[FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

[Vladimyr]

Glen,

Try something else...

Create Agents that only behave honestly when they think they are under observation.
When they think they have been detected they will weave a rationalization out of standard clichés, that appears as if they were honest but mistaken due to ambiguity 
of language. This prevents honest agents from figuring out what happened.
Such an agent should cause untold chaos when slipped into any honest collective.

Over time the collective should disintegrate or be perverted...
If you can create chaos with only the one kind of pervert imagine if half the population were perverted away from honesty.

No real need to immerse yourself in a transparent cloak, just sit back and watch.

vib
Good luck.
Then add violent reprisals and you are back to classic game theory... tit for tat.

These perverts might actually be attempting to evolve into true social parasites. Like Staphylinid beetles in an ant colony.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: April-13-17 5:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

On 04/13/2017 03:06 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> 
> Not just because I want to predict their behaviour, I might want to adopt that part of their memome into my own?

Ugh!  Thanks for reminding me why I hate the idea of memes.  The problem me and Robert argued about extensively awhile ago is important, here.  Memes are unlike genes in a critical way.  Memes are phenomenological.  Genes are mechanistic.  So, if we shot a new gene into your genome, it would (maybe) generate a trait difference.  But there is no meme gun.  A memome is a flat/shallow thing, there's no gen-phen map.  The analogy is so flawed I can't think straight.

> The point of me seeking such understandings would be to divert whatever resources I might be using to *blunt* what I *fear* is their efforts to undermine the development and maintenance of a healthy "commons" to increase my own contributions to said commons?

OK.  On my good days, I mostly agree.  But on my evil days, I can't help but think that the ethical way to do that would be to build a _transparent_ model and be similarly transparent about any attempts to manipulate the trajectory.  Such transparency is exceedingly difficult and expensive.  And even if you could achieve it, you'd be weakened because the red team, not bound by a transparency requirement, would probably win.  Indeed, any innovation you transparently incorporated in your model and manipulations would immediately be co-optable by the red team.  So you'd effectively become the red team's unwitting tool.  Your efforts would become evil in your well-intentioned attempt to do good.

Is it ethical to be a tool?

> I misread your statement:
> 
>     teetering on the edge of social democrat (despite knowing 
> democratic socialism is more coherent)
> 
> to suggest that you held democratic socialism higher (more coherent?) than social democracy and were perhaps aspiring to move on through from the latter to the former?

No, not higher.  Yes, more coherent.  Self-consistency is laudable when validation data is lacking, but only then.  Just because democratic socialism hangs together in a more rational way does not mean it's a better (more real/realistic) political approach.  Social democracy, like neoliberalism, allows us to leave some parts of the system alone, especially when we're too ignorant to implement a regulatory infrastructure.  The difference is that one allows for a kind of ontological pluralism, whereas the other doesn't.

> Very packed paragraph here.   I think you just said you are preferring a democracy which (happens to/naturally) chooses to have a strong social infrastructure?   In the second part, it isn't clear that the Electoral College mitigates us against buffoons "like Trump" since all indications are that the Electoral College actually *preferred* the buffoon over the ???? .

I said _like_ the Electoral College.  I think we have to change that check/balance because it's broken.  But I think it's silly to simply eradicate it without thinking about it's purpose and what role it was intended to play.

> I can't help but pull out my soapbox and suggest that "ranked voting" is much more likely to achieve the results than the mere "chunking" of the electoral college which seems very subject to Gerrymandering.

I agree, though it's not clear to me what the implications of it would be.  I'm too ignorant.

> I think you are correct, though I think the latter is a great deal more sincere in those sentiments than the latter who might have lost touch with reality on most social issues along the way (albeit nowhere near the level of the extant Buffoon in Chief).

Yes.  Perhaps Clinton ha[sd] lost touch in a way that Sanders had not.  But I also think Bernie had either lost touch or never had touch of many of the things Clinton has mastered, particularly Machiavellian things that may well be necessary evils with a bureaucracy this size.  But we've been over all that.

--
☣ glen

============================================================
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
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove