[FRIAM] capitalism vs. individualism

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -

> Re: leaving the interstitial space unmodeled being motivated reasoning
> -- I struggled with that, mostly because I lamely qualified it twice:
> 1) only sometimes and 2) only if you *cannot* multi-model it. My
> emotional (?, intuitive maybe?) motivation is that I too often see
> people slap together something that kindasorta works, then the begin
> believing their slapped together thing because it kindasorta works
> (80/20 rule) and it's too inconvenient to pay back that technical
> debt. If your team is ready to systematically maintain a skeptical
> stance, then go ahead and model the environment/economy and be willing
> to dump/iterate on it when it's falsified. But otherwise, maybe it's
> best to leave it unmodeled.

In the spirit of "all models are wrong, some are useful",  what you are
calling _interstitial_ implies to me that you are thinking of them more
as "wrong because incomplete" ?  In my decades long work with scientists
and engineers, trying to provide useful "visualizatoins" of their work,
I have often been confronted by their eagerness to accept *my*
model-fitting over their sparse data as somehow "magic".   In the early
days of animation (roughly flip-books) the time-series interpolation
required to make it smooth was often mistaken for magically exposing
some "feature" of the model, when at best, it subdued the perceptual
jinkiness introduced by their sampling.   I had done nothing more than
arbitrarily fit a spline to their data, which they themselves could well
have done, but would not have... somehow outsourcing that sleight of
hand made it OK?

I am in sympathetic resonance with your experience of "kinda sorta" and
80/20 but it is worth emphasizing perhaps that the 80/20 rule in
extension blows up to infinity... it would take an infinite amount of
time and detail to model 100%, and the technical debt will never be
fully paid, by definition.   Oddly this might be a way of saying "you
can't own Truth, just pay the interest on a mortgage against it?"  

I am in the process of trying to apprehend a GUI(sm) of sorts, not to
arrive at a final or absolute truth, but rather to seek some extra
understanding power by expanding the domain of consideration.   In my
experience, models are useful for understanding, explanation, and
prediction...   the first and last being the hardest with the middle
being the loosest.   A lot of what we call post-hoc rationalization fits
into that category I think.

>
> Re: the extension of ownership to larger meaning (stewardship,
> systemic consequences, etc.) -- I agree completely. I wanted to say
> "Well said." But I'm not sure you've said it well.  Nor have I. Nor
> has anyone I've read. 
I struggle with the same challenge... in my own mind I often use "well
considered", even though I may not be happy with the actual description
of a thing, I am often convinced of it's strong support and as you
indicate *only wish* it were "well said".   Perhaps the archaic "here
here!" (or is it "hear hear!") applies better than "well said!"?
> The tragedy of the commons is difficult to grok and even more
> difficult to explain, say, to the dog walkers who leave their dog shit
> in the school yard behind our house ... or worse yet, to the teenager
> with fantastic math skills who would prefer to spend her time
> categorizing fashion choices.

What is the complement of the "tragedy" of the commons?  Is it the
"glory" of it?  Or is it more the "absolute fundamental reality" of
it.    Water rights or pollution regulations would seem to be a
necessary emergent artifact of governance in response to said "tragedy"
and has us ultimately often seeing only the negative space of The
Commons.  In the spirit of "might makes right", there are no Commons,
only resources to be gathered and hoarded and defended by *might*.   I
sometimes feel that the spirit of the frontier which seems to be the
root of individualism characterizing most brands of libertarianism and
conservatism has no room for a "true commons" nor ultimately for any
notion of "stewardship".   One simply "owns things" by virtue of "might"
(physical, rhetorical, legal, economic?) and one has absolutely no
responsibility *to* those things, nor to others who might have a stake
in them (e.g. atmosphere, water, etc.).   

- Steve