On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 8:39 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com
<mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
"The rigging is, IMHO, of not doing anything about the unabated
and disproportionate flow of wealth to the top and, hence, giving
rise to the resulting, ever-skewing, descriptive Pareto
distribution of wealth versus population. It certainly does seem
like an increasing biasing of the metaphorical /fair /coin [e.g.,
the busted "trickle down" metaphor of President Ronald Reagan]."
I think it depends in part on the source of the wealth and how it
is used. There's a qualitative difference between a Google and a
payday loan company that preys on the poor. Are these wealthy
people creating new high-paying jobs or locking-in people to
dead-end jobs like coal mining? Do they have a vision of
advancement of humanity (Gates) or just a unnecessary assertion of
the `need' for a lowest-common-denominator dog-eat-dog view of
things? How does their wealth and power matter in the long run?
It is at least good that there isn't just one kind of
billionaire, like the sort that destroys the environment and
enslaves people.
A problem with government is that the agency it gives people is
either very limited (you get food stamps so you can eat), or it is
also hierarchical like these enterprises (you don't get much
agency unless you fight your way up or are an elected official).
For people to truly be free means creating a commons that
facilitates other kinds of motivators that are rewarding in more
complex ways than just salary or status. Universities don't
really deliver on this, except perhaps for some professors who are
in that world for most of their adult life.
I would say neoliberalism is trying to engineer biased coins that
land in a coordinated ways to build something more complex. One
way is with trade laws.
Marcus
P.S. RT is the Russian Propaganda news outlet. Of course, they'd
have their own motives for wanting to diminish Chinese power.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> on behalf of Robert Wall
<wallrobe...@gmail.com <mailto:wallrobe...@gmail.com>>
*Sent:* Thursday, January 19, 2017 4:57:14 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
*Subject:* [FRIAM] Nautilus: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent
This is just an exploratory thought piece to try in this forum ...
please skip if it seems, right off the bat, as being too
thought-full ... 😴😊
Does *Pareto's Principle
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle> *(with the
attending, so-called Power Law
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law>) provide good
_moral_ justification for an amped-up progressive tax strategy or
a reverse-discriminating set of rebalancing policies [e.g.,
changing the probabilities for the "everyman"]? And, is the
argument one of *morality *or one of *necessity*? That's what
this thread and the subject /Nautilus /article intend to explore,
especially with the events that will begin the next four years
tomorrow.
/Nautilus/: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent
<http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/investing-is-more-luck-than-talent?utm_source=Nautilus&utm_campaign=f5f998a451-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_dc96ec7a9d-f5f998a451-56531089>
(January
19, 2017).
/The surprising message of the statistics of wealth
distribution./
/I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
swift, nor the battle to the strong, /
/neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill, /
/but time and chance happeneth to them all./(Ecclesiastes 9:11)
[*an introductory aside*: As computational statisticians, we love
our simulations ... and our coin tosses. 😎 We are always mindful
of *bias *... as, say, apparent with the ever-widening wealth gap.
Money, Money, Money
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETxmCCsMoD0> ...] 😊
Inline image 1
So, as described in the subject /Nautilus /article, Pareto's
Principle, descriptively seen so often in nature, seems to imply
that the current widening wealth gap is, well, "natural?" Judging
by its prevalence in most all rich societies, it does seem so.
However, remembering that this sorting process works even with
/fair /coin tosses in investments and gambling, this process
phenomenon with its biased outcomes seems to occur in many places
and on many levels ...
For example, we find this aspect of /luck in nature/ elsewhere in
biological processes; from /Wikipedia /... /Chance and Necessity:
Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology/ is a 1970 book
by Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod, interpreting the processes of
evolution to show that life is only the result of natural
processes by "pure chance." The basic tenet of this book is that
systems in nature with molecular biology, such as enzymatic
biofeedback loops [/metabolisms/] can be explained without having
to invoke final causality [e.g., Intelligent Design].
Usually, relatively very few winners and many, many losers.
Phenotypical luck or luck in tectonic location?
According to the introduction the book's title was inspired by
a line attributed to Democritus
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus>, "Everything
existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity."
But, is there a /necessity /to Pareto's Principle? To answer this
I must defer to my theoretical mathematician friends who so often
look to Plato for such answers. 🤔😊 My thought is that the
necessity comes from a need to, perhaps teleologically, react to
it ... as the planet's only available potential intelligent
designers ... the purpose being, on some scale, Darwinian-level
survival.
And, this aspect of /fate by chance/ is also reasoned in the
Pulitzer-winning/ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies is a 1997/, a transdisciplinary non-fiction book by
Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations
(including North Africa) have survived and conquered others,
while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due
to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent
genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and
technology between human societies originate primarily in
environmental differences, which are amplified by various
positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences
have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the
development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic
diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because
of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for
example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different
cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.
[Wikipedia]
The luck of geography. So then, should the more fortunate nations
be more progressively taxed? Maybe we should ask Greece? Or see
what Germany has to say? Followers of egalitarianism would argue
yes. Followers of Ayn Rand's capitalism or her Objectivism [like
Speaker Paul Ryan] would argue no. I think most of the rest of us
fall somewhere in between; that is, not sure. So, let's go on ...
*Is the (economic) game rigged* then, as Bernie Sanders and
Elizabeth Warren have insisted? Personally, I would say absolutely
yes, and *neoliberalism *is the underlying philosophy of the
rigging process
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9wUGxgEFsw> [hear just the 1st
12 minutes, if you watch]. But, maybe this political ideology is
just one that is eventually spawned by a conspicuous need for
moralistic or even Randian justification, by the winners, for its
resulting destructiveness--as we so often hear, "wealth
accumulation is based on hard work and talent." So, intelligent
design?
The rigging is, IMHO, of not doing anything about the unabated and
disproportionate flow of wealth to the top and, hence, giving rise
to the resulting, ever-skewing, descriptive Pareto distribution of
wealth versus population. It certainly does seem like an
increasing biasing of the metaphorical /fair /coin [e.g., the
busted "trickle down" metaphor of President Ronald Reagan].
Going forward, maybe we need to think about this neoliberal meme
as the next four years, with a* President Donald Trump*, begin
tomorrow ... while also remembering that *morality *is a human
concept or "invention." Or is it?Or, does that even matter?!
Perhaps, morality is just a necessity ... but what are its goals
... dare I say its "purpose?" When did it emerge? With
consciousness? How did it emerge? By chance, as Monad and
Democritus would insist?
*
*
*_Conjecture_*: *It would seem that morality's human purpose is to
check, slow, or rebalance the effects of the Pareto phenomenon in
social and economic processes.* Wealth has always been
disproportionately distributed. Surely, just like the "selfish
gene," morality arose out of self-interest; so it arose with
prerequisite consciousness and *not *necessarily just with human
consciousness [e.g., we see evidence of "morality" in other
primate social systems]. As a system model, neoliberalism is
connected with a positive feedback loop to morality and with a
negative feedback loop to social stability. I think that there is
a tipping-point distribution of wealth versus population
<https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-02-04/is-inequality-approaching-a-tipping-point->.
*_
_*
*_Conclusion_*: The above conjecture is borne up by chance and
necessity. The necessity is manifested by the need to rebalance
the outcomes of the game [e.g., wealth or opportunity] every now
and then, in order to ensure social stability. This just seems
like a brain-dead conclusion that even Warren Buffet and Bill
Gates get. But will Trump? Strong critics of Hillary Clinton
imply that she, like her husband, would surely have strengthened
the negative feedback effect of neoliberalism toward their own
self-interest and toward worsening social stability, IMHO. The
results of the November election are a kind of testament to this
conclusion. In an unexpected way, we may have a /chance /with
Trump to bring even more /necessary /awareness to the
aforementioned system model that has often played out in human
history and as recounted in Jared Diamond's book-length essays.
Bernie-style revolution? Perhaps.
So, that is the idea of how /chance /and /necessity /fits here in
"the game.". Now, let's dig into this idea of *morality *a bit
more and how it fits in with the need for a different kind of
evolution, not biological, but *conscious evolution*:
This comment from a /Quora /article on this subject titled Is
morality merely a social construct or something more?
<https://www.quora.com/Is-morality-merely-a-social-construct-or-something-more>
is
notable:
Mindaugas Kuprionis
<https://www.quora.com/profile/Mindaugas-Kuprionis>, works
at CERN
Written 17 Sep 2010
<https://www.quora.com/Is-morality-merely-a-social-construct-or-something-more/answer/Mindaugas-Kuprionis>
Just recently Edge.org <https://www.edge.org/>held a
conference titled "The New Science of Morality
<https://www.edge.org/event/the-new-science-of-morality>".
Consensus statement signed by several scholars (list
below) was such:
1) Morality is a natural phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon
2) Many of the psychological building blocks of morality
are innate
3) Moral judgments are often made intuitively, with little
deliberation or conscious weighing of evidence and
alternatives
4) Conscious moral reasoning plays multiple roles in our
moral lives
5) Moral judgments and values are often at odds with
actual behavior
6) Many areas of the brain are recruited for moral
cognition, yet there is no "moral center" in the brain
7) Morality varies across individuals and cultures
8) Moral systems support human flourishing, to varying
degrees [aside-- so morality may be akin to metabolic
systems at the level of society --regulating feedback
loops of sorts]
[*aside*-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky's /Crime and Punishment
/comes to mind. Under this eight-point new science,
how would we judge the "higher-purpose" actions of
Rodion Raskolnikov?]
So if it is true that there is no distributional *purpose *to
l/uck /other than a mechanistic, long-run, teleonomic
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy> sorting mechanism of
outcomes in accordance with a Power Law, then should there be a
/necessary/, periodic re-sorting of the initial conditions now
skewed by /chance /... like with a deck of cards before the next
deal ...? 🤔 All poker players would insist on no less. Don't we
all insist on a /fair /game? It's an interesting question, IMHO.
Yes, I know; lots to unpack here. Sorry. Nonetheless, I thought
the /Nautilus /article was quite thought-provoking as they always
seem to be.
Cheers,
-Robert
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