[FRIAM] Preference Order Ecosystems: was Trumpism

[Marcus Daniels]

Great article.   Here are a couple more.   These seem to me like the bleeding-heart variety of liberal taking their eye off the ball.   No, I say win the culture war.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/opinion/tech-rural-america.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/there-is-much-to-fear-about-nationalism-but-liberals-need-to-address-it-the-right-way/2018/12/30/2c6e8f24-0ab7-11e9-88e3-989a3e456820_story.html
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Monday, December 31, 2018 at 11:33 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Preference Order Ecosystems: was Trumpism

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<mailto: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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