On 12/07/2016 07:55 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
There are other kinds of energy barriers besides catastrophes. Climbing a hill is different than falling in a hole and having to climb out again. Taking on debt or forcing everyone to buy car or health insurance, say.
Right, which is what I'm claiming w.r.t. social justice (and political correctness, btw). Scott Aaronson's kerfuffle with Amanda Marcotte is a good example. Social justice diversifies the type of energy barriers on which to cut our teeth.
I don't see why any cognitive process is needed for violence to occur other than operational aspects of making it happen or planning to avoid retribution. The person that believes there is inequality, say a terrorist, can take up arms without really modeling the target at all. A dog can get kicked just because it was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I'm not so sure cognition is as binary as you're implying. The dog-kicker must model the dog to some extent, even if it's in the most banal sense of the adequate sensorimotor control required. Even if the dog-kicker intended to kick the cat and the dog was merely chasing the cat, the dog-kicker still had a model of "the thing to be kicked".
A group will be made up of a finite number of agents. If there are a much larger number of dimensions for measuring productivity, there may not be any basis for exchange. Each agent could live in their own imaginary world of value unrelated to others. Thus, productivity needs to measured on a relatively small number of dimensions to act as a common currency. On college campuses, I would think the currency would be papers (e.g. your fusion research example), or popularity of classes. For voters, it's current and future earnings.
True. But projecting a huge space onto a 10 dimensional space looks quite different from projecting it onto a 1 dimensional space. My guess is that the set of bases for exchange in universities is roughly equivalent to whatever expressive outlets exist in the students, professors, and employees. This can (and should) be different for every university. And my guess is the size of such a set will be larger for a university than your typical corporation or government agency. It's a typical category error by conservatives (like Haidt) to assume universities should operate like corporations, to effectively reduce their telos to unity as if they were a VC funded startup.
It is not necessarily easy for an emotionally warm person to steel herself in such a way that major risks are addressed independent of the risk of collateral damage. When adding up a bunch of costs and benefits to make a decision, the first five or ten effects might be feasible to model, but not five or ten effects of every person involved. For a world leader that could be billions of small terms in an optimization. I emphasize this because you seem to be pushing back on the suggestion that there are categories of people that are mostly the same and can be modelled as the same -- even if they can't be treated the same, at some point they really must be.
Well, I was arguing narrowly against the idea that simulation doesn't "get at" the question of why a selfish individual should care about the efficacy of the biosphere. Video/VR games directly target what the individual cares about. So that contradicts your claim. But whether or not one can use simulation as an effective policy tool is a different sort of usage pattern, less qualitative and more quantitative. And in that usage pattern I agree not only with your practical feasibility limit, but also accept a theoretical limit. If a model is as complicated as its referent, it becomes useless. But my preferred method is not to homogenize the aspects modeled by the Grand Unified Model (GUM), as you seem to suggest; it is to implement a model grammar and generate as many distinct models as necessary to circumscribe the referent. So the feasibility constraint is not on features of the unitary model, but on the number and types of models. FWIW, I seem to be in the minority in thinking this way, given all the pushback I get from traditional modelers and in peer review. 8^(
I would stick with `know'. Questions like "Should I/he/she feel this way?" are relevant for social purposes. Without them, the chips fall where they may. If there is no language to model how differing emotions will interact and what it all means, then all that can be done is to let a conflict process play out.
Well, the topic, here, is social psychology. So, it's difficult for me to abandon the majority of the social medium, which is emotion/feelings. Going back to Aaronson's experience, this is what our conversation's about: the tendency of (us) nerds to avoid the complex fabric of context and focus on overly simplistic black/white contrasts.
To me the word `justice' suggests that subgroup A can exert influence on subgroup B (or B on A) without some sort of dangerous potential energy building-up. If B wants millions of expensive cashmere socks without getting anything in return, there could be a problem.
Yes, I agree. I'm simply resisting the idea that we have to reduce everything to pairwise negotiations (or conflict), which is what Haidt's doing with his truth vs. SJ dichotomy and what you're doing with group influence. I think we should bite the bullet and admit that all influences exist in a rhizomic bath of influences. And that means we need more than pairwise relations. SJ stories help me in my argument for pluralism because they (almost always) involve factoring a 3rd variable into an otherwise false dichotomy (like considering Yarvin's anti-democratic and "scientific racism" views in deciding whether or not he can present his cloud OS to a meeting of programmers). Grafting externalities on the otherwise clean-looking relationships exposes the need for a more robust calculus. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
