[FRIAM] Tragedy of the Commons & Free Riders

[Steve Smith]

Glen et al -

I'm probably completely out of my depth (again) here.

> Eric's idea of engineering individuals to fit some prior conception of 'tragic', defeats the individual liberty purpose. The purpose of liberty is to explore the state space, including all the tiny cracks, including cracks that violate *any* particular local contract, including the cracks that can only be reached with *immense* accumulated wealth (e.g. NIH budgets, or landing rovers on Mars).

I have to split a hair:   The "purpose" of liberty can be that of the
collective and that of the individual (that ever illusory, phigment of
my imagination) and in my tin-man (somewhere between straw and steel... 
chosen for it's relative ease in construction and it's relative
durability compared to straw) understanding,   these two are in dynamic
tension.   The myth of "the individual" supposes (I suppose) that there
is here here, that this illusion of a (self) consciousness has some
reality to it, at least enough to motivate/define the actions of the
locus of activity that is the mirage of an "individual". 

If we compare/conflate "the individual" with what we more commonly refer
to as "the ego", I think your formulation of "to explore state space" is
still apt, but it is the series of "adjacent possibles" expanding out
from the infinitesmal subset of "state space" that (self) identifies
with said "illusory individual ego".   Girls just wanna have fun.   Free
Mumia!  Don't Tread on Me...  

If we insist that all there is is the collective, the state-space of the
entire universe, then we naturally have a quantitatively intractable
problem (for the puny state space available for modeling such implied by
puny individual humans, their mobile phones, laptops, supercomputers and
surely even Marcus' latest quantum computer).   In fact the entire state
space of all the pieces of paper, chalkboards, whiteboards,
windows-decorated with grease pencil and dry erase markings, and all the
world's computers harnessed together in one grand ensemble of seeking
the "meaning of life, the universe and everything" will come up
infinitesimal in that context?  

So the split hairs must be split again (or not) to talk about something
like (relative) meso-scale collectives.   If the Universe itself (or
worse, some abstraction of a multiverse) is too gainourmous to apprehend
or use as the denominator in this grand equation, then we can scope down
to just the Solar System or maybe our Bio/Cryo/Lithosphere... or maybe
just the first-world-culture-of-privilege *we* mostly surf on top
(automobiles, academic degrees, currencies, speculative markets, credit,
mass media, political parties, etc.)

>  I even enjoy well-done tags marking a gang's territory. This scoping is aesthetic.
I suppose your use of "scoping" (in this sense, in the sense of an
aesthetic) helps me to think about this spectrum of alone<-->all-one
with (very subjective I suppose) aesthetic segmentation.
> In contrast to Eric's pre-indoctrinated individuals, with government [⛧], we mix both the liberty to violate with the option to conform. Government facilitates such libertine violations, whereas Eric's focus on prior definition and indoctrination of the individuals would debilitate healthy disruption.
>
>
> [⛧] Not merely any government, but one based on jury trials and the essentials of our Constitution.

I'm currently niggling around the edges of the implications of the work
of the Cardano Foundation and their open self-governance model of
designing/building/evolving their particular vision of blockchain to be
applied to something a *lot* broader than cryptocurrency and NFTs, to
the point of the idea of something as sacred as a "Constitution"  and
"Rule of Law" can be formally described and extravagantly
tested/validated for logical consistency.  Maybe it will become it's own
nightmare of "grey goo" consisting of macromolecules of Administrivium.

In a recent conversation with a "very bright fellow" not on this list,
he referenced an anecdote of one of the more well known modern
mathematicians/proto-computer scientists like maybe Godel or von Neumann
or similar applying for (British?) citizenship and during the final
interview pointing out to the examiner/bureaucrat one (or more) of the
logical inconsistencies in the Constitution he was swearing to uphold.  
I haven't looked hard yet, but maybe someone here knows of this anecdote?

And lastly...

>> give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; explain "profit" and you have no fish
>>
>> -- rec --

Capitalism in it's more positive light would be "give a man a net to
catch fish"  or "help a man make his own net like yours and you feed him
and his friends and progeny  ad-infinitum"

More cynical consequences are:  " teach a man to weave a net and soon
there will be no more fish in the lake" and "don't teach a man to fish
until he swears fealty to you (and lets you hold his eldest daughter in
the castle) and agrees to give you half of the fish he catches".  Even
more recursive/leveraged:  Get a patent on net-making and use the force
of law to ensure that anyone who ever catches a fish with a net must
pass the best parts of it back up and through all the middlemen to the
fish-part counting house of the patent-holder (even if the patent holder
wasn't the original genius-of-macrame who figured it out first).

-sass