[FRIAM] labels

Sat Oct 10 15:29:31 EDT 2020

Ok.  In the late sixties I worked on a federally funded project to do a
longitudinal study of US highschool students who graduated from 1960 to
1964.  For each of several tens of thousands of students we had values of
several hundred variables.  We applied many multivariate statistical
techniques to try to understand those student cohorts and even to make
predictions about demands for educational resources, numbers of people
pursuing various career paths, etc.

The project was called Project Talent.  The techniques applied, included
factor analysis, principal components, discriminant functions, etc.  All
the software was in Fortran.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 1:13 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

> One could imagine a large covariance matrix of individual preferences,
> say.  If you are pro-life, you are probably also religious, and probably
> not living in a city.
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, October 10, 2020 11:43 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] labels
>
>
>
> Wait, what?  Eigenvectors are properties of a linear transformation from a
> space to itself.  What's the space and what's the linear transformation?
> Principal components analysis is a method of spanning a space of variables
> with one of lower dimension.
>
>
>
> Or are you speaking metaphorically?
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 12:27 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Marcus -
>
> (in mild agreement/acknowledgement of your point as I understand it)
>
> I suppose my own biases about human nature are that we are driven along an
> internal greed/fear axis which is then "weaponized" by the politicos.   The
> Right seems particularly adept at both, while impugning the Left as if they
> are the ones playing those trump (Trump?) cards...
>
> Other axes such as equality/equanimity,   group loyalty/deference to
> authority, etc.   seem *somewhat* orthogonal..
>
> I suspect the terms "Progressive" and "Conservative" don't really capture
> what is actually exhibited/explored by the Left/Right tug-of war.   I know
> that as I have aged/matured/evolved I've become *much* more socially
> progressive whilst feeling much more conservative about progress itself...
> not trusting the headlong rush we are on, while acknowledging that it is
> (somewhat) inevitable.
>
> Following the arc of SteveG's ideas about collective intelligence,
> least/stationary action, bidirectional path-tracing as a paradigm that
> eclipses or replaces or maybe subsumes  (neo) Darwinism and Paternalism,  I
> also feel that we are overdue for some fundamental refactoring of our
> collective models/paradigms.   I'm no more interested in the style of Pol
> Pot's Communism than I am in Hitler's Fascism or Stalin's
> Fascism-disguised-as-Socialism than I am in Trump's variants on the same.
> They seem like they are all aberrant excursions into a highly compressed
> (projection) subspace that is at best a *shadow* of what is really
> needed/possible.
>
> - Steve
>
> On 10/10/20 11:37 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> My model is that people lean left and right as a developmental aspect of
> personality, and the parties mimic but also manipulate those patterns.
> People really must be gamed and manipulated by politicians because even the
> best-intentioned people are often ignorant of the complexity of the
> population and the practicalities of governance.    Worse, many people are
> blamers who have nothing to add beyond What’s In It For Me.
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On
> Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Saturday, October 10, 2020 9:55 AM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] labels
>
>
>
> Nick-
>
> Not trying to ding you personally for this, but this kind of blind
> deference to authority/party/tribe/loyalty is one of the mechanisms I'm
> trying to tease a part with Marcus' reference to the Left/Right *dominant*
> component as an inevitability?  And I *think* EricC's questioning of that
> assumption?
>
> How *do* our political parties "precess" in higher dimensional space such
> that the subdominant components can "flip" entirely...   how did the party
> of Lincoln Republicans who rejected secession and abolished Slavery and
> their opposition which had a strong component of what became formally the
> Dixiecrats, effectively flip positions?   The party that accused (accuses?)
> their opposition of being "tax and spenders" has become "print money and
> spenders".   How do deficit Hawks become Deficit Doves or Owls, and is
> there an instantaneous "tunneling" between these somewhat oppositional
> positions?
>
>
> https://citizenvox.org/2012/02/22/hawks-doves-and-owls-budget-policy-goes-to-the-zoo/
>
> - Steve
>
> Thaniks, EricS for reading and commenting on the Amy Interview  I am such
> a benighted, naïve, stupid, optimist.  I can imagine that if she were an
> Obama nominee, I would be saying, “We have a good one here!”
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On
> Behalf Of *David Eric Smith
> *Sent:* Saturday, October 10, 2020 3:47 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] labels
>
>
>
> Yes, and not only Ugh.
>
>
>
> The two places this bothers me as a category error are:
>
>
>
> 1. It conflates writing the rules of the game and being a player in the
> game.  Shubik used to harp on this: that the government’s role as the
> declarer of monetary policy, and as the participant in fiscal policy, were
> roles at different levels, game designer versus large atomic player.  The
> category isn’t quite as clean here, in that a rule targeting balanced
> affiliation isn’t exactly the same as playing for one side.  It is a bit
> more like certain monkey societies, in which the problem-solver steps in on
> the side of whoever is being attacked to lessen the asymmetry.
>
>
>
> But it still feels like it has a related problem, of defining an outer law
> (constitution or statute for structure of the court) in terms of a
> non-legal convention (the particular parties and how they are non-formally
> categorized and weighted in the society at this time), and that feels
> completely unstable against drift.
>
>
>
> A more mechanism-design-y thing would be to revisit whichever Federalist
> Paper it was that talked about the destabilizing role of parties, never
> imagining the technologies for coordination that would be available to them
> 230 years later, and ask what the mechanism update is to the constitution
> in a world where instabilities toward consolidation are so extreme.  Kind
> of the same spirit as revisiting capitalist property rights laws when a
> warehouser and distributor can come to own the whole economy.
>
>
>
> 2. In the Coney Barrett talk that Nick circulated, she made an important
> point that should be true, even if we could argue that it is a smokescreen
> that isn’t true in reality.  She says “liberal/conservative” in regard to
> the interpretation of constitutional law are different categories from
> “liberal/conservative” as political affiliations.  She probably even
> believes it, though I expect that her SCOTUS decisions will magically align
> with the political axes 100% of the time, and one must ask how that happens
> to always be the case.
>
>
>
> Of course, the question is whether it is all disingenuous.  Thomas Edsall
> had a decent article in NYT a few days ago on originalism/living-text
> definitions, that was right on the thread we were on.  It is interesting
> that the opponents of each side make _exactly_ the same accusation toward
> it: that the side they are criticizing has no real method and is a program
> for rationalizing whatever outcome the judge wanted politically.  To the
> extent that that is true in substance, if obfuscated in appearance, then
> Coney Barrett’s claim that they are different categories is a falsehood.
> One wonders then at what level of argument one could force her to
> acknowledge that error.
>
>
>
> Eric.
>
>
>
> On Oct 9, 2020, at 11:18 PM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- reconfigure (expand) it from 9 to 15 but
> *balance* the Left/Right ideology (I think he proposed 5/5) and then
> ---------
>
>
>
> Note that one thing both parties agree on is that we should conceive
> politics as utterly and completely a choice between the two of them. God
> forbid that we conceive of judges using any other dimensions. In fact,
> let's enshrine it in law that we must forever focus on exactly whether we
> have a "balance" of "left" and "right". Ugh!
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2020 at 4:48 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Ha!  I refer to the last bit as "ok fine, TWIST my drinking arm!" when
> someone offers to buy me one...   the only one to twists my drinking arm
> this last six months has been Mary... and Maybe Stephen and his circle
> on "ZoomGrappaNight".
>
> I don't like the language around "packing the court".   I don't think
> "reconfiguring the court" is the same as "packing the court".   Clearly,
> the (not so) loyal opposition to the Dems *would* pack the court...  add
> 6 more justices and make sure they are ALL conservative leaners.   Pete
> Buttegeig was the first to speak of this in my earshot, and HIS version
> sounded pretty reasonable...   reconfigure (expand) it from 9 to 15 but
> *balance* the Left/Right ideology (I think he proposed 5/5) and then
> leave it to the Justices themselves to fill the remaining 5 (through
> some arcane process?).    What the Republicans have been building up to
> for decades is "packing the courts".
>
> Checks and balances are tricky, as is depending on social norms and
> standards, but I think it might be "as good as it gets", at least for
> the time being.
>
> - Steve
>
>
> On 10/8/20 1:36 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> > Ha! That was the essence of one of the 538 panel member's phrasing
> suggestion for Kamala Harris in response to Pence's question about packing
> SCOTUS. The elaborated version was: "Because confirming Barrett, NOW, is
> such a horribly wrong thing to do, we have no choice BUT to pack the
> court." ... I.e. now look what you made me do. That was my dad's favorite
> phrase to justify whatever abuse he chose to mete out that day. He once ran
> over my bicycle with his truck. I *made* him run over my bike because I
> left it laying in the driveway. It's a running joke with my fellow drinkers
> who *regularly* FORCE me to drink more than I should. There is no free
> will. I live to serve.
> >
> > On 10/8/20 11:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >> Look what you made me do,
>
>
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