world.  It should also encourage cliquishness while maintaining a sense of nationalism.

Capitalism, the "American Dream", and high-standards public education are one of many possible intersecting solutions.  Public charter schools which function as de facto class purifiers would also be part of a strong intersectional solution.  This gives the appearance of openness while masking fundamental closed-off specialization.

A necessary condition of the common vehicle education would be a focus on understanding commoners and commoner dynamics.  Central to this would be assurances that the right class of people emerge as normative achievement champions.  Thus the "right" type of answers endemic to a coordinator world-view would valued by the system.  Trump-like blue-collar logic and pragmatics would be ridiculed and portrayed as destructive: after all, while understood by commoners it is not readily understood by elite.

Conclusion
We spent an inordinate amount of time flushing out arguments for a socially heterogeneous society composed of two morally homogeneous sub-groups.  We broadened the scope of Wilson's binary moral findings to include the possibility of mixed commoner morals.  What we found was that self-interested coordinators and mixed morality commoners is a solution well.  Evolution of this state (case 6) into complete self-interested implosion (case 5) must be mediated by some factors.

Technocracy in the form of rule-of-law or Big Brother based religion (or quasi-religion) is one potential stabilizer.  Education is another potential stabilizer.  Distinguishability between sub-groups lowers norm enforcement costs.  It also minimizes conflict between sub-groups.  Role specialization (real or hyperbolized), dependencies, and group-specific moralities further minimize competition.

Education can either be niche oriented to the needs / interests of each group, or it can be generalized for both groups.  Niche specific education is well served by liturgeous symbolically opaque coordinator (elite) education.  This increases migration costs into coordinator classes and entrenches distinguishability of the classes.  Niche specific education is well served by altruistically oriented practices for commoners.  This opposes natural pressure to ever-increasing levels of commoner self-interest which is destructive in the between-group selection world with other societies.

Common education is well served by an elite focussed education that encourages altruism and equity, but which in practice has a high bar usually only passed by those with the right type of culture.  This gives the appearance of equity while masking the ordinal race to ensure coordinators always come out on top.

Notes
*In another post, I'll expand on the mixed group case.  This involves the scenario where some parts of a larger society are classically religious (favouring altruism) while other parts are Randianly selfish (favouring pure self-interest).  This mixed state neatly balances in-group stability (just enough altruists) with out-group stability (nice combination of proselytization for altruists by some while others predatorily {or commensalatorily} exploit those outside the group)

**Distinguishing between conversion and migration is fairly arbitrary.  From here on out I'll assume, at our level of precision (non-individual specific), that the two events are interchangeable.

***Prestige bias isn't the only vehicle for cultural transmission.  Seemingly irrelevant transmission types for our scenarios are oblique (1 to many), vertical (parents to children) and horizontal (social) transmission. Seemingly relevant transmission types are guided variation and content bias.

Guided variation is characterized by individuals seeing something interesting and then modifying it.  Sometimes this increases utility.  Sometimes it refines it.  Content bias is characterized by the intrinsic attractiveness of something affecting its adoption frequency.

Both these forms of cultural transmission weigh the self-interest transmission vs. norm enforcement balance toward self-interest (at least in cased 4-6, in cases 1-3 it weights the other direction).
There's also some interesting support for the evolution selection for high status.  Higher status individuals have lower mortality than low status individuals.

**** Case 2 is also favoured on the sole basis of co-ordinator migration concerns.  However, it didn't pass initial filtering speculation.

Why the "quasi-sacred" part of this blog?

Here's an old post from about 10 years ago.  My thinking has obviously matured since then, but I think it still captures why biological approaches to the science of religion inform educational change questions so neatly.

The post is based on D.S. Wilson's excellent book "Darwin's Cathedral".  At the time, it was an excellent and refreshing escape from the sloppy evangelical approach of the New Atheists (who at that time had reached peak popularity).

Darwin’s Cathedral and Organizational Management in Education

One of the challenges with educational change is the resiliency of old beliefs.  Many change theories propose ways through the walls of stakeholder resistance. Some are idealistic in nature, relying on full transformation and  universal adoption.  Others rely on slippery slope adoption in what amounts to hidden coercion.  The fundamental nature of each change initiative really gets revealed in the way it expects to change the masses.  The high intrinsic motivation of formal educators means there are always a few experimentally minded groups that can be located to make change initiatives initially successful.  However scaling is the true crux of educational change.  Wilson’s ideas in Darwin’s Cathedral yield a new perspective to some of the quandaries and circular problems of educational change.

Formal education is a highly moralistic endeavor.  Education maintains many of the deeply shared common values of society.  Formal education and its hidden curriculums (unstated expectations) provide a grammar that is useful for maintaining cohesion, or at least intelligible cultural communication, in diversified societies.  Now, by this I don’t mean the specific knowledge and language: rather, I mean implicitly understood assumptions of the way society works.  Specifically, I refer to the fuzzily understood morals and ethics around which society and its groups are expected to operate.

In this light, Wilson’s multi-level (group) selection approach to religion is very insightful.  Education’s central position as a cultural pillar has grown to be protected by very robust defense mechanisms.  The adaptive function of religious tendencies should enable group dynamic theories to leverage, rather than blindly fight, evolutionary predispositions.

Wilson shows that religious tendencies are adaptive solutions to group level dynamics.  He also shows that the free-rider problem of group selection is solved through morally enforced norms which are well controlled by specific religious characteristics.  People a normally distributed range of genetically evolved predispositions that work to counter balance free-riding.  In terms of the quasi-religious role of educational systems, this means that educational change may have to fight innate tendencies that protect moral understandings.  Change dynamics may be hindered by our own tacit reluctance to change the foundational understandings upon which the larger groups involved in education operate.  Thus while change initiatives may be fully rationale, they may not be adaptive.

Several implications emerge from this shift of perspective. 

1.     Educational change theorists may benefit from looking at how large scale religions adapt, evolve and change. 

2.     Re-interpretation rather than reform may be appropriate for some levels of change.  Factioning and full schisms may be the only solutions for other levels of change.

3.     For changes to be successful they may need to show solutions to the free-rider problem (in education this is probably participating in the process without ever getting “educated” – at least in the right way)

4.     There needs to be a balance between factual and practical realism.  As Wilson (2002, pp. 228) states, “If there is a trade-off between the two forms of realism, such that our beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true, then factual realism will be the loser every time.  To paraphrase evolutionary psychologists, factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors.”  And just so this doesn’t sound as if I, or he is advocating flying spaghetti monsters, “the proper and intellectually respectful way to approach factual and practical realism is as a trade-off… However, it appears that factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate adaptive behavior.  At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.  In addition the effectiveness of some symbolic systems evidently requires believing that they are factually correct.” (Wilson, 2008, pp. 229).

Judgment Aggregation Theory & Why Education Forces Multi-level Alignment

The Alberta Teacher's Association is having its annual convention this weekend.  A post by the always insightful Phil McRae caught my eye

which ties in the union/profession's official comments,

with a bit more context by the union,

So what I'm going to do today is explain why these types of dynamics happen.  I'll do this from judgment aggregation theory (List & Pettit's formulation).   I'll then reference this back to Argyris' old theory-in-action work (which I'm sad never caught on as well as it would now - the theoretical support tools just weren't there when he wrote it).




JUDGMENT AGGREGATION 
The basic tenet behind judgment aggregation theory is that individual judgments when aggregated on a multi-step issue can create paradoxical results.

For example, in a court case you may need to evaluate two separate premises before reaching a conclusion. Each position may be based on "majority wins".  In Kornhauser & Sager's (1993) classic example below, both premises are true, yet the aggregate decision is false.  This is the paradox.  Do you evaluate down each premise then aggregate across (a true/guilty conclusion)? Or do you evaluate across each individual conclusion then aggregate down (a false/innocent conclusion)?

See Pettit's paper for a deeper technical presentation using formal logic conventions.




APPLICATION OF JUDGMENT AGGREGATION & GROUP AGENCY

List & Pettit (2011) have taken judgment aggregation further by endogenizing group agency.  This is REALLY good work.  Here's a quote:

Individuals may form a group agent in virtue of evolutionary selection or cleverly designed incentives to act as required for group agency, perhaps within independent cells.  here the individuals contribute to the group agent's performance, but do not explicitly authorize the group agent, the need not even be aware of its existence. (p. 36)

One of the challenges is how to make a Turing machine aggregator "rational".  They take a fairly generous approach here simply saying that the aggregate needs to :

1. respond to its surroundings (be rational & responsive), and
2. rationalize its positions (beliefs & desires)

They also add in the need for binary attitudes (but that is more to tie up details associated with a rigorous formal logical approach).

On a whole, this boils down to something like the Turing test.  The aggregator is rational if people ascribe intentionality to it.

While their work has tonnes of depth and fascinating detail,  I'll resist tangent-temptations and pull another quote.

The supervenient relation between the members' attitudes and actions and those of the group can be so complex that the group agent may sometimes think or do something that few, if any, members individually support.  And secondly, the supervenient of the group's attitudes and actions on those of its members is entirely consistent with some individuals being systematically overruled on issues that matter to them a lot.  Accordingly, the kind of control that individual members must be able to exercise in order to enjoy effective protection has to be stronger.  It is not enough for individuals to be able to contribute to what the group thinks or does on the issues that particularly matter to them.  They must be individually decisive on those issues.  Roughly speaking, we say that an individual is 'decisive' on a particular issue if he or she is able to determine fully -  and not merely in conjunction with other individuals - how this issue is to be settled. (p. 130)

This leads to a very interesting (and rigorously argued) conclusion: group agents 'control' individual actors via attitude biasing.  This is in stark contrast to usual definitions of control which assume the application or threat of application of formal power.  Here's another quote on this:

Since our definition of control has taken the group's attitudes, rather than its actions themselves, to be the targets of the individuals' control - the reason being that the group's actions are usually mediated by its attitudes - we can focus, once more on the part of the organizational structure that is easiest to model theoretically: its underlying aggregation function. (p. 136)

As mentioned the aggregation function is based in attitude biasing.  More specially it is a type of espoused, and complexly aggregated, morality.  Here are a few more quotes to take us to the end.

To be a person is to have the capacity to perform as a person.  An to perform as a person is to be party to a system of accepted conventions, such as a system of law, under which one contracts obligations to others... In particular it is to be a knowledgeable and competent party to such a system of obligations.  One knows what is owed to one, and what one owes to others, and one is able and willing to pay one's debts or to recognize that censure and sanction are reasonable in cases of failure... But non-persons cannot be moved by being made aware of obligations they owe to others. (p. 173)

and

To be sure, group agents are not flesh-and-blood persons.  They are pachydermic and inflexible in various ways, and lack the perceptions and emotions of human individuals.  But they nonetheless have the basic prerequisites of personhood.  Not only do they form and enact a single mind, displaying beliefs and acting on their basis.  They can speak for that mind in a way that enables them to function within the space of mutual recognized obligations. (p.176)

INSTITUTIONALIZED EDUCATION AS A GROUP AGENT
Viewing institutionalized education as a group agent is fairly easy.  Education operates on multiple organizational levels just as judgment aggregation and judgment aggregator agents do.  What we want to find out is how this informs the conflict coming to a head in some parts of the Alberta educational system?



THE CONFLICT
The conflict is largely between different philosophical approaches and the relative benefit of secondary feed-back effects on students, teachers, and the system itself.  The actors are:

• the superintendent / government class who increasingly appear as managerial achievement optimizers, and 
• the teacher / union class who are perennial individualizing optimizers.
• Students are the units of analysis (and the ultimate beneficiaries or casualties of the fight).
• Influenceable teachers who are the unit of leverage (and the source of capital).

JUDGEMENT PARALLELS

Judgment aggregation theory suggests the conflict might be framed as fight for different aggregation methods: do you aggregate down each premise or across the whole?  I suspect technocrats favour the premise based approach.  I suspect social scientists favour conclusion based aggregation.

However, this simplistic view isn't what is of interest (after all, how do you really falsify such sociology?).  Rather what's of real interest in what List & Pettit found in the process of judgment aggregation....



GROUP ACTOR CONTROL
Remember that List & Pettit found that the group agent exerted control by biasing the actions of actors and their judgment aggregation processes via a single (ill constrained) "morality" or "intentionality".  In simpler terms, what the "group" was seen as wanting tended to bias individual actors.

The history of former decisions and actions was essential in anthropomorphizing this intention (see also Atran's Big Gods for some good work on anthropomorphizing Big Brother agents).  The history of individuals' asquiesences was also informative.

The conclusions are quite stark.

Individual premises, no matter how wise they may be, don't control judgment aggregation.  Any single level within education which deviates from past histories and intentionalities, is almost certain to get clawed back.  The larger the system, the less disruptive any single level or agent can be.  The longer the system's history, the less disruptive any single level or agent can be.  The more morally-imbued the system is, the less disruptive any single level or agent can be.

The system doesn't "average" each level's conclusions.




CONCLUSIONS
The conclusions suggest that institutionalized education is a behemoth.  Railing against it just burns up capital.  Nonetheless, the system as a whole moves as a net result of endless waves of such expenditures (see Tyack & Cuban's surface wave analogy to ed reform).  However any single level acting on its own is unlikely to be productive.  Rather, the degree of any level's variance to aggregrate intentionality correlates with the degree of pushback it is likely to get.

Incremental change is the purview of morally-infused organizations.  Radical change is not.

Radical change can, however, occur when one part of the system breaks off from the rest.  The result is between-group competition (or multi-level selection type 2 reproduction).

All-in-all, dust ups between unions and senior managers is never productive for students.  Nor is it productive for teachers as a whole, even though individual loci may show gains.  In education, thinking you're right may be noble.  Forcing other levels in the system to act on your nobility is... naive.


Next post - Argyris' espoused vs. theory-in-use perspective.

Teacher Norms: The ideology of Ever-Increasing Standards

There are a couple of trains of thought with regard to teacher professional development.  I'm going to focus on two standards-based approaches. The intent is to deconstruct the assumptions and feedback loops in these approaches.  In this post, I'll introduce some background and explore the increasing-standards train of thought.




BACKGROUND

Best practice in teacher professional development points to the need for embededness, collaboration, and decision space (the ability to make decisions that are not undercut).  Fullan and Hargreaves approach the question a bit more broadly. Their professional capital take on things frames steady state solutions to teacher professional development dynamics (and steady state teacher standards dynamics) in terms of professional capacity.  Professional capacity is operationalized as a function of:

• decision capital - the power & ability to make meaningful decisions (including structural ones)
• social capital - effective networks of practice which are frequent, collaborative, and sufficiently skilled
• human capital - the skills & resources (including energy & motivation) necessary to be effective.

On a loose-tight managerial spectrum, there are a couple of paths standards based professional development can go:

• A loose systems approach - no real minimums (except for obviously egregious malpractice) and a high focus on differentiation and individualization.  You could also call this a strong union approach.
• A tight system approach - perpetually increasing standards, minimal differentiation, often with a focus on economies of scale (one size fits many solutions).  Many people call this the business approach to education.
• A mixed approach - varying minimums and with commensurately varying levels of differentiation (in an inverse relationship).  Differentiation usually operates near the school unit of analysis (it typically ranges from between a couple of schools down to the level of a few teachers).  K-12 education usually operates here.

Like any categorization, this one is obviously arbitrary (heck, it doesn't even have an ANOVA table to give it that false air of social-scientific authority!). However, as I've discussed before, education is a complex system that tends to operate between strange attractors.  From an organizational lens, these attractors are: 

• system looseness (basically a small group orientation), and,
• system tightness (basically a large group orientation). 

The middle is complex.  Emergent patterns ebb and flow with perennial actor changes and societal feedback.  While some steady states in the middle may be stable on moderate time frames, brevity requires omitting this discussion....

EVER INCREASING STANDARDS

The eternal rounds of the mobius strip

The business camp of education tends to see standards as a moveable bar used to push performance to higher levels.  In this sense standards aren't true professional minimums.  Rather, standards are (~lower quartile) normative performance goals.  If enough people meet a standard, evaluators simply bump up expectations.

Some people try to sell this as "life-long learning".  If you don't see the linguistical con here, I've got some beachfront property in Nebraska to sell you...

Other people try to sell ever-increasing standards as "real professionalism".  This is cherry-picked mis-contextualization.  Practices whose professional standards improve frequently tend to be those standards related to technological and highly quantifiable measures (which metal composite to use).  Practices whose professional standards change infrequently, but do so ubiquitously, tend to be those with zero error tolerance (blood transfusion process).  Education this is not.


Example
The Dufours have generated a good example of a fully developed "increasing standards" approach.

Dufour styled professional learning communities (PLC's) are based on a dogma of "increasing standards".  This is operationalized via inclusive ideological assumptions.  Inclusive educational ideologies posit "all students can learn".  This leads to the conclusion that achievement (the controllable aspect at least) is best framed as an exclusive function of teacher input.  Student capacity, freedom, and teacher inspired student transformations are exogenous.

PLC's unit of achievement is the number of students surpassing an arbitrary performance standard. In an ideal world standards are set by collaborative teacher groups.  In the real world, standards are set by the state.  Exceptions occur when a PLC's results are far above expectation.  At this level of performance actors finally become autonomous - at least in theory.

In practice the educational sustainability literature suggests successive waves of administrator turn-over results in near stochastic certainty that autonomous PLC's will, over time, get called out for being different or for rejecting the newest mandated reform.  Autonomy has bounds and educational success can't escape the politics of shifting values.  As many a tightly coupled school division would say, you are always free to do whatever is reasonable -as long as it agrees with what we're asking.  Like any utopian solution, fidelity is paramount.


Philosophy
Philosophical assumptions of increasing standards are humanistic toward students (in a PLC model) and machine oriented toward teachers.  In education's highly nested organizational hierarchy, this produces a system which, on a whole, has an uncertain philosophical orientation.  Tension between humanistic assumptions for teacher-student interactions but mechanistic assumptions for teacher-leader interactions suggest organizational actors may complexly oscillate between the polarized dogmas of loose-coupled humanism and tightly-coupled machination.

Increasing standards can of course be applied both to teacher and students.  KIPP schools are an excellent example of this.  In this case, philosophical assumptions are entirely machine oriented and all actors in the system (except for elite decision makers) are cogs in a machine.

Humanist approaches can also be applied to both teachers and students.  In this sense, an increasing standards approach may mirror a structural-marxist philosophy (caveat emptor - I know bunk about marxism....): revolution is constant, the bottom matters most, equality is utopian, and self-sacrifice is essential.

In a simpler sense, the focus on those who don't succeed represents the gist of modern feminism and social justice.  While it may seem odd to associate "leftist" philosophies/ideologies with a business oriented approach, tolitalitarianism makes strange bedfellows....


Focus
It's easy to deduce that the focus of the ever increasing standards approach is students/teachers who do not meet standards.  This provides an obvious resonance with inclusion which takes for granted that system improvement comes from focussing on the bottom.

The contribution of heroic actors (who typically grate against tight-coupling's contextual blindness) is offset by net improvements.  Losses at the top of the pyramid are more than offset by gains at the bottom.  (For what looks to be a reasonable discussion on inclusion, see Rethinking Inclusive Education: The Philosophers of Difference in Practice.)

In terms of students this means 20% grade point improvements for F students more than make up 2% losses for A students. In terms of teachers, this means improving poor practitioners' teaching capacity yields better net results than continued empowerment of heroic actors.  The business label is apropos.

History shows multiple cases where this trade-off has been successful.  The most obvious case is conflict between large farming societies and small hunter-gather societies.  Farmers tend to be less proficient warriors than hunters.  But sheer numbers dominate in the long run.  The US civil war is just one among hundreds of examples.  A multi-level selection theory (or any strain of group selection) is informative here.

In-group trade-offs certainly are not virtuous practice (in the technical sense of the phrase).  Pure group level considerations are naive to the individual and the individual's effect on the group.  Pure individual considerations are naive to the group and the group's effect on the individual.

Simplistic good-bad dichotomies are problematic.  Good outcomes are simply those we like (including secondary effects).  Bad outcomes are simply those we don't like (including secondary effects).  Power dynamics can't be escaped.  Tension between primary effects' short-term impact vs secondary effects' long-term impact may be seen as yet another set of strange (educational) attractors.



Feedback Loops
Inspection suggest increasing-standards is dissonant with:

• Most teacher unions - Teacher unions tend to reflect education's over-arching moral mission to improve each person as much as possible.  Their focus is on the whole, not the bottom. Public education resists balkanized niches.
• Academically oriented education - Academic orientation is less concerned about standards and more considered with ordinal based performance.  The bottom is less a focus than the top. Streamlining is expected.  It is thus individually oriented.  Focus is on the maximum standards possible for adequate filtering.
• Equity / fairness - Increasing-standards is focussed on equality (everyone up to standard) more than equity (each person getting what they need).
• Social justice - Standards are blind to the reasons or contexts of different performance. (Note: norming is certainly possible.  In this case, allowances for social justice is possible but is dependent on the quality of norming methods.)

Increasing-standards is somewhat dissonant with:

• Assessment for learning - While Dufour PLC's and formative assessment are both based on continual data analysis, clear standards, and timely interventions, their philosophies and unit of analysis are different. Assessment for learning is based on differentiated assumptions and the smallest unit of analysis possible.
• Outcome based curriculum - The unchanging nature of outcomes make little room for increasing standards. While PLC's are based upon increasing standards, it's disingenuous to say the process can't be bastardized.  Divergence happens one "everyone" is meeting the mark.

Inspection also suggests increasing standards is resonant with:

• Inclusion - Both worry about the bottom of the ladder more than the top.
• Teacher proofing - While high yield instructional strategies can build capacity for everyone, history suggests teacher proofing is the stable equilibrium point systems reach in regard to low performers.
• Vocational education - This is mainly about acquiring the skills necessary for specific types of employment.  A standards approach thrives here.  A finite set of job types to train for means vocational education can be group oriented.
• Business oriented education systems 
• PLC's
• Outcome based reporting - grades are disaggregated into multiple standards.  Achievement may be pass or fail but is often more graduated.

IMPLICATIONS

The ever-increasing standards approach must eventually eat-its-own.  Exponential achievement increase is a logical phallacy (pun intended).  At some point, things have to level off.  What do you do then?

In practice, PLC's & increasing-standards approaches reach the point where incremental improvements on the same old questions sap more and more human capital and motivation.  Even perpetually worthwhile goals like "student achievement" or "lifelong learning" are sensitive to synergistic demands. Growth and change are fundamental aspects of human group behaviour.  They aren't mere add-ons.  Machine philosophies neglect this at their own peril.

Luckily, education always has new problems to tackle. But, as mentioned before, are those new problems allowable? Are they mandated & non-constructive?  Or do inevitable system level directional changes provide a perpetual source of refocus and thus a continual option for synergy?

Perhaps.  But the answer is largely determined by the system in which any single school division resides.  Education's strong moral mission creates strong background pressure for complete system alignment, not to specific practices but to general morality.  See List & Pettit's work on judgement aggregation theory for a fairly rigorous modelling of why this is the case.

Safe Spacer Summary

Because my posts tend to be rather long (and hard to follow), here's a quick summary of how I analyze the safe-spacer free-speech-blocker movement.

The safe spacer movement is well interpreted by religious dynamics. I tend to think what we're currently seeing in post-secondary campuses is simply the final stages of religious self-organization.

A long trend toward increased societal diversity enabled a phase change in norms.  Things recently became unfrozen.  Once "anything goes" morality was legitimized, real questions about what can be and can't be accepted have emerged.  For the masses, morality has switched from its normal high implicitness to discussable (& questionable) explicitness.

Natural tendencies to religious-like dynamics ensure sacredization occurs (i.e. certain things become sacrosanct).  With multiple versions of morality out on the open, complexity theory ensures self-organization occurs (both mimetically, culturally, and in terms of groups).  Thus groups start rallying around various moral nexuses.  Standard religious dynamics (see Atran, In God's we Trust) illustrate likely group-behaviour patterns.  Multi-level selection theory provides information about group competition dynamics.

The net result resembles a great religious awakening cycle.  However, supernaturalism is absent. The strong embodiment of moral big brothers seems to not matter much in our reasonably scientific literate & rule of law trusting society.

Swarm Politics' Long Game

Scott Adams has a interesting post up this week.  Rather than his usual discussion about large-group persuasion, he proposes that social media (in this political season) has become the new source of US political power.

This is a rather interesting idea.  I mention it here because of its link to large group dynamics and cultural evolution.

Here's a long quote from his post:

The founders of the United States designed a system in which voters elected smart people and those smart people ran the country. They called it a republic. 

Over time, money corrupted the system. Rich people became the real power. The rich controlled the media, and that was enough to control the minds of voters. Let’s call that system a type of “economic fascism.” By that I mean the real power is the top 1% (as opposed to one dictator) and the rest of the country has no real power. 

Society has improved a great deal under economic fascism. Slavery ended, women gained equal rights, and gays are getting married. We also have lots of social nets and whatnot. But that stuff only happens because the top 1% is okay with it. As long as the rich get richer, the people at the top are fine with any other change. The rich don’t want the poor to riot, so some policies have to favor the masses. Drug cartels operate the same way. They provide social services to put the locals on their side. 

In 2016, our form of government took a new turn. Thanks to social media, the most persuasive ideas can always find an audience. The top 1% are no longer the gate keepers of truth with their control of the media. Now any good persuader can rise to the top of the influence pile. All he or she needs is a smartphone.

So Adam's proposed (cultural) evolution of political power is:

power via intelligence [& perhaps (of) positional manipulation]  --> power via intelligence of economic manipulation --> power via intelligence of social manipulation

Academics will certainly fuss about his broad generalizations.  However, it doesn't pay to lose the forest for the trees.  The interesting point (for large group dynamics) is the thesis that replacement of economic-strings with social-populism-strings is underway and that the Trump phenomenon may have instigated a rapid phase change in this regard.


SWARM TENDENCIES: LARGE GROUP INSIGHTS
From this social-manipulation lens, mob mentalities are the new norm.  Swarm effects have overshadowed the leverageable effects of money-politics. Money's lap-dog, mass media, is seeing its power to sway overcome by social media.  Social media swarm factors have negligible intersectionality with back-room money power structures (for the moment at least...structures have a way of winning long wars....).

While its not quite right to say popularism is the new de facto currency of political power, it seems correct to say, that since we're now in the midst of the long-foreseen identity wars, the ability of groups to convert, mobilize and compete against other groups* is more important than it has been for a long time.  Additionally, these identity groups are competing in an environment that seems to have fairly strong group selection pressure (MLS1 type).  The dynamics probably have a lot of parallels with new religious movement dynamics.

Social media has very strong local effects.  Society's general moral destabilization means that localized environmental effects can have significant global effects.  Our socio-moral system is in an unstable equilibrium. Localized phase changes may have minor global penetration, but their cumulative effects (via primary, secondary, or tertiary effects) are anything but environmentally negligible.


QUASI-RELIGIOUS INSIGHTS
On the quasi-religious end of things, social media mobs and their swarming propensities are highly actualized by sacred value formation & breach.  Thus, as swarming's power becomes more noticeable, it should be leveraged more and more.  Sacralized hypersensitivity is to be expected.  As history shows, outrage is a virtue in inter-group conflict (at least up to the point where it engenders real existential destruction).

In fact, this seems to be what we're seeing.  Well intentioned identity-based groups are becoming more and more hyper-sensitized (think over-reaching micro-aggressions).  The sacred important ascribed to things that the uncatechized would see as fairly innocuous attests to this.  Moral outrage & the ability to swarm confer real group benefits upon individuals.


MULTI-LEVEL SELECTION INSIGHTS
A multi-level-selection analysis of Adam's swarm based political power suggests loose confederacies will form and dissolve while fitness advantages between various groups and various group orientations are indeterminate.  To me, this is Adams point.

I suspect he sees weaponized complexity leadership expressed in the social media domain and actualized via quasi-religious dynamics as a steady state solution.  I don't.  I see it as a temporary state which enables in-group and out-group oriented components of a meta-group to get back together and eject free-loading power usurping radicals.  In this regard, I take Sigmund's Tides of Tolerance model to heart: a small preference for tolerance (out-group orientation) grows until there's a loss of connection with the reasons for tolerance. At that point, there's a temporary phase change to intolerance while the system resets itself.

Thus tolerance for its own sake reaches a crisis point: its ubiquity engenders massive meta-analyses.  This often takes the form of a "great religious awakening".  When morality emerges from its implicit shadows, multiple moral expressions compete.  Pretty soon everyone is offensive to someone. Intolerance keels over from its top-heaviness.  New norms are established.

ARE PERPETUAL SWARMS STABLE
Of course, the real question is whether perpetual swarms are stable (like Adams proposes).  I don't think there's a definitive answer for that.  Political theorists during the French revolution era considered popular democracy unstable.  History has proved this naive (at least under the right GDP conditions). So what's an appropriate time frame for stability judgments? 1 year? 10 years?

Based upon the historical pattern of moral instability lengths during religious awakening cycles and other periods of moral instabilities, swarms seem stable on the order of a few years, but not on the order of a few decades.  But, just because this has hitherto been the case, doesn't imply it will always be the case.  So, can a swarm pattern be stable on a decade order?


ANALYZING LIKELY SWARM STABILITIES
Multi-level selection theory is mute on this topic.  The best it can do is suggest (via historical deduction) that:

1. Adaptive groups operating in a stable state are likely to have no clear fitness advantage over each other.  The tools used by competing groups offer no significant fitness advantage.  The analogy is nation state vs. nation state, chiefdom vs. chiefdom, etc.  Niche specializations are of course possible, but advantages are localized. Religion is another example: no single religion has a clear advantage over another.  Some may certainly be doing better than another, but few major players are disintegrating on the decade time scale under discussion.
2. Adaptive groups may nest within a semi-cohesive meta-structure.  This structure provides moments of synergy, but has no clear fitness advantage over smaller group orientations. Culture and weakly functioning nation states may be examples of this.  Religions and tribes provide many rule-of-law like benefits & protections.
3. Adaptive groups may nest within a dominant meta-structure or higher level group.  The higher level group provides clear fitness advantage over an exclusive small group orientation.  Functioning nation states may be examples of this.  Rule-of-law orientation is more beneficial/productive than tribal or religious orientations.

From this analysis, 3 (nesting under a large-group) suggests swarms and power to control swarms will eventually become dominated by a successful group or by an emergent nexus group.  Swarms are not stable, or swarms are indistinguishable from current political parties (although under the new swarm influence we may see an eventual move to a multi-party system)

2 (nesting under a weak supra-structure) certainly seems possible.  A combination of 2 and 3 seems to be what the 1730's great religious awakening produced (nascent but weakly functioning nation state).  3 seems to be what the 1820's great religious awakening produced (a strong nation state that effectively competed against state rights).  2 is the solution I tend to see as most likely.

1 (competing small-groups) is what Adams seems to favour.  I'd suggest it is unlikely to stay tenable over many years because:

1. Repetitive sacrilege loses its synergistic value.  For example, gay marriage used to rile up righteous indignation in some people.  Now it seems pretty mundane.  Similarly racism's over-play seems to be softening its sacrilegial value. Now that most everything is racist to someone, its losing its meaning & significance.  Familiarity is the foe of a swarm's energizers.
2. Maintaining swarm synergy in the context of diminishing sacrilegial energy requires size expansion.  Basic complexity theory suggests you need to add energy to a system by either creating new connections of by absorbing free environmental resources.  Thus groups either need to 2a) combine, 2b) swallow each other, or 2c) convert unaffiliated (or weakly affiliated) agents. 

While we're certain to see groups combine and dissolve (2a & 2b) I suspect, over time, these players foci (combining & domination) will be localized rather than globalized.  Global actions are likely to be costly commitment displays: useful for beefing up in-group commitment, group status, and keeping new recruit levels sustainable.

2c (proselitsim) is the most interesting option.  The history of 2nd & 3rd century Christianity is illuminating here.  Costly christian commitment displays, like helping plague victims, and martyrdom, seeded sect growth remarkably well.  However, I doubt a twitter triage or a publicized career suicide has enough commitment cost to function at the evangelical level needed....  However, I could be wrong.

CONNUNDRUM

This presents a conundrum for swarms.  They must have a ripe target (i.e. cis-gendered white males), but can't risk alienating too many people or else their source of synergistic energy will shrink (unaffiliated actors).  However, I've already mentioned that once everyone is someone's target, sacrilege loses its power due to pluralistic dilution.  It's impossible to limit a big trump card to just a few people's hands.  Scott Adams, however, alludes to the idea that truly great persuaders may always be able to stay one step ahead of the curve: continually finding new sources of unique outrage.  

Call me skeptical, but I think real outrage and groundswelling sacrilege need time to fester. Pop the outrage blister too much and its reservoir run dry.  Big moral reboots and total-value questionings need unique environmental superpositionings to reach critical social mass.

CONCLUSION

Thus, I think swarm power is likely to have a good run for a few years.  After that though, I can't see it having much staying power.  Power brokers will certainly try to harness it as much as they can.  Every so often it will catch. But, over time, ground-level swarm power will be surpassed by structure.  Successful structure will likely be a combination of old and new power (back-room machines & social media swarms).  

However, to me, swarm structure is unlikely to be much different from current religion.  Certainly it will be secularized and non-supernatural.  But, as readers already know, I don't think supernaturalism is great boundary for religious dynamics.  What this means is that politics is likely to merge with secular quasi-religion and we'll be doomed to have to relearn the lessons that gave rise to the separation of church and state.

Notes
* Of course I'm referring to groups within our society