[FRIAM] Preference Order Ecosystems: was Trumpism

[Roger Critchlow]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/the-philosopher-redefining-equality
was a good read this morning,

-- rec --


On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:36 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

> The political doctrine of liberalism aims to increase the freedom of the
> individual.  The institutions and rules that optimize for this freedom must
> be evaluated in aggregate and so for every increase of one group must be
> understood for a decrease in freedom of another group.    It is a very hard
> optimization problem involving high order interactions and horizons that
> can be difficult to agree upon.    Is success reflected by an increase in
> per-capita income or by some definition of happiness or engagement?  Is it
> for people entering the workforce or leaving it?    Why measure at the
> median and not the 1st or 99th percentile?    A liberal wouldn’t
> necessarily have an opinion on how to measure freedom other than to do say
> that the more diverse the cacophony of opinions, the better.
>
>
>
> But let’s not confuse diversity with amplitude.    Reactionary idiocy
> isn’t about diversity, it is about loudness.    A giant tumor isn’t
> contributing the health of an animal, it is just a tumor.   If there are a
> hundred million people just chanting the same angry slogans to themselves,
> indifferent to the facts of the matter, what we have is the socio-political
> equivalent of a tumor.
>
>
>
> Imagine you have two computer programs, both that have the task of zeroing
> out some memory.  The first one looks like this:
>
>
>
> int A[1000000];
>
> A[0] = 0
>
> A[1] = 0
>
> A[2] = 0
>
> …
>
> A[999999] = 0
>
>
>
> The other one looks like this:
>
>
>
> int A[1000000];
>
> A = 0
>
>
>
> If there are any resource limitations (let’s say instruction cache), it is
> insane to favor the former program.    It functionality achieves the same
> thing, but taken literally will result in memory exhaustion. [1]   (Suppose
> that an instance of the program is an individual, and there are millions of
> individuals.)   Why should a society encourage individuals like the first
> program?  For that matter, does A even *need* to be zeroed out?
>
>
>
> Given resource limitations, I would argue it is reasonable to recombine
> programs like the latter sort, and unreasonable to recombine programs like
> the first sort.    The latter has discovered the concept of shape (or tail
> recursion) and the latter has not.
>
>
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
> [1] Actually it wouldn’t on a modern operating system.   The text section
> would be generated read-only and just remapped.   Thank you, urban planner.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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