[FRIAM] loopiness (again)

[Marcus Daniels]

< In our post-fact world, to which communities does any particular person belong?  ... to the ones you think you belong to?  ... to the ones that respond to your calls to action?  >

I could say I belong to the `community' of some large code projects, e.g. on github.  I share an understanding of stuff that other people also share some understanding.   It isn't important I ever meet these people, but if I do, we can have a conversation about our understanding of those artifacts, and how they are useful or not.   Surprisingly, to me, we can do a pretty good job of communicating even if when have different native natural languages.    We may get along fine, but really our relationship is not built around each other.

Now, my folks belong to the `community' of their church.   The community does various things like alert one another to illnesses and risks to the members of the community.  The community has some group optimization tactics.   If some family isn't living up to expected norms, they are helped or maybe weakly shamed.  They have modest funds for deserving or needy students to help them go to college.   (It isn't  necessarily be inward-focused awards, but it can be.)   I would say they are negotiating or evolving a set of values as much as they are performing a practical function for themselves, e.g. feeding the elderly in the community.  Interpersonally, I know that the community is far from harmonious in an all-to-all sense.  There are factions.   So why else do people stay in a community if they often don't like the people?   One possible explanation is that it gives them useful memetic material.   It gives them a way to order and understand their world, and that perhaps without it they would feel lost?

From the point of view of mutual information or excess entropy, there are similarities.   I don't really have a comprehensive understanding of all parts of these codes.  I rely on maintainers or other domain experts to develop arguments about what is good and what is bad.   Without that ongoing negotiation, and resulting work, chaos would break out and the code would be at risk.  

But I can't help feeling there is something very different too.   I can't quite grasp the urgency with which their community is maintained.   With a large, useful code base, there is always motivation for individuals or organizations to keep things working.   Motivation like you can be paid to do it, or that problems disrupt other work that is motivated somehow.   I would say large code bases are much harder to maintain in some respects than church congregations.   Decisions can have big, dangerous unintended consequences.    For example, security problems in the Linux kernel can and do stop days of work at a time at large organizations.

Getting back to the tolerance of fake news, it seems there is a very urgent need to not feel lost.   What does it mean, these poor folks from the midwest that say "I just want it to be the way it was"?  (I remember my grandparents saying things to this effect, but with less exasperation.)   I guess it means there was a time when they believed they understood the world.   Gosh, is there anything sadder than that?   The appearance of a authoritative control system somehow is more important than actual functional governance.   

One way to feed this need is to proliferate ungrounded memetic material -- plausible fiction.    Because there is this apparent urgent spiritual need for consensus, they'll lap the stories right up.   And perhaps the others that fail to find this consensus, are the ones that are steadily increasing their opiate doses towards their demise? 

Also, I don’t see the relationship between communities, and those that make a call-to-action.   There are organizations that are more or less potent.  I just want the gas I'm contributing to the bulldozer will send it in sort of the direction I would like.  In part, we've got Trump now because too many people couldn't get excited unless they got to drive the damned bulldozer.  

Marcus