[FRIAM] merging with the mob

[Marcus Daniels]

< It seems to me like you're claiming the comprehensions *always* exist and are, at least in principle, computable. >


A parochial perspective doesn't *aim* to synthesize multiple local representations into a global view; it aims to only focus on one local prescription.  Only by having the ambition of a universalist perspective does one even try to do that synthesis to see what is needed.   Whether the best way to do that involves one or a few general models or hundreds of local models which are voted is just a question of what works and what gives insight.


Marcus

________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2018 12:08:24 PM
To: FriAM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] merging with the mob

I think both Occupy and the Tea Party, present challenges to your argument, here.  What about mobs *without* a "master equation"?  ... an, in principle, incompressibility? ... they don't generalize at all?  In either case, even the most coherent advocates failed in their descriptions of the "movements".  (Scare quotes used to indicate that the reason we use the word "movement" is precisely because these phenomena don't submit to coherent description.)

E.g. to me, much of what's happening, including the "not racist" racism emerging around migration is (stigmergically) arising from a more open-ended, high dimensional, multitude of threats.  Any comprehensive predicate for it would go way beyond all the individual silos (sociology, psychology, biology, etc.).  It would touch every layer-of-explanation (including explanation-ology).  It's possible that such a comprehension might be practically incomputable.  (Douglas Adams?)

It seems to me like you're claiming the comprehensions *always* exist and are, at least in principle, computable.

On 01/25/2018 10:19 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Another distinction I would make, not directly in response to any recent remarks in this thread, is the distinction between people (or groups of people) and ideas.   True, a group can be built around some ideas, and that group can have high cohesion or a thick membrane, but ideas can exist without a group having  those properties.
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> One can study sociology without actually being concerned with in the life story of every person.    What matters are the generative properties of life --  how predispositions and experiences lead to different kinds of outcomes on average.   Sure, there will be some probability that a child with a good upbringing will fall in with a bad crowd and become a chronic user of drugs, or that a young adult will get cancer and create catastrophic consequences for her family, or that for no good reason an imbecile becomes president.   There's a non-zero variance in real-world distributions.
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> To reject tribalism in the way I mean is to learn about the common properties of social systems, and to try to make models more predictive and general.    To do this does not imply having a  Dunbar number > 7 billion.  It helps if a lot of people look at a lot of life stories, but that doesn't imply that those doing the research need to have a social circle of a particular diameter.
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> Another simple metaphor would be between a (deterministic) pseudo-random number generator having a functional form and a known seed versus the output of that generator.   The amount of information in the former is relatively compact (a few pages of text).   However, compressing all of that detail with a popular compression program would not discover that functional form.  Knowing the life stories of 7 billion people would be like the output.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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