[FRIAM] Tragedy of the Commons & Free Riders

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Thanks... I'm sure it was my imputation over your implication, but I do
think your point is well served by the explication.   I think this
"identity at many scales" is an important feature of whatever it is we
are talking about (what were we talking about?)...  I think maybe
"liberty" then translates into the language of "free energy" or
Lagrangians and Least Action Paths, Noetherian Logics, etc.    I
definitely prefer my own Liberty "wiggly"...   too much in one stiff
chunk can be hard to swallow without chewing thoroughly.

Thanks for the Godel link... I'm sure I could have found that if I'd
just flicked my wrist and tapped my keys one more time...  Interesting
that nobody has found a conclusive candidate for what he was apparently
dithering over?   This is why *I* like anecdotes so much, they provide
some of the "wiggle" in my liberty to think whatever I want to think!

Meanwhile, while the source Mae-Wan Ho might tweak your
Pseudo-Science-Dar, I found this 2005 article she co-authored with
Robert Ulanowics that struck a chord:
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucessjb/S3%20Reading/ho%20and%20ulanowicz%2005.pdf
.   Ho has a RationalWiki entry:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mae-Wan_Ho which is fairly neutral by my
experience of their standards.   The fact of an entry at all suggests
that her work/position/posture is at least somewhat questioned(able?)
but the only significant negative I saw in the Rationalwiki reference
was quoting one of her reviewers as having accused her of questionable
"Strawmanism" in a few places.    I read her Rainbow H2O a few years ago
and was impressed by how *little* pseudoscience it even gestured toward,
given how *much* pseudoscience uses her work as a fulcrum for their
shenaniganry.   Wanna by a whole-house "structured water" device, there
are plenty of sources... or you could just stir your water pitcher in
the right direction with bamboo chopsticks before you serve it to your
guests.   But check your hemisphere first, Chirality Matters!

- Steve

> OK. If I implied a distinction between individual and collective liberty, I'm sorry. My intention was to assert that every scoping, every coherent packet, from enzyme to cell to animal to biome ... to galaxy, has a corresponding conception of liberty. And the purpose of that wiggly liberty is to expand into whatever space it can, including changing the sub-space in which it wiggles.
>
> Thanks for the hook to Cardano.
>
> I think the story was about Goedel, where his friends discouraged him from talking about any such contradiction in front of the judge. If I remember right, nobody's sure of the contradiction Goedel had in mind.
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_Loophole
>
>
>
> On April 1, 2021 3:24:51 PM PDT, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>> 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