[FRIAM] Preference Order Ecosystems: was Trumpism

[Ron Newman]

Stepping back to 40,000 ft. for a second...

'[Morality] is an evolutionary process in which societies constantly
perform experiments, and whether or not those experiments succeed
determines which cultural ideas and moral precepts propagate into the
future.'  If so, he says, then a theory that rigorously explains how
coevolutionary systems are driven to the edge of chaos might tell us a lot
about cultural dynamics, and how societies reach that elusive,
ever-changing balance between freedom and control.

'Witness the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union...the whole
situation seems all too reminiscent of the power-law distribution of
stability and upheaval at the edge of chaos.  'When you think of it', he
says, 'the Cold War was one of these long periods where mot much
changed...But now that period of stability is ending...in the models, once
you get out of one of these metastable periods, you get into one of these
chaotic periods where a lot of change happens..It's much more sensitive now
to initial conditions.'

'So what's the right course of action?' he asks.  'I don't know, except
that this is like punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary history.  It
doesn't happen without a great deal of extinction.  And it's not
necessarily a step for the better.  There are models where the species that
dominate in the stable period after the upheaval may be less fit than the
species that dominated beforehand.'

'And now suppose it's really true that coevolving, complex systems get
themselves to the edge of chaos...if we imagine that this really carries
over into economic systems, then it's a state where technologies come into
existence and replace others, et cetera.  But if this is true, it means
that the edge of chaos is, on average, the best that we can do...You can go
extinct, or broke.  But here we are on the edge of chaos because that's
where, on average, we all do the best.'

- Doyne Farmer, Chris Langton, and Stuart Kauffman, in that order, quoted
in "Complexity", M. Mitchell Waldrop, p. 319-322.

I wrote a layman's blog post on a similar idea, "On the Importance of
Idiots", speculating that societal chaos might be moving the solution space
out of local minima into novel areas in the solution space, and that the
process might be solving for long-term resiliency of the system as a whole,
in opposition to short-term sanity.  I did filter it through Norm Johnson
at SFI to remove egregious errors, but make no claim for completeness or
rigor:
https://blog.ideatreelive.com/?p=481

Ron Newman, M.S., M.M.E.
Founder, IdeaTreeLive.com <http://www.Ideatreelive.com> Knowledge Modeling
Piano <https://www.ronnewmanpiano.com>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20181230/4a2ffe7b/attachment-0001.html>