I feel trepidatious to even try to weigh in here, but try I shall (unless I delete my attempt before I <send>).
I agree with Glen's point about the author conflating "C" with little "c" capitalism. I am a reformed Capitalist who continues to practice capitalism on a daily basis, though not always *proudly*. The author refers to capitalism as an "economic system" which I believe makes it closer to *C*apitalism. Glen loosely defines capitalism as *private ownership of property* but i want to further refine it to be private ownership of *the means of production*, and then extend that to *excluding public ownership* as with "the Commons". My working experience/definiton with/of *C*apitalism is roughly the larger (even than an economic system) definition the author describes which invokes the extension of (absolute) individual rights over material objects to more abstract things like land (both small and huge) and perhaps ultimately political parties (Trump becoming defacto leader/ruler/owner of the Republican Party) or ideas (beliefs?). Thus post-truth <==> Capitalism. I'd like to tie post-truth back to Capitalism more directly/tightly as I agree that the author did not necessarily do that well, but I'm not finding a good argument on the fly. I appreciate the "gesture" he makes *toward* linking (C)apitalism with the broader idea that the individual not only has the *right* to believe anything, but nearly the *requirement* to do so. With that seems to be a voraciousness which seeks to take *personal ownership* of all things, including "the Commons" represented by nature itself (air, water, viewsheds, solar irradiance) and more to the point of current events, the government (for/by/of the people?) itself. With that ramble out of the way, I want to address the question of "isms"... which I take to simply be "informal models" which can have both organic and engineered roots/natures. They are also *collective* by some measure, being the aggregation or superposition of the individual (and subcollective) ideas/concepts of people. Political parties, for example, have "party lines" (doctrine) which may well have been crafted by a few "scholars" with a particular ideal pattern in mind (e.g. Marxist Communism, Keynesian Economics), but in fact, they *also* evolve and morph with "the will of the people" or maybe more aptly "the imagination of the people". In the spirit of the *world itself* being a *complex adaptive system* I would suggest that the "isms" of sociopolitics (e.g. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etc.) are roughly regions of equilibria connected by high-dimensional bifurcation "points" (alternatively basins of attraction bounded by "saddles" and "ridges"). To the extent that such "isms" are made up of "beliefs" as much as "acts", the full embedding space would need to include *all possible beliefs* to be complete, but in fact, it is the subspace that we happen to be exploring at any given time which is relevant. On the other hand, there does appear to be a place for "most dangerous ideas" which represent a "seed" of organization which might introduce/find/create a "path" between these subspaces (isms) as well as yet others yet unknown. Glen's idea that we not try to interpolate between the existing spaces (smooth the space-between with our own assumptions?) lest we miss some kind of interesting/useful structure in the intervening landscape seems motivated (if I'm even beginning to characterize what he said correctly). As a reform(ing)ed Capitalist, I am very interested in how the reality of private property (in the sense of "possession is 9/10 of the law") competes with those elements of the physical (and social?) multiverse which might be "best" (whatever best means?) left in "the Commons". I have a strong sense that among my "possessions" there are many which require too much of the "force of law" to maintain as my own... for example, anything I cannot keep on my person or in my sight is at risk of being absconded with. A piece of real property which I do not reside or work significantly at (weekly if not daily) would seem to be at-risk of re-appropriation by others, and in the sense of stewardship, anything I "can't take care of" might not really be mine? For example, in the plantations-operated-by-chattel-slavery, might be said to have belonged to those who cleared, plowed, sowed, and harvested the fields and those who built, maintained, and repaired the buildings more than the individual or family whose claim to "ownership" of the real property and it's improvements were well beyond their own ability to have created, much less maintained it. Mumble, - Steve On 11/5/19 2:23 PM, glen wrote: > I'm not sure I agree. Even without unification into a singular whole, we can > register novelty by clustering. Clustering in a space, obviously, requires a > space of some sort. But spaces are defined by bases that are often only tiny > slices/aspects of the things arranged in the space. E.g. we can organize TV > shows by run-time, ignoring all other aspects. And if a new show has a > run-time different from all other TV shows, then it's novel, even if in an > uninteresting way. > > I've recently been exploring state space reconstruction methods for some of > our more enigmatic model traces. EEMD revealed an interesting IMF for a > periodicity I have yet to explain mechanistically. It's a bit infuriating > because I wrote the damned model. Anyway, such a task is less about unifying > the contributions to the signal than it is finding a basis from which to > "debug" it. (Debug in quotes because the periodicity might end up being a > counter-intuitive feature.) > > > On November 5, 2019 12:02:26 PM PST, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> > wrote: >> Glen writes: >> >> "But re: avoiding modeling the space between the -isms, I'd argue that >> sometimes (only sometimes), it's best to leave the interstitial space >> unmodeled to avoid biasing the integration." >> >> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." The space >> unmodeled could contain a configuration (a new Ism) that is has better >> properties than the existing configurations, and the available >> observations are just what has been found so far. If one is unable >> or unwilling to compress to commonalities -- to unify -- then one cannot >> anticipate novelty either. I have 500 channels of crap on cable (more, I >> guess), and I don't really need to watch it all to appreciate the exceptions >> to this. > ============================================================ 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
