https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/the-philosopher-redefining-equality was a good read this morning,
-- rec -- On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:36 PM Marcus Daniels <[email protected]> wrote: > The political doctrine of liberalism aims to increase the freedom of the > individual. The institutions and rules that optimize for this freedom must > be evaluated in aggregate and so for every increase of one group must be > understood for a decrease in freedom of another group. It is a very hard > optimization problem involving high order interactions and horizons that > can be difficult to agree upon. Is success reflected by an increase in > per-capita income or by some definition of happiness or engagement? Is it > for people entering the workforce or leaving it? Why measure at the > median and not the 1st or 99th percentile? A liberal wouldn’t > necessarily have an opinion on how to measure freedom other than to do say > that the more diverse the cacophony of opinions, the better. > > > > But let’s not confuse diversity with amplitude. Reactionary idiocy > isn’t about diversity, it is about loudness. A giant tumor isn’t > contributing the health of an animal, it is just a tumor. If there are a > hundred million people just chanting the same angry slogans to themselves, > indifferent to the facts of the matter, what we have is the socio-political > equivalent of a tumor. > > > > Imagine you have two computer programs, both that have the task of zeroing > out some memory. The first one looks like this: > > > > int A[1000000]; > > A[0] = 0 > > A[1] = 0 > > A[2] = 0 > > … > > A[999999] = 0 > > > > The other one looks like this: > > > > int A[1000000]; > > A = 0 > > > > If there are any resource limitations (let’s say instruction cache), it is > insane to favor the former program. It functionality achieves the same > thing, but taken literally will result in memory exhaustion. [1] (Suppose > that an instance of the program is an individual, and there are millions of > individuals.) Why should a society encourage individuals like the first > program? For that matter, does A even *need* to be zeroed out? > > > > Given resource limitations, I would argue it is reasonable to recombine > programs like the latter sort, and unreasonable to recombine programs like > the first sort. The latter has discovered the concept of shape (or tail > recursion) and the latter has not. > > > > Marcus > > > > [1] Actually it wouldn’t on a modern operating system. The text section > would be generated read-only and just remapped. Thank you, urban planner. > > > > > > > ============================================================ > 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 > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
