"Social justice diversifies the type of energy barriers on which to cut our teeth."
Yep. "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." What I mean is that there can be sufficient disequilibrium in the global system such that an agent could be reasonably well aware of the impact of the system on them and their impact on the system, and nonetheless act in a way that decreases global fitness but increases their individual fitness. An example I heard this morning on NPR was a writer that makes a living from advertisement revenue from fake-news at least partially about Clinton, but nonetheless voted for Clinton. Or any of hundreds of examples of externalized costs by corporations. Games may or may not clarify these factors. It's an act of faith to expect altruism, even in a cost neutral situation. "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 long that there are some iterative reconciliations between `neighboring' distinct models then one might hope a limited GUM could relax over the centuries (and that GUM would be related to federal government). "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." Nerds make black/white contrasts or do nerds simply bother to make contrasts? I would expect the stereotype would be that nerds would be more prone to depth-first approaches -- total dominance of some esoteric narrow topic rather than trying to find a way to rationalize a large but ambiguous or partial set of signals. In doing the latter, model free parameters need to be estimated, and at first that may involve extreme perturbations if measurement is not easy (sample some color with the value of black or white, but not grey -- assuming monotonicity). "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." I could see that would be useful to model politics (esp. high school popularity contests), but it can already hard to model complex things with pairs never mind many body terms. I suspect someone like Trump really is pairwise in his interactions. It works because no one in the whole network has come to expect consistency. With that kind of violence, it is fool's errand to model many body terms. Marcus ============================================================ 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
