Nascar racing ?? F1 cars, running, bowling, boxing, rowing, you name it stats are used universally and extensively.

“what are the statistics of this sprinter for getting ‘off the blocks’ after the gun fires, what’s he’s average speed after 10 meters, how long did it take to get half way, all statistics.”

statistics are only used in games like baseball because they are so boring that fans have to do something to amuse themselves, and doing maths must be more interesting that watching the game.

and we all know, the coach is an idiot, unless he get’s it right then he’s a button pusher. (since Obama came in, you have all the answers carl).

Don’t bother trying to figure out who I am, or where this post comes from. Suffice it to say it’s very distant.

I bring important and timely information for your civilization.

First, some background. Each time there’s a major change in the dominant means of wealth creation, a civilization undergoes a transition, which may be accompanied by substantial shocks and upheavals. There are profound economic disruptions, followed shortly by a massive shake-up of the political order, which may be alarming in the short term but ultimately results in a leap upwards in the quality of living.

This civilization should have seen a previous major such incident when manufacturing began to overtake agriculture as the dominant component in national GDP. When agriculture was the dominant component, those who owned and defended large amounts of land were the wealthy and politically powerful. The result was what you term the “feudal” system, in which feudal lords controlled vast territories, defended them with large armies, and competed with one another by attempting to seize territory or, failing that, destroy its agricultural worth to their rivals. Seizing land and “salting the earth” were the primary strategic acts of war.

Once manufacturing became the dominant component, this shifted. Manufacturing is not heavily reliant on controlling large areas of land, but instead on owning and defending factories and their machinery. The optimal unit of productivity changed from a feudal lord’s farmland holdings to a corporation’s factories. Further, the optimal political system changed. Whereas feudal lands were largely self sufficient and relied on trade only for imported luxuries, corporations required trade with other corporations to thrive. This interdependence creates a complex economy, which you term capitalism, and changes the role of political leadership. The leadership no longer is the same as the owner of the means of production; instead, leadership organizes a territorial region into a safe and prosperous environment for the corporations the territory hosts, through policing against theft and vandalism and managing trade at its borders. Secondarily, the individual consumers that create the demand to give the corporations their final markets, at the terminations of supply chains, need to be protected from theft and violence so that they can expect to keep and enjoy their purchases, or else they have little incentive to buy things. The optimal form of government for this is what seems to predominate here now, a liberal democracy with a capitalist economy and fairly porous borders to trade. Territorial warfare changes accordingly: capturing industrial towns replaces capturing arable land and bombing factories replaces salting earth. There’s also much less of it, as competition between owners of means of production takes place in the arena of marketing more than through violence or theft, and cooperation between owners of means of production brings benefits when they aren’t serving overlapping markets.

Other systems were likely tried, such as trying to amalgamate an authoritarian central government with manufacturing-dominant productivity, and they no doubt failed due to the inability of centralized economies to innovate and advance as fast as a free market. The maintenance of demand, beyond for staple products, requires a constant flux of new things for people to desire, while centralized systems run as a single monolithic corporation are optimized for manufacturing a specific set of things, with only incremental, non-revolutionary advancements in their nature and means of manufacture.

There have probably been weaker, subsequent upheavals of the system. For example, the transition to non-feudal social organization will have devolved farm ownership to small individuals, but the subsequent mechanization of agriculture will have favored large corporate organizations operating large farms and groups of farms. The capitalist system would have been shocked when a wave of small farm failures hit the market, setting off bank failures among lending institutions in rural areas that served local farms but not distantly-headquartered agricultural corporations, and then possibly central bank failures. This would likely have occurred roughly one century in your past, if the timeline was typical.

A much larger transitional upheaval looms in your immediate future now. Manufacturing is no longer the dominant term in your most advanced territories’ GDP. The largest contribution now comes from the direct growth and application of knowledge, ultimately to accomplish tasks and allocate time, wealth, and other resources more efficiently. Information itself, and the collation, filtering, and networking-together of related information; so, information and relevance; are supplanting material objects (and food) as valuables, and the means of production of information are supplanting factories (and farms) as capital.

This necessitates as severe a transition as that from agriculture to industry. The optimal organization for information productivity, as you have discovered when you noted that “[t]he top minds are now all working in silos, not only unable to collaborate but actually competing against each other”, is not a feudal territory or even a corporation but a network. Crucially, it must have highly porous borders to information flow in both directions, unlike a corporation which must protect its wares and equipment from theft or sabotage, or a feudal land which must protect its land from conquest or sabotage.

The network thus must not own its own products, paradoxically, or it will be out-competed by ones that do not own their products. A brief survey shows not only the clear instance with statistics your article mentions, but also an instance in the software that governs your information processing machines. A network produces, without owning, one alternative, called Linux, and corporations produce another two, called Windows and iOS. The former has advanced rapidly and eaten into the latter’s market share, to the point that on the mobile computing devices that are your current generation of information processing tools Linux (and its derivative, Android) predominate. In networked servers, Linux also seems to have become dominant.

This “blog” appears to be documenting the early stages of the transition as it impacts the main economic producers, and the producers using the new methods begin to severely out-compete producers attempting to use the old methods, such as corporate silos, to produce the new goods. This transition will accelerate in a very short time, utterly transforming your economy, and the political disruption will follow shortly thereafter. It is a general trait that this transition is much more rapid than the previous one, as it can spread at the speed of light rather than that of external-combustion-engine-powered ocean-going vessels.

The dominant organization of your future is the network. A few existing examples are apparent now that I have found; the oldest being the nearly free flow of information internally within your institutions of higher learning. This has actually been disrupted recently, by publishers exerting copyrights and by patents issued related to something named a “Bayh-Dole Act”. That trend will reverse, if it hasn’t already. Another example is the manner in which your primary telecommunications network has been developed, involving open processes for comment on proposed standards and open publication of said standards, and reliant on network hosts cooperating to implement said standards to make a functioning network. Both the invention of the computing network you use and the network itself are organized on the principles that will dominate in the future.

Those, such as the authors of articles here, that have recognized some of what is coming, I notify of what is to come. I sense some despair and frustration here over the old system’s assorted victories and obstructionism. I notify you that the old system will in what to you will seem a surprisingly short time be as obsolete as feudalism.

That is, assuming the planetary environment remains stable long enough. It currently seems to be rather stressed, as often occurs when a manufacture-dominated civilization has been extant for a while. There is some danger associated with that stress, if efficiency improvements (enabled by information technology and by nanotechnology) don’t come fast enough. Also, there may be significant amounts of political violence in some territories associated with the transition, though inter-territitorial war features much less prominently in the information transition than it does in the manufacturing transition, when centrally-planned economies that are unable to compete economically with market democracies attempt to complete using instead the feudalist methods of violent conquest and destruction of capital. The information transition’s obsolete system’s last resort tends to consist instead of technological and political acts of sabotage. Since their enemies’ primary means of production are computing and communications systems, attempting to disconnect their enemies or sabotage their computing and communications equipment tend to predominate over physical violence. Have there been recent attempts at censorship, computer intrusions, or use of state military or law enforcement powers to disconnect or disable network hosts from availability? I think I saw at least one reference here to such an instance, a “domain seizure”. If so, the political transition may have entered its earliest stages. The later ones are typified by small, and later landslide, victories by political organizations oriented towards networks rather than ownership — you may have such political organizations already in some places — and, in some places, by violent internal revolutions, predominantly in areas where the political system is not open to network-based political organizations peacefully attaining rule through the consent of the governed. If there is no chance of political candidates with network-oriented policy proposals, hostile to the proprietary control of information, being elected in large numbers in your area, then the potential for violent overthrow of your local government is substantial, and thus the risk of being personally subjected to violence as a consequence of the transition.

After the transition is complete, corporations will be as relatively small and insignificant component of your economy as farms presently are compared to manufacturing and information-technology businesses. Information-technology organizations based on network principles will predominate over closed corporations. Systems of employment and remuneration of individuals will have changed correspondingly. Large central governments will become more answerable to individual citizens as the influence of corporations wanes, and later will break down into smaller locally autonomous regions, likely typically consisting of a city and outlying areas, providing for individual safety and protection of computers and other property against theft and vandalism, with little regulation of trade other than in destructive bio- and nanotechnology and other weapons, and with the larger scale organization of the world’s people based on network principles rather than any single central authority. Economic productivity will be maximized by deregulation and the dismantling of large-scale militaries, trade barriers, and other similarly obsolete institutions. The final transition away from large governments will be accelerated by the increasing difficulty of taxing economic activity that increasingly doesn’t involve direct monetary transfers, and especially of taxing forms of wealth that are grown rather than diminished by being shared. If you have a municipal level of government primary responsible for domestic peace-keeping and primarily funded by a land ownership tax, this is likely to persist and eventually predominate among all forms of governance, in the long term.

The two big caveats are these. One, the environment’s stress, and later bio- and nanotechnology, given a catastrophic accident or misuse, could collapse your civilization first, though the risk of this diminishes greatly if this transition is completed successfully. Two, someone may develop an artificial intelligence capable of recursive self-improvement based on understanding and altering its own software. This will destroy you if its goal system is not stable under its own self-improvement actions or if its goal system is not very finely tuned so that it shares your values as people. Either avoid developing such, or ensure the goal system is stable and finely tuned to your values. The time of maximum danger for this lies perhaps 20-30 years in your future, but a small amount likely exists already, based on the speed, number, and ubiquity of your computing devices.

Do not mess with destructive microorganisms, nanodevices capable of reproducing themselves autonomously, or AI unless you know exactly what you are doing. Do not count on any kind of cosmic supervisor, galactic government, those like myself, or similar entities that you may have hypothesized existing and intervening to save you from such errors. And do not despair, even at times when it seems like the “copyright maximalists” are winning, or if a violent revolution or large-scale bank failure ensues, for as long as the ecological, biotechnological, nanotechnological, and AI hazards are avoided your future is a bright one.

This will be my only communication to you.

Based on my observations, I think the appropriate parting remark for a note like this one is “HTH”.

HTH.