[FRIAM] merging with the mob

[Marcus Daniels]

Another distinction I would make, not directly in response to any recent remarks in this thread, is the distinction between people (or groups of people) and ideas.   True, a group can be built around some ideas, and that group can have high cohesion or a thick membrane, but ideas can exist without a group having  those properties.


One can study sociology without actually being concerned with in the life story of every person.    What matters are the generative properties of life --  how predispositions and experiences lead to different kinds of outcomes on average.   Sure, there will be some probability that a child with a good upbringing will fall in with a bad crowd and become a chronic user of drugs, or that a young adult will get cancer and create catastrophic consequences for her family, or that for no good reason an imbecile becomes president.   There's a non-zero variance in real-world distributions.


To reject tribalism in the way I mean is to learn about the common properties of social systems, and to try to make models more predictive and general.    To do this does not imply having a  Dunbar number > 7 billion.  It helps if a lot of people look at a lot of life stories, but that doesn't imply that those doing the research need to have a social circle of a particular diameter.


Another simple metaphor would be between a (deterministic) pseudo-random number generator having a functional form and a known seed versus the output of that generator.   The amount of information in the former is relatively compact (a few pages of text).   However, compressing all of that detail with a popular compression program would not discover that functional form.  Knowing the life stories of 7 billion people would be like the output.


Marcus



________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2018 6:39:18 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] merging with the mob

Glen writes:

“Well, I'm not much of a sports oriented person.  But sometimes they're useful.”

Certainly, sports metaphors are useful to understand tribalism, because sports are tribal activity.
I’m reminded of visiting a company in Austin to discuss a project of mutual interest.  I didn’t realize I was being pre-interviewed (or whatever that is called) and didn’t even intend to give those signals. Our discussion was going along fine and then they brought up football.   I have never watched football and don’t understand its appeal.  When they understood this several of them visibly recoiled.    My take is that they wanted someone that would project into their (lower dimensional) tribal space in a seamless way.   It was an important part of how they got along.

You alluded to collective measures of fitness.   A progressive’s measure of fitness is not unlike Shannon entropy – let a thousand flowers bloom.   A conservative, however, fears that entropy will be too costly and that people will forget previous fit strategies.   In principle, maximizing entropy could push out cultural norms since that is copied information.  Imagine a finite length bit string representing a program where skills related to football were sacrificed for skills related to curling or dancing (or more esoteric topics).  If you think that the available bit string is short, that then one might worry about locally (or universally) promoting the `right’ cultural information in order for people to get along.

Marcus

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