a conservative ecology would be precisely a senescent one, one that, yes, acknowledges the need for 'community' and so on, but that doesn't valorize the changes that such community fosters (correlatively, a philosophy of individualism lies on the other side of the spectrum). The 'best' ecosystems are precisely those perched halfway between immaturity and senescene, insofar as they can accommodate change in the best way. — StreetlightX
But then something happens when a variable in the system can relate to that cycle by, to paraphrase Csal, by 'reflexively taking it's own parameters as a variable that can be acted upon': so humans will cultivate food so that we don't have to deal with - or at least minimize the impact of - cycles of food scarcity and die out like wolves with too few deer to prey on. This is the shift from the 'in-itself' to the 'for-itself', where the implicit becomes explicit and is acted upon as such. And this almost invariably alters the behavior of the system, which is why, I think, the two descriptions of the 'X’wunda trade system' (quoted by Csal) are not equivalent: something will qualitatively change if the system itself 'approaches itself' in Friedman's way. — StreetlightX
Gri-gri comes in many forms – ointment, powder, necklaces – but all promise immunity to weaponry. It doesn’t work on individuals, of course, although it’s supposed to. Very little can go grain-for-grain with black powder and pyrodex. It does work on communities: it makes them bullet proof.
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The economists Nathan Nunn and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra wrote a paper analyzing the social effects of gri-gri: Why Being Wrong Can Be Right: Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs [...]
The paper argues that gri-gri encourages resistance on a mass scale. Beforehand, given a mix of brave and cowardly, only a small percentage of a village would fight back. If you want to have any hope of surviving, then you need everyone to fight back. Gri-gri lowers the perceived costs of said resistance, i.e. no reason to fear guns when the bullets can’t hurt you. Now everyone fights, hence, gri-gri‘s positive benefits. Moreover: since more people are fighting, each gri-gri participant also raises the marginal utility of the others (it’s better to fight together). And, since there are highly specific requirements for using the powder (if you break a certain moral code it doesn’t work), gri-gri also probably cuts down on non-war related crimes. Take group-level selection: the belief in and use of gri-gri will thus allow any given village to out-compete one without gri-gri. After a time, these will either be replaced by gri-gri adherents (hence spreading it geographically), or they’ll adopt gri-gri themselves (also spreading it).
"[imagine that] the state sends a researcher into the village. “We’re sorry,” he says. “We were so stupid to mock you. We totally understand why you do this thing. Let’s explain to you what’s actually going on, now that we have an economic translation.”
The researcher explains that, in fact, gri-gri doesn’t work for the individual, but it has the net-positive effect of saving the community. “Give up these childish illusions, yet maintain the overall function of the system,” he exhorts. A villager, clearly stupid, asks: “So it works?” The man smiles at these whimsical locals. “Oh, no,” he sighs. “You will surely die. But in the long run it’s a positive adaptation at the group level.”
No one would fight, of course. The effect only comes from the individual. If he doesn’t think he can survive a bullet, then it’s hard to see how you’re going to make him fight. “But people fight better in groups, don’t you see?” stammers the exasperated researcher. That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s also no revelation. I trust that at least a couple of those villagers have brawled before. “Fighting six guys alone vs. fighting six guys with your friends” is a fast lesson with obvious application. Still didn’t make them go to war before the introduction of gri-gri. If that didn’t work, why do you think “time for some #gametheory” will convince anyone?
Cheer up Schop. Take the long view. Either humanity will work out what it is about or your wish will be granted. You can wait 50 years surely? — apokrisis
AFAIK the mechanisms that link biodiversity to stability are still being researched, so it's far from 'settled science'. — fdrake
Do you mean the time series obtaining a local maximum through 'optimisation' or do you mean an ecological model obtaining a local maximum through optimisation? The relationship of the latter to an ecological model is more a matter of model fitting and parameter estimation than how a parametrised mathematical model of an ecology relates to what it models. The parameters are 'best in some sense' with respect to the data. — fdrake
I personally wouldn't like to think about the 'modelling relation' between science and nature in terms of the 'for-itself' acting representationally on the 'in-itself'. Just 'cos I think it's awkward. — fdrake
I think ecology has some complications that aren't present in simpler relationships between model and world. I'm not sure I could make a list of them all, but there's always a difficulty in measuring properties of ecosystems precisely in a manner useful for modelling. It isn't the same for chemistry. — fdrake
Canopy succession is an example. Once a mighty oak has grown to fill a gap, it shades out the competition. So possibilities get removed. The mighty oak then itself becomes a stable context for a host of smaller stable niches. The crumbs off its feeding table are a rain of degrees of freedom that can be spent by the fleas that live on the fleas.
But if the oak gets knocked down in a storm or eaten away eventually by disease, that creates an opening for faster-footed weed species. We are back to a simpler immature ecosystem where the growth is dominated by the strong entropic gradient - the direct sunlight, the actual rainfall and raw nutrient in the soil.
The immature ecology doesn't support the same hierarchy of life able to live off "crumbs" - the weak gradients that highly specialised lifeforms can become adapted to. It doesn't have the same kind of symbiotic machinery which can trap and recycle nutrients, provide more of its own water, like the leaf litter and the forest humidity.
An immature ecology is dependent on standing under a gushing faucet of entropy. It needs direct sunlight and lots of raw material just happening to come its way. It feeds on this bounty messily, without much care for the long-term. Entropy flows through it in a way that leaves much of it undigested.
But a senescent ecology has build up the complexity that can internalise a great measure of control over its inputs. A tropical forest can depend on the sun. But it builds up a lot of machinery to recycle its nutrients. It fills every niche so that while the big trees grab the strongest available gradients, all the weak ones, the crumbs, get degraded too.
I imagine that approaching ecosystems through network analysis would have alot to say about this: i.e. more biodiverse ecosystems have more nodes that support certain cycles such that the failure of a few of these nodes would not lead to the failure of those cycles as a whole; and moreover, that such robustness also has a catalytic effect - the more robust a network, the more chance for the development of further nodes, etc, etc
I agree it's clunky as well, but the necessary vocabulary is kinda hard to pin down, I think. I think part of the problem is the fungibility of these terms: what may once have been a non-reflexive variable ('in-itself') may become reflexive ('for-itself'), and vice versa - the only way to find out which is which is to actually do the empirical study itself, and find out what exactly whatever little patch of nature under consideration is in fact sensitive to ('sensitive to' being perhaps a better phrase than 'what nature can see'). So when you say later on that:
First up, I'm not bothered if my arguments are merely qualitative in your eyes. I am only "merely" doing metaphysics in the first place. So a lot of the time, my concern is about what the usual rush to quantification is missing. I'm not looking to add to science's reductionist kitset of simple models. I'm looking to highlight the backdrop holistic metaphysics that those kinds of models are usually collapsing.
To sum up, no doubt we have vastly different interests. You seem to be concerned with adding useful modelling tools to your reductionist kitbag. And so you view everything I might say through that lens.
To help you understand, I define degrees of freedom as dichotomous to constraints. So this is a systems science or hierarchy theory definition. I make the point that degrees of freedom are contextual. They are the definite directions of action that still remain for a system after the constraints of that system have suppressed or subtracted away all other possibilities.
But it is a shame that you bypass the content of my posts to jump straight back to the world from your point of view. — apokrisis
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