Task-Layer Multiplicity as a Measure of Community Level Health

P Fraundorf

doi:10.1155/2019/1082412

Abstract

The insights of many disciplines, and of commonsense, about individual-level well-being might be strengthened by a shift in focus to community-level well-being in a way that respects belief systems as well as the power of each individual. We start with the jargon of complex systems and the possibility that a small number of broken symmetries, marked by the edges of a hierarchical series of physical subsystem types, underlie the delicate correlation-based complexity of life on our planet’s surface. We show that an information-theory-inspired model of attention-focus on correlation layers, which looks in/out from the boundaries of skin, family, and culture, predicts that behaviorally diverse communities may tend toward a characteristic task-layer multiplicity per individual of only e29/20≅ 4.26 of the six correlation layers that comprise that community. This behavioral measure of opportunity may help us to (i) go beyond GDP in quantifying the impact of policy changes and disasters, (ii) manage electronic idea-streams in ways that strengthen community networks, and (iii) leverage our paleolithic shortcomings toward the enhancement of community-level task-layer diversity. Empirical methods for acquiring task-layer multiplicity data are in their infancy, although for human communities a great deal of potential lies in the analysis of web searches and asynchronous experience sampling similar to that used by “flu near you.”

Highlights

We examine an empirical way to characterize the extent to which organisms generally, and people in particular, manage to spend time addressing matters that look inward, as well as outward, from their boundaries of skin, family, and culture
We show that an information-theory-inspired model of attention-focus on correlation layers, which looks in/out from the boundaries of skin, family, and culture, predicts that behaviorally diverse communities may tend toward a characteristic task-layer multiplicity per individual of only e29/20 ≅ 4.26 of the six correlation layers that comprise that community
The importance of a multilayer perspective was highlighted, for instance, by Francis Bacon [1] when reflecting on the correspondence between brotherhood in families, arts mechanical communalties, and religion and his proposed fraternity in learning and illumination

Summary

Introduction

We examine an empirical way to characterize the extent to which organisms generally, and people in particular, manage to spend time addressing matters that look inward, as well as outward, from their boundaries of skin, family, and culture. David Sloan Wilson puts it in Darwin’s Cathedral [10]: “There was a time when individualism reigned supreme in both evolutionary biology and in the human social sciences, creating an image of the individual as the only adaptive unit (or rational actor) in nature and of the group as merely a byproduct of what individuals do to each other.

An Optional Big Picture Context

A Task-Layer Multiplicity Simplex

Applications

The Data Challenge

Conclusions

Disclosure