2.7 Million Morons

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ken Muldrew) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...

Warning: I probably have more free time on my hands than you do right
now, and am more bored with life in general outside the net (so called
"real life").

Proceed at the risk of your own time. ;-)

> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Edward Green) wrote:
> 
> >You and Steve are beginning to frighten me a little bit here -- you've
> >got religion!  
> 
> Anything for the cause, brer Ed.  ;-)
> 
> >Oh yes ... as I was reiterating; at the time I saw this as kind of a
> >business religion, which provided an outlet for the religious instinct
> >rationally suppressed.  
> 
> Hmmm...I think this is going a bit too far. When you go from a voice
> crying in the wilderness to a place where you can start discussing
> ideas with a few like-minded souls, perhaps even a rudimentary
> community, then it's nice. It's not like we're defending an
> interpretation of why planes stay in the air, or anything.

Well, wrt you and Steve, you did both report some "awakening"
experience, and expressed a need to spread the word.  And wrt "TQM",
the business sect, I don't think I'm going too far; although I said
the movement exploited or awakened some religiousity need or instinct,
not that it became a full blown formal religion -- though at times and
in ways it got close.
 
> >And this ties back to our discussion
> >concluding that to avoid social stagnation some fraction of the
> >population must occasionally forcefully and persuasively think in a
> >way outside their own narrow self-interest ... shall we say
> >idealistically or religiously?  Since there is a social utility for
> >this behavior, could evolution have arranged for it?  Is there a gene
> >for religiousity: maybe even for guruhood?
> 
> If it's genetic, then those individuals who are thinking
> idealistically will be following their own self-interest.

Whoa ... semantic warning flag there.  This is similar to ... in
subject as well as form ... the question whether something called
"altruism" is possible.  One might argue that by, say, throwing
oneself in front of the speeding train to push the innocent children
out of the way, that one was responding to some inner need, hence
acting through self-interest and not "altruistically". One could say
the same of any deliberate self-sacrifice for others, hence show
altruism always fulfills an inner need, and isn't altruism!

Nobody except a dionysiac is going to waste too much energy on this:
obviously if we define a word to mean something logically impossible
then it describes the empty set, and saying "it doesn't exist" is a
tautology!  In which case, we may as well pick the word up off the
floor, dust it off, and put it back into service meaning pretty much
what it did before we become hyperlogical -- because we need a label
for the old concept anyway: altruistic behavior is behavior
deliberatly aiding others, neutral or destructive to the actor.  By
calling it "behavior" we imply it was willed by the actor, and
(redundantly) met some immediate psychological need (also a redundant
restatement).

But maybe what you want to say here is that if a behavior is
genetically selected, than its expression is at least _genetically_
self-interested, though maybe not personally: like those army ants who
run into a stream forming a bridge, remaining linked even after they
drown, which eventually living ants can pass over.
 
...

> >Ok ... back to "information processing".  Yes, you have said that
> >before.  Now since you have not seen fit to list me as an advocate or
> >compeer here, I guess I'm a layman or skeptic.  
> 
> Geez, you are the *archetype* of the skeptic! And we're all laymen on
> this topic.

Well, some of us are are more layed than others ... er, or something
...
 
> >It can be argued that _all_ physical phenomenon are a
> >manifestation of information processing (Fredkin?) -- complex models
> >always embody information, and the distinction between a model and the
> >modeled is purely a mapping, mon.  So can you be a little more
> >specific what you mean by "information processing" _here_ which makes
> >it special and unlike other physical models, which all can be seen as
> >manifestations of IP?
> 
> The physical world is the way it is, we measure it by processing
> information. So it pays to consider the abstraction of information
> when we analyze the process of modeling nature, since what we're
> modeling is our measurement of nature. Consider statistical mechanics.
> The actual physics doesn't matter that much since what we can measure
> about systems with moles of constituents is so divorced from the
> underlying physics. What we're doing is performing inference on
> incomplete information, and the techniques that we use for stat mech
> can be applied to a whole range of phenomena once we properly abstract
> our methods. 

Hmm... I'm not sure if that muddies or clarifies.  But the stat mech
angle ... surely that's an old dream and we can't be the only two to
dream it: if we can do a stat mech of atoms, why not society?  About
right?  Might that might have been the dream of "systems theory".

Oh ... but you're not finished.  Excuse the interruption...
 
> Think of economic transactions, how each purchase by an individual is
> an economic choice that attempts to measure the value of that person's
> time and effort. Thousands of such transactions all sum together to
> reward the producers of goods who anticipated what the consumers would
> find valuable. The whole market consists of millions of agents who are
> engaging in microscopic decisions based on the information that is
> available to them, and taken together a miraculous economic decision
> making apparatus emerges for society as a whole. 

At least in coordinating the manufacture and distribution of gizmos. 
You look at more inherently global issues ... like transportation
(system) and health care (system), and the results are somewhat less
than miraculous.  But continue ...

> It works well because
> individuals are able to align their interests and abilities with the
> economic decisions that appeal to them. The CEO of American Airlines
> makes different decisions than the cab driver on 4th Ave but they both
> contribute to the overall system.
> 
> >  So in studying great thinkers we
> >are really studying the emergence of ideas, which, aside from the cult
> >of personality, isn't that far off track anyway from your point of
> >view.
> 
> It's not that far off because it's just a different way of analyzing
> history. I want to emphasize the information processing point of view
> because I want people to take the idea of a political market
> seriously. 

OK.  This is someplace near where I expected you answer to land.  Let
me rephrase, and see if you agree I got it:  By "information
processing" you are specifically talking about the information
processing internal to the units ... the societal atoms ... of our
stat mech.

In the celluar automata or Fredkin view of physics, we can draw a
parallel between any extensive physical system and information
processing, because in many ways that's exactly what the system is
doing: carrying out a massively parallel calculation according to a
fixed local rule set.  But that's _not_ what you're getting at.  You
are noting that individual decision makers ... unlike bromine atoms
... have a complex internal structure whose purpose (evolutionarily
and empirically) is to model the external world: we like computers for
the same reason we like small furry animals -- they remind us of us
(with different emphasis ;-).

> I've talked to a lot of people, and poured a lot of scotch
> in the process, and I'll tell you that it's a hard battle. It's like
> you have to teach people an entirely different language before you can
> even begin to put some ideas forward.

Sounds like an earmark of the pardigm shifting new thingamabob.
  
> >Ok ... let me close with a pessimistic thought du jour: no matter how
> >brilliant and even correct and potentially effective a "marketplace of
> >politics" you and others may develop, it won't much matter, because
> >the masses are too dense to understand it or embrace it. 
> 
> Are the masses too dense to understand the economic market? Isn't the
> taxi man perfectly capable of budgeting his earnings to cover his
> expenses; maybe even saving a bit for a rainy day? Once you develop
> the institution (the "market") that identifies (and legitimizes) a
> token of influence, and provides both negative feedback for unpopular
> use of the token and positive feedback for popular use (analagous to
> starting a business and making money if you do well in business and
> going bankrupt if you do poorly), then people just have to follow
> their own self interest. Because, after all, what we're trying to do
> with politics is figure out where people's self interest lies. So what
> better way than to let them speak with their (political) wallets.

OK.  That's the _endstate_.  But ... oh, I love this ... to achieve an
endstate it is not sufficient to merely demonstrate its possible
existence ... we have to chart a path from here to there.

> > To implement
> >a new political theory, we may have to get our hands dirty either with
> >traditional politics, or outright violence 
> 
> The beauty of the idea of "collective cognition" (analogous to
> collective action) is that the more minds are involved in solving a
> problem, the better the solution. What I want to do is get more people
> thinking about the idea. Once that gets going then it will either
> become obvious that it has to be implemented, or it will become
> obvious why it cannot be implemented. 

You are very optimistic.  

Go back to the American Revolution again: it was obvious to a
sufficient number of people in the colonies that something had to be
implemented, however, despite that or because of that, the only
possible implementation was violent.  There may not be a path to
implementation for an idea ... however compelling ... which does not
require force to counter the uncompelled.

Will you listen to me?  I'm becomming an effing revolutionary
theorist!
 
> And even though I haven't replenished my scotch supply since last
> Friday, let me thank you personally for your iconoclastic skepticism.
> I hope I'm not treading into religiousity if I remark that a devoted
> (but thoughtful) critic is worth much more than someone who nods in
> agreement.

Accepted.  I will even as a result overlook a recent personal comment
that I highly resembled!  I drink a glass of Dewars 12 in your honor
(thanks for the rationalization).

------

Since my old account is defunct and I don't want to spam up my new
one, yet not be a recluse, I'm considering adding one of those puzzle
sig thingies:

"To reply, write out the word for one followed by one followed by one
hundred zeros zeros, concatenate 8, at net concatenate zero, dot net".
(sic)

Well ... my correspondence may be a _wee_ sparse. ;-)