[FRIAM] the cancellation arc

Fri Sep 17 16:17:45 EDT 2021

Quick answer to your specific question below, Steve.

Whether or not it says more about the concept or about my accidental window on it, of course, I cannot know.

But to me, the cleanest example of a true epiphenomenon is the way neoclassical economics in its pure Arrow-Debreu form treats institutions.  The abstraction at the foundation is that there are these individuals — meant to somehow stand for people — who have well-formed preferences for their part of every possible allocation of some scarce basket of resources in every possible state of the world.  The General Equilibrium solutions are any allocations such that nobody in the society would be willing to accept any differing contract from the present one, which anybody else would be willing to offer.  There are issues of locality and connectedness of the set of all equilibria, etc., but let me not get off into the weeds of that here, which are not to this point.

Anyway, the GE economists of course understand that institutions exist.  They use money at the supermarket within the conventions of the laws, etc.  But in their foundation abstraction, whether any of those institutions exist or not is immaterial to the allocation of the resources basket achieved at the end, because that allocation is ultimately determined by the collection of all the individuals’ complete preference functions.  There is no work for an institution to do, so the institutions do no work.  In that sense they are epiphenomena.  

Martin Shubik’s pushback against the GE psychosis was the endlessly-repeated expression “Institutions are the carriers of process”.  Just for completeness’ sake, let me mention that Ken Arrow was wonderfully clearheaded about the pathology of the Arrow-Debreu foundation, right from the beginning, and in everything he did thereafter.  He put it out because it was a problem that could be solved, and occasionally the abstraction would have enough of an overlap with some case that it might be useful.  But it never was a religious icon to him.  Shubik and Arrow worked in quite different ways and styles, but in understanding that the ephiphenomanon characterization of institutions was a serious problem to be overcome, there was no struggle between them.

Eric

> On Sep 18, 2021, at 12:04 AM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
> 
> My first thought in reading this (Glen and Jon in response/elaboration) is that we are discussing whether the universe of comprehensions is (fully) metrizeable or not.  I have some conjectures about (weighted) graph and network metrization which may or may not have a play in this.   I'm not enough of a math-hole to really properly think (much less speak) about the higher order abstractions of topology that are invoked/implied in all this...   
> 
> I'm also puzzled by the distinction between epi-phenomena and phenomena.   I suspect the principals in this discussion here to be using similar but different reserved terms from overlapping but distinct lexicons.   My entirely intuitive/vernacular response to this is that it feels like epi-phenomena "all the way down".   
> 
> Glen invoked "epi" as "nearly" and yet in vernacular use, I feel it always carries the extra connotation of "on top of" or "in addition to" or "composed with".   Cycles and epicycles in the copernican sense?   Isn't the "billiard ball model" of molecular dynamics an "epiphenomen" when compared to a quantum wave formulation of the "phenomenology of particle physics"?
> 
> I'm probably not reading/thinking/expressing this nearly carefully enough to be relevant.
> 
> bumble,
> 
>   - Steve
> 
> On 9/16/21 8:03 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>> """
>> Were M absolutely, perfectly faithful to W, there would be no epiphenomena in M. I.e. epiphenomena do not exist...
>> """
>> 
>> I read Glen as saying that the collection of all comprehensions forms a space equipped with a meaningful notion of distance, and that if one were to treat the space analytically, one can arrive at a satisfactory definition of local epiphenomena.
>> 
>> For what it's worth, I still feel that free-constructions may be an insightful way to model epiphenomena, or maybe even (as in EricS's t-shirt post) the relationship that Lie groups have to their algebras.
>> 
>> 
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