glen asked
Question 1: Why does TANSTAAFL only carry traction (whatever that
means) in edge/corner cases?
Question 2: What does "well-formed" mean in this concept of computation?
Both good questions...
1) The gist of the phrase was intended to capture that for "normal" or
"familiar" computational conditions, the trade-off between different
resources (time/space/heat-dissipation) maybe don't offer "differences
that make a difference" yet when the conditions are extreme
circumstantially (edge/corner) those differences do matter (molecular
scale constraints may elevate the value of thermal efficiency over time
or space while time or space might have a greater weight in other
contexts?) These are meta-questions about the shape of the Pareto space
(and thus the frontier)?
2) I suppose this is EricS's question, but here is my answer. I think
of "well formed questions" being the province of "science" more than
"engineering" or "computation" but am not prepared to say that either
are fundamentally different than "science". In Science I intuit a maxim
that "if the question is well enough crafted, the answer becomes
obvious/self-evident"... some kind of Willem du Occam corollary? Just
an intution/hunch... not a defensible claim.
Tangent: The Carnot-type limit, in my ignorance, rang the bell of an
argument I'm in with a couple of friends. They're both
[macro]biologists; so I'm the ultracrepidarian, here. But they have
faith that biodiversity (both macro and micro) is obviously lower in
urban environments than in wild or rural environments. My argument is
that the measures of diversity make up a wild landscape in and of
themselves.
In Permaculture it is taken as a maxim that the interface between wild
and built is in some sense more interesting. I'm not sure that it is
more complex per-se but rather that it is qualitatively different than
either built-built interfaces or the milieu of the evolved. Back to
your question 1... perhaps it is about *creating* edge/corners to have
cases around?
Were we to take a multiverse analysis
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_analysis> approach to such a
question, would the various diversity measures [dis]agree? I mean, it
is obvious that there's a dearth of some types of species in urban
environments (e.g. types of plants and animals).
I suspect that as with resonant systems, the "spectrum of diversity"
might change... (maybe relevant to the permaculture conceit)? The
number and variety of human diseases and parasites explodes in the
proximity and lack of natural-filtering which wildland complexities
offer? And conversely the number of large predators which might compete
with humans approaches zero in urban environments?
But there are lots of the ones that are there (humans, rats, pets,
potted plants, etc.). And the rhetorical leverage from "low macro
diversity" to "low micro diversity" seems too *obvious* to be true...
much like when a huckster offers a deal that's too good to be true.
Not only is this question not "well-formed", one's faith in their
preferred answer feels almost cult-like, where the priests' answer is
so completely accepted that the skeptic is ostracized as a contrarian
for asking for a demonstration of the evidence.
to the extent that an engineered environment (urban) depends on reducing
the number of degrees of freedom to increase predictability, it seems
"natural" that a larger number of fewer species would be included in
the design. Any who have lived in an urban environment with much
history will notice that plenty of adaptive evolution occurs in the
interstices. For better and worse.
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