I suspect that your notion of hierarchy, when descriptive, is not the same as what I'm targeting. The idea that a program or system has hierarchies, for example, isn't the same as social hierarchy. — Moliere

If you can’t present this beetle in a box private theory of yours here, then there is nothing to discuss.

there is a key difference between saying that one has no evidence for something and saying that something does not exist. — Leontiskos

I’m not clear what you are driving at. But I have no problem if you are saying the negative can’t be proved. I can’t claim evidence against a transcendent “God did it” story. One could always adjust a supernatural claim to lie just beyond the reality that can be evidenced.

I mean scientists can posit superdeterminism as the way to regain realism in quantum mechanics. There is always a way to suggest a hidden cause beyond the reach of the evidence available.

So sure, as pragmatists, we advance by having beliefs that we seek to doubt. Einstein had his classical presumptions and because they could be counterfactually expressed, they could be shown to be wrong. Or at least forced past the bounds of counterfactuality, as with superdeterminism.

I'm scratching my head a bit because I think I've given concrete examples before, like the IWW. — Moliere

You really are a low effort sort of guy. You can't even cut and paste your example, let alone explain it in terms that are relevant as any kind of counter to what I might have said.

But here you go. This is your starter.....

The Wobblies believed that all workers should organize as a class, a philosophy which is still reflected in the Preamble to the current IWW Constitution:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

it feels as if your solution would be to (legislate?) regulate against either single-user or less-than-five-user motor transport, so that cycling and hte like can flourish. — AmadeusD

NZTA’s multimodal approach was to create safe separation to allow everyone pick the transport choice they best preferred. If you can whiz to work on a bus lane or cycle lane rather than get stuck in a car, then you would be free to do so.

Of course that serve all options carrot was going to require a bit of sly stick. Such as fuel taxes rather than fuel subsidies, a limit on inner city parking, 20 kph speed limits, and any other such measure that made motorists pay the actual environmental and social costs of their preference.

So the plan was an effort to be cunning. But the car drivers still caught on. The politicians caved accordingly.

It's an interesting question -- why did Europe like this clever idea? -- but it's not a political position. — Moliere

For goodness sakes. Read Fukuyama. All three volumes. :grin:

He analyses political structure across the world from the year dot. Read Debt as well for the economic story.

How Europe stumbled its way to its political arrangements is a fascinating tale of luck and experiment. But also of essential system-balancing structures needing to be found.

Can you give me criteria for what a concrete example would need to fulfill? — Moliere

Do you ask to hold someone’s hand every time you need to cross the road? Clearly I’m wasting my time now.

Clearly, this is no longer apt for this thread. If you care, feel free to PM with any questions, but I assume its uninteresting in the extreme to you. — AmadeusD

Just amusing but not related to the thread. On the other hand, it did point to the real world issue of why transport planning is in a bind.

I’m not claiming NZ is paradise. But in the end, I had the choice. That makes a big difference.

I think we both reject the scientistic interpretation of 2b, — Leontiskos

Hold up. Biosemioticians like Stan Salthe explicitly recognise a hierarchy of grades of telos that runs from human purpose to biological function to physical tendency. Sorry, no divine intervention involved. Just the appropriate divisions of semiosis as a system science approach embracing all four ArIstotelean causes.

So in this rendition the naturalist will posit a brute fact where the theist posits a intentional ordering, and these sorts of disputes move further and further towards metaphysics and away from science. — Leontiskos

Not really. The brute fact is structural rather than material. So developmental rather than existential.

And science has gone the same way even at Its fundamental physical level of quantum field theory. Hence Ontic Structural Realism as the recent shiny new toy in metaphysics.

Curiously, the first hit on Google initially frames the idea theologically. — Leontiskos

Yep. And science can have its modern atheistic version. One which reduces to dissipative structure theory, and so not half as exciting of course.

I found that surprising and interesting. It is interesting that it is intuitive and commonly accepted that <If the Big Bang occurred, then the universe was probably created>, — Leontiskos

The argument goes different. GR showed the cosmos is unstable. It would either have to be contracting or expanding. If contracting, it ought to have already disappeared from existence. It indeed exists, so therefore it must be expanding. And therefore have had an abrupt creation-like beginning. A creation event in which spacetime and its material contents got going on their eternalised expanding and cooling. Forever falling into a heat sink of their own construction.

I've not intimated NZ is the worst country in the world. I just hate it here. That's all. Various reason, largely biases and personal disposition. Not sure what's controversial getting you lot up in arms. — AmadeusD

So are there countries where you would be sure that you would hate them less?

What do their transport habits look like exactly? Remembering that was the OP. Is there a city where the cyclists are never rude, allowed on pavements and yet not in bus lanes. Expand on this Shangri-La.

when I read your description of society -- as a flow -- it seems descriptive and descriptive only and I cannot tell what might even be the "good" hierarchy. — Moliere

Well I only got started on the first point. How nature is in general always organised into hierarchical or fractal flows.

Then would come how hierarchies evolve from the unthinking kind to the thinking kind. When the flow is that which sustains an organism able to make smart choices at every scale of its being.

Eventually we get to the political meat - like why the combo of a constitution and a president (or even law-bound monarch) seemed like a clever idea.

Just as our brains are intelligent because they can form both long term smart habits and make more instant smart choices, so this polarity is reflected in the design of a rational political architecture. We want a constitution as our stable long term memory, our accustomed and well adapted habit. And we also want a president who can mobilise society in the moment, react immediately to novel threats and opportunity as they present themselves.

So as our brains are organised for intelligent choice, so do we want our nations to be institutionally organised. Exactly the same need and so exactly the same cognitive architecture.

However, I think we're going for something other than description. "ought" is the philosophy word, but I'm not sure it's the right word other than to convey a distinction on a philosophy forum. — Moliere

If “ought” makes philosophers feel they have a USP, then let’s see how much sense they make applying the concept. Systems science and natural philosophy have already shown is and ought to be all part of. the one pragmatic package. But if philosophy wants to slide over to romanticism as it feels the enlightenment has been giving it the cold shoulder lately…

No one has a proper theory of how to fix it, or a real idea about how it works. — Moliere

So you say. So you find comforting to believe.

But I asked for concrete examples that might support your vaguely expressed sentiments. As usual, I’m just getting more unsourced claims.

The reason that measures of entropification can be applied to information, is just because information represents a form of order, and entropy naturally applies to order. — Wayfarer

How does entropy apply naturally to order except as its negation or inverse? Just as is the relation between signal and noise in the information perspective.

I'm sure this is what leads to the prevalence of information-as-foundation in contemporary discourse. — Wayfarer

Did you read the full passage? Do you really now want to commit to the thesis that brains are just mechanical computers? Racks of logic switches? Thought reduces to symbol processing?

Those dichotomies cannot properly account for that which is both. — creativesoul

I was mocking Banjo’s abuse of these dichotomies to serve his rhetorical purposes.

The need to tease out what is neurobiological about consciousness, and what is then socially constructed, is where my semiotic approach to cognition starts.

Consciousness of course functions for us as a cohesive whole. And yet it is an integration across a hierarchy of semiotic levels. There is information encoded in forms that are genetic, neural, linguistic and numeric. These all fuse to inform the results. Perhaps not seamlessly, but adequately. Good enough for all practical purposes.

Banjo just wants to stop the conversation before it slips beyond his narrow grasp. And who really knows why.

My target is hierarchy. I know that much. — Moliere

So not good vs bad hierarchies, just hierarchy in general. Boo, hiss! Hierarchy, dude! It's baaad!

I think this is too general; at some point social systems are not abstract and do things according to what's up rather than because of patterns we've seen. — Moliere

If you could give a concrete example, it would help show if you might have a case.

However, I wonder if equating the two risks losing sight of the fact that information derives its significance from its order. — Wayfarer

Well if you are interested in processing signals, that requires you to have a model of noise. This was Shannon's actual job given he worked with a phone company with crackling long distance wires. You need to know how often to repeat yourself when it is costing you x dollars a minute. Maybe send a telegram instead.

If you know the worse case scenario – no information getting through to the other end, just random crackle – then you can begin to measure the opposite of that. How much redundancy you can squeeze out of a message and yet rely on it to arrive with all its meaning intact.

So sure. We can load up our bit strings with our precious cargo of "differences that make a difference". We can send them out across the stormy seas of noisy indifference. But if we know that some of the crockery is going to be inevitably broken or nicked, we might choose to pack a few extra cups and plates to be certain.

Information theory just starts with a theory of noise or disorder. Then you can start designing your meaning transmission networks accordingly.

So I question that equivalence - might it not be a fallacy of equivocation? — Wayfarer

It is like when folk talk about big bangs or dark matter. People latch onto complex scientific ideas in simplistic fashion.

To actually have a flow of meaning – which is what you are meaning by "information" – it has to be a flow of differences that make a difference. However that in turn requires a physical channel that transmits difference in the first place. Like a vocal tract that can make noises. Or a stylus that can scratch marks on wax.

So you start with the mechanics for making a noisy and meaningless racket. Then you can start to add the constraints that suppress the noise and thus enhance the signal. You add the structure that is the grammar or syntax that protects your precious cargo of meaning.

A number line has its direction. You are either counting up or counting down. A bit string has some standard word size that fits the bit architecture of the hardware. As further levels of syntax get added, the computer can figure out whether you are talking about an operation or its data.

So no equivocation. Information theory is the arrival of mechanical precision. Mathematical strength action.

Entropy likewise brings mathematical precision to our woolly everyday notions about randomness or chaos. It gives a physical ground to statistical mechanics. Boltzmann's formula speaks to the idea of noise in terms of joules per degree Kelvin.

And so showing me a bunch of images that I see to be red doesn't prove that colours are not mental phenomena. — Michael

He gave the game away. If you want to talk about the biology of consciousness, he is just going to confuse you by talking about its sociology. That way he gets to complain about another repetition of the same old chestnut running over 100 pages.

The basic point I would make is that colour is not entirely in the mind of an individual, but also functions at a social level. — Banno

Claims that the dichotomy of private/public is undeniable.

The broader methodological point is that philosophical dichotomies such as subject/object. subjective/objective, internal/external, private/public are difficult to maintain on close examination — Banno

Then denies the dichotomy of private/public can be the subject of a claim.

Sounds legit. :up:

It goes by a great many names. Here is a sample.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_distribution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Bejan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

That's the bit of human nature I'm targeting I think we have lots of reasonings to excuse social dominance, but for the most part it's our chimpanzee side which gives rise to such reasonings rather than the purportedly enlightened side. — Moliere

So then your target isn’t really hierarchical order but some notion of social injustice.

If we step back to understand hierarchical order as a pure form, we can see that it is a distribution system. It is a way to distribute power, information, entropy, whatever, in an evenly balanced fashion across a closed and cohesive network of relations.

So it is fundamentally about equality. But the complex kind of equality where the total flow of the system is divided up in a fractal or scalefree fashion that maximises its throughput.

A landscape is drained of water by forming a fractal network of trickles, streams, rivers and deltas. World aviation is organised into remote grass airstrips, small rural airports, large city airports, major international hubs. The mathematics of this is precise. A fractal distribution system has a log/log or powerlaw scale of size. That is how a geography can be efficiently covered so every drop of water or wannabe flyer gets an equal chance of participating in a well-organised network of flow.

There is no limit on free action even when all the actions are in competition. The network adapts so that statistically it services the available flows in an evenhanded fashion. If demand increases for the rural airstrip or drops for the global hub, then that node in the network can grow or shrink accordingly.

So in the pure form, the hierarchy is about a democracy of scale. A network composed of networks with any possible scale. Whatever works best to optimise flow for the entire system in question.

In a society, we would want everyone to have enough to eat, a bed to sleep, a voice in any decision making. These are goods to be distributed evenly. But then a real world civilisation is not going to end up giving everyone the same meal, the same bed, the same degree of being listened to.

A rural airstrip is not going to have a VIP lounge, or customs officers, or nonstop flights to international destinations. A global hub becomes its own vast hierarchy of terminal facilities and job functions. If you want a weather report at the grass strip, you look up at the clouds. At Dubai or Chicago, there are teams of meteorologists with hi tech radars, monitoring stations and computer models.

Is this difference in airport facilities intrinsically unfair? Even artificial rather than natural? If you want to fly, the whole world has become efficiently organised to allow anyone to hop on a plane from anywhere. But to do that basic thing, it also means that the nodes in the network have to themselves become hierarchically complex to the degree they fairly do their part in servicing this globalised flow of individuals.

If you are talking politics and decision making, the same applies. One can get all upset that democracy organises itself into interest groups and institutions. One can start bleating about the ruling mafia, the oppressive state. One can dream of a world where in effect everyone flies off their own grass airstrip and there are no giant planes taking off from their giant airports.

But there are perfectly natural reasons why societies, as human flow structures, will seem unequal as they seek to deliver equality. And if you don’t understand that, you can’t actually focus on where a hierarchy might be performing poorly in striking that optimal flow balance. You just want to pull the whole system down, or live outside its bounds. You have no proper theory of how it works and thus no real idea of how to fix it.

Wasn't that because Von Neumann, who was an associate of Claude Shannon, suggested to him that he adopt the term 'entropy', noticing that it was isometric with Bolzmann's statistical mechanics interpretation of entropy? — Wayfarer

Yep. That’s where it started. With a conceptual similarity. But then an actual physical connection got made. Folk like Szilárd, Brillouin, Landauer and Bekenstein showed that the Boltzmann constant k that sets the fundamental scale for entropy production also sets a fundamental scale for information processing.

Computing creates heat. And so there is an irreducible limit to how much information a volume of space can contain without melting it. Or in fact gravitationally curling it up into a blackhole.

In a number of such ways, information and entropy have become two faces of the same coin connected by k, which in turn reduces to c, G and h as the fundamental constants of nature. Reality has a finite grain of resolution. And information and entropy become two ways of talking about the same fact.

I don't grok this. — 180 Proof

I’m talking about holography and horizons. Volumes of spacetime can only contain finite amounts of information because information has a finite grain. Or in entropy terms, a finite number of degrees of freedom.

So at the Heat Death, it all just stops. The information represented by the energy density of the Big Bang has reached its eternalised de Sitter state of being cooled and spread out as far as it could ever go. The Universe is a bath of blackbody radiation. But with a temperature in quantum touching distance of absolute zero. Photons with a wavelength the size of the visible universe.

(There are a few issues of course. Like how to account for the dark energy that ensures this de Sitter state where the cosmic event horizon does freeze over at this finite maximum extent. So it is a sketch of the work in progress. Lineweaver is a good source.)

'Platonizing' information and/or numbers (as 'concept realists', 'hylomorphists, and 'logical idealists' do) is, at best, fallaciously reifying. — 180 Proof

Yet the holographic principle in fundamental physics says it means something that the same formalism works for information and entropy. At the Planck scale, the physical distinction between the discrete and the continuous dissolves into its own identity operation.

There is something deeper as is now being explored. Reality is bound by finitude. Which would be a big change in thinking.

But I gave you that example. You failed to respond to it. And I can understand why. You have no real argument to make in terms of any evidence you can present. You cannot rise above empty slogans.

Anyway, imagine arriving on the shores of Australia to either be faced with the rich social complexity of its indigenous people or instead some actually random and atomistic collection of folk dumped out of the average international airport at a busy time.

Do you think you might notice a difference? Could you put a finger on what it was? In what sense would the critical distinction you might detect fail to meet a proper systems definition of hierarchical order?

These were the questions you were seeking to evade by pretending you hadn't been asked them.

But don't worry, I am not holding my breath for a coherent response. :up:

The reality is that there are no gangs that specialize in this crime, simply because other types of crime are much more profitable. — Tarskian

It is almost as if crime believed in the statistical utility of risk/reward equations.

This life strategy acknowledges the very limited or even inexistent ability of the individual to improve his current political environment while emphasizing his very real ability to simply choose another one. — Tarskian

Dignify it how you like. Arbitrage is arbitrage. The issue is the strength of the presumptions you use to motivate your life strategy model. The interesting social science question is "does it scale?".

In the end, individuals can make their free choices. And the world is that which emerges as a consequence. The consequences of some particular choice being scaled to the level where it is a general choice then begins the feedback response. The choice being made may come to be regretted once everyone seems to be trying to do the same thing as you,

Of course, then you are free to switch to another course – to the degree other options remain unconstrained.

So there is no mystery or heroism here. It is just human civilisation evolving and learning. Until the wheels suddenly fall off as all the risk/reward calculations turn out to have been predicated on living in Mediocristan rather than Extremistan.

It is morally superior because it encourages the individual to do something about the problem instead of endlessly complaining about it. — Tarskian

Ah. Moral superiority. How hierarchical. How heroic.

"Do something" meaning "escaping having to do something". What you leave behind is beyond redemption. You just give up on it. And this defeat is inverted – by forming a network of the like-minded – as some digital nomad tribal victory.

I mean I perfectly understand the self-interested rationale you give. I just don't see that it can be glorified in political science terms unless it truly scales.

And to scale would turn it into ... a hierarchy. The tribe would become large enough to have its own clout. It could start to change the world around it to better serve its needs. It would develop a political voice. It would get laws changed to suit its preferences.

Already, in waving the banner of a new tribe, you are playing the very game you seem to want to claim you are escaping.

So fine. Digital nomad. It's a way of life available to you. It will either mesh well or clash badly with the larger hierarchy of the civilised world. Lessons will be learnt. Adjustments made. Same old systems logic applies. At least until the wheels properly fall off.

Your personal SMV (Sexual Market Value) is very location dependent. ...
Instead of congratulating this man for successfully solving his problem, they will argue that he is taking advantage of these naive Guatemalan women. WTF !? — Tarskian

It is clear that you hope to shock with this kind of bro-speak. But it has kind of lost that initial shock value it might have had. One dimensional thinking leads to a one dimensional life.

Again, no point bothering me until you understand hierarchies.

I could explain to you of course. But you don't want to be put in the position that would reverse the little hierarchical power dynamic you hope to construct here.

(How much did you wager? How soon can I expect payment? :razz: )

Still nothing being said to back up your claims. Just some annoyed mutterings as you depart the scene. :up:

How many hierarchies have you formed? — NOS4A2

Yep. You really don't understand hierarchies in any theoretical sense. Hence the idiot response.

I'll just note how you failed to back up your claims with evidence. Case dismissed. :up:

But there's a lot of hype around information as a kind of fundamental ontological ground, kind of like the digital geist of the computer age. — Wayfarer

So part of what I was pointing out is how information theory cashes out the counterfactuality of logic in actual logic gates and thus in terms of a pragmatic entropic payback.

Numbers seem to live far away in the abstract realm of Platonia. Shannon information was how they could be brought back down to live among us on Earth.

Algebra with real costs and thus the possibility of real profits.

Can you unpack that a bit? — Wayfarer

It is easy to assume things are just what they are. But that depends on them being in fact not what they are not. That should be familiar to you from Deacon's notion of absentials if not from the three laws of thought.

Counterfactuality secures the identity of things by being able to state what they are not. And that is what a bit represents. A and not not-A. A switch that could be off and thus can in fact be on.

Numbers are places marked on a line. The assumption is that their value is ranked from small to large. So already the symmetry is geometrically broken in a particular fashion. But that asymmetry is secured algebraically by identity operations. Adding and multiplying. Adding zero or multiplying by 1 leaves a number unchanged. Adding or multiplying by any other value then does change things.

So the counterfactuality is a little more obscure in the case of the numberline. The question is whether a value was transformed in a way that either did break its symmetry or didn't break its symmetry. The finger pointing at a position on the line either hopped somewhere else or remained in the same place.

Information and numbers then have to move closer to each other as we seek to employ atomistic bits – little on/off switches – as representations of algebraic structures. To run arithmetic on a machine, the optimal way is break it all down into a binary information structure that can sit on a mechanical switching structure. Just plug into a socket and watch it run, all its little logic gates clacking away.

So counterfactuality is the way we like to think as it extremitises things to the point of a digital/mechanical clarity. The simplicity of yes or no. All shades of grey excluded. Although you can then go back over the world and pick out as many shades of grey as you like in terms of specific mixtures of black and white. You can recover the greyness of any particular shade of grey to as many decimal places as you like. Or at least to whatever seems acceptable in terms of your computational architecture. The gradual shift from 8-bit precision to 64-bit was pricey.

I have never had any security problem related to Bitcoin. — Tarskian

Perhaps Sam Bankman-Fried should call you as a character witness then?

You would obviously feel it an outrageous violation of the bitcoin bro code that a ruling mafia in the form of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York got him grabbed off his comfy couch in the Bahamas.

I mean bitcoin is just so secure. Who needs these exaggerated systems of security to secure the security of your securities once they have been adequately digitised and block chained?

It is not as if you could ever need the protection of the state when some gang ties you up in a chair and starts hacking your flesh until you give up the key to your digital wallet.

So sure, it is possible to live the transient life of a digital nomad. But it ain't some kind of alternative politics or superior moral order. It reflects the freedoms that are available in a world that has now growing equally complex and multifaceted in its hierarchical order.

For you to arbitrage the world in this fashion – optimise your self-interest in terms of not paying taxes, finding the least regulated communities to work remotely from, gloat about the naive local women, etc –
requires a world with that variety to arbitrage.

Got a passport? No ties? Fungible skills? Well you are good to go.

And big deal. The world only has to hang together slightly more than it falls apart. It's a simple statistical game after all. Although things do start to get slippy as your expectations of a return move from a no-interest stasis to an exponentialised no-limit growth.

Political hierarchies are not natural but artificial and conventional. — NOS4A2

Evidence? Where in history is a human society not hierarchically ordered? I mean how could we even recognise it as a "society"?

Imagine pulling up in your colonial ship on the shores of Australia or America and finding just ... a crowd. Imagine the contents of Dubai or Singapore airport being dumped there as the native population. Everyone is just part of a sea of individuals with no structure of relations. And somehow that atomised existence has been the way this population has lived for centuries.

Wouldn't that just seem completely alien? Quite unnatural? Pretty much impossible?

So where is your evidence to support your assertion.

(And if you start talking about how networks beat hierarchies, hierarchies are just networks of networks – networks with nested hierarchical scale. Networks that are actually optimised in terms of their freedom of connectivity. )

Not quite where the thread started, but imho yours a good place to close - I'm not going to improve on it. — tim wood

You raised an interesting question that I haven't properly dug into. My focus has been on the more macroeconomic issue of nation states and their colonial empires. So the US experience only starts to matter for me when it entered the world stage as the Euro empires began to falter. :smile:

I think ultimately the difference between information and numbers is only pragmatic. — hypericin

Both piggyback on the logic of counterfactuality. And that in turn leads to the deep difficulties folk have in believing in a continuum that can also be broken into discrete parts. Logic seems to fail right at the point where you seek its own origin.

So a string of bits or the numberline exist in the happy world where we can just take this paradoxical division between the continuous and the discrete for granted. Continuums are constructible. Don't ask further questions. Get on with counting your numbers and bits.

So yes, a 1D line can be understood as an infinite collection of 0D points. And then you can start mechanically imposing any concept of an ordering of the points on the line that takes your fancy. The syntax can become as complex and hierarchical as you like. An analog reality can be encoded in string of digital data points. A Turing machine with an infinite paper tape can in principle represent any more complicated state. Counterfactuality is the true atom of Being.

Yet this happy conception may work pragmatically, however its deeper foundations remain suspect. So there is that to consider.

I wonder if it just evolved as organic sense to them, or if they had some examples in mind? — tim wood

I think it was just commonsense once the big leap towards treating society as a designable machine for delivering desired ends became a thing with the Enlightenment. Madison and Bentham both arrived at the same conclusions around the same time. You just had to start thinking about nationhood in technocratic rather than conservative terms to see the advantages of a hierarchically organised liberalism.

So once Europe became organised as sovereign states, there was competitive pressure to move to state structures that could mobilise their populations to best advantage. Rational political science arose out of that need. Change eventually happened.

The systems principles have then been articulated with increasing clarity as a result of experience. The 1930s “hierarchy of norms” approach of Hans Kelsen is an example of that.

In general, the Anglo world does philosophise in terms of the mechanical, and so the pure systems science view doesn’t come through that well. Feedback is understood in the sense of release valves to stop boilers exploding. That kind of thing.

But German philosophy - the Naturphilosphie tradition - is rooted in a holistic organicism and so is more fertile ground for proper systems thinking. You see that then coming through in ecology, ethology, sociology, etc. The idea of nature indeed having a driving force of self organisation.

So there is a reason the feedback story might not instantly have come to mind as a first principle. The Anglo world is adverse to the general idea of holisism, while the Germanic tradition is strong on it.

Yet either way, a hierarchy of norms becomes generally accepted as the most rational social model of justice. You don’t want society to be a brittle machine. You want to plant a seed in fertile soil and watch it grow strong and resilient. Capable of adaptive change and dynamical self-balancing.

In his book, "Black Swan. Impact of the highly improbable.", Nassim Taleb says that there are two situations to consider, mediocristan and extremistan. — Tarskian

Err yeah. Complex systems 101. The difference between normal and log distributions.

You cannot protect a system from attackers who seek to exploit its vulnerabilities by means of statistically good enough solutions. It won't work. — Tarskian

It works all the time everywhere in life.

Of course if you think in only rigid absolutist terms, this will be hard to accept.

No amount of hierarchical complexity can seal off this kind of vulnerabilities from attack. — Tarskian

In less than three years, Klyushin’s cybersecurity scam amassed more than $93 million.

Who in everyday life even knows or cares about such a chickenfeed scam? Did the stockmarket needle even register a flicker at the news? Was some gapping breach in the walls of capitalism created from which it could never recover?

Just like supermarkets write off shrinkage so as to keep their staff and not chase away shoppers, so capitalism in general just has to bank a steady 3% per annum on capital and everyone will agree, good job done.

In fact, it is enough that just one low-ranking bureaucrat, who is apparently just some seemingly unimportant cog in the system, leaks the wrong information to the adversary, for corruption to start snow balling. You can imagine the damage if people higher up the ladder decide to start making money from their power, and they routinely do. — Tarskian

Driving your car causes inevitable wear and tear. Does that mean you put it in a glass box and never drive it?

Shit happens in the real world. The aim of a system designer is to constrain the unwanted to the point that it doesn't matter, not to where it doesn't even exist.

You are being a perfectionist in a world where averageness is quite good enough as a baseline for action. And indeed a world that can't escape being average anyway as that is just statistics for you.

Philosophy has corrupted the minds of the young. Again. — frank

Nope. That is just Banno trying to rewrite ancient forum history to console his still hurt feelings. :grin:

None of that is to deny that Mt Everest is - let's see - 8,849m — Wayfarer

The more important measure in everyday humans terms is that Mt Everest is numero uno. The peak that stands above all others.

But others might protest that is not the metric that encodes the greatest skill, the greatest effort, or whatever else ought to be given prime importance due to some socialised context.

Science might indeed offer you a least socialised metric in terms of metres above sea level. All other aspects of being a mountain – such as being a tectonic bulge rising and falling over eons, or a fractally complex feature that is of some average roughness, hence easier or harder to climb – are allowed to fall away in that particular view.

It might be the measure that is pragmatically useful at a really general level of physical description based on spatial distances at temporal instances. Kind of like, you know, Newtonianism. :up:

So generally you are right. Folk philosophy does tend to make that primary vs secondary property distinction. And it is sort of there in the data. Hue discrimination seems somehow different even as a neurocognitive act than object recognition.

The perfect sphere of a ball set against the messy fractal scene of a typical natural landscape just kind of pops out as being "that kind of Platonically perfect object that we form as an ideal object".

The backdrop has scale symmetry – a fractal averageness to it. The ball has its rotational symmetry – an abstract symmetry that only comes into view once we get all spacetime relativistic on Nature's arse. That makes a ball a rather striking thing even on our back lawn. It is clearly "out there" even if it is also about as Platonic an object as, well, a square.

Then hue discrimination comes from the other pole of neurocognitive decoding. We can say it is about wavelength – as if a frequency of light is the key that flips the detector switch in a cone receptor cell and our brain suddenly feels that "redness".

And yet really there is huge complexity in the neurology to even start the discrimination. The round football is striking against the fractal garden backdrop. But hue discrimination has to build a whole contextual hierarchy of contrast to get to where it wants to go.

Just as a taster, consider how the three cones are already set up at the retinal level to construct both the visual sameness and the visual difference that gets the game going. Same information cut both ways in dialectical fashion so as to have any hat to hang the processing on – extract some difference that makes a difference as it has become the signal that stands proud of the noise....

Most animal species have the capacity for color vison, and in all known cases it is based on detecting light with two or more photoreceptor classes that differ in the wavelength sensitivity of their photopigments. However, having more types of receptors does not necessarily confer a higher dimensionality of color vision.

Most humans have three classes of cone receptors maximally sensitive to short (S), medium (M), or long [L] wavelengths, and thus normal (or, more aptly, routine) color vision is trichromatic. Encoding color further depends on the neural machinery for comparing the relative cone responses, for example to determine whether the L cones or M cones are more excited by a light spectrum.

These comparisons begin in the retina, in post-receptoral neurons that receive inputs of the same or opposite sign from different receptor types, and are carried within three “cardinal” mechanisms with distinct cell types and pathways, named for their projections to different layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus.

Cells in the magnocellular (M) pathway sum the L and M cones’ signals and are the substrate of our luminance sensitivity (L+M). Chromatic information is instead carried by two cone-opponent cell types that receive opposing signals from the L and M cones (L-M, the parvocellular or P pathway) or from S cones opposed by both L and M (S-LM, the koniocellular or K pathway).

However, these mechanisms describe only the initial steps of color coding. There are major further transformations of the cone-opponent signals in the cortex, and different transformations may arise at several different cortical stages. Moreover, even within the retina, there is a possibility that color percepts are carried within pathways that combine the cones in different ways than the cardinal mechanisms

With the football in your back garden, it seems to tell its own tale. If it appeared only this morning, perhaps a neighbour booted it over the fence. There seem to be no low level behind the scenes type neural processes going on. If the football is easy to see and explains itself, this is because you understand the intellectual type stuff about rotational symmetry vs scale symmetry. It is your choice whether to take an everyday lumpen realism about balls on lawns or to get mystical about Platonic strength forms.

But with hue discrimination, there is a massive amount of preprocessing to create the same kind of "its just obvious" pop out contrast. To have the immediate and primary impression that the football is blue with yellow stripes and not red with green ones.

At the end of the day, it if pops out, it pops out. Our neurology is doing the job it is meant to do. We can be lumpen realists speaking in everyday language about thoughtlessly inhabiting a cosy familiar world of medium sized-dry goods. The whereabouts of our pending luncheon the only concern.

However the immediacy is an illusion. The reality is the phenomenal complexity of an acquired neurological habit. We must each build hue discrimination for ourselves as bodies that develop neural pathways via processes of growth and pruning. We must get wired for colour as a pragmatic interaction we form with the world as we find it.

That's the look of surprise you see starting to form on the newborn's face as it emerges. Nothing makes sense. And yet within a few months, it really starts to fall into its comprehensible patterns. Footballs that are red. Redness that is not just about footballs.

The average strength of the wall of a besieged city does not matter. Only the weakest spot does. — Tarskian

And the weakest spot would be by definition the least average? Dude, plug your brain in.

You can indeed use statistical calculations to control the damage caused by hurricanes. You cannot do that, however, when it is about human adversaries. — Tarskian

Again, just stop and think a little deeper. This is why defence systems are hierarchically structured. You have a static frontline and then a mobile reserve. One just has to last until the other gets there.

Human attackers of course understand the principle from its other side. And that is what drives the hierarchical complexity. It has been the same ever since walls started getting built and attacked at the dawn of agrarian empire building.

So do you mean actual linear cities - like the disastrous Neom project - or those with a natural fractal hierarchy that maximises the efficiency of its flows?

One is very mechanical in conception - although repetitive segmentation works well for worms and other creatures of the simplest design. The other is the organic or ecological form that nature would seek to impose on any complexly organised structure. Like our mammalian bodies or actual cities that are functionally organised into organ systems.

As a system grows large, it must have a large brain at the centre of its distributed nervous system, a large pair of lungs at the centre of its gaseous exchange system, a large heart at the centre of its blood circulation system, etc.

A worm has small and simple versions of all these things. A tube just needs its entrance and exit. The centre of a worm’s various organ systems take up very little more room than their periphery and so a segmented design is good enough. The same as a strip mall along a highway or straggle of houses making the initial settlement along a new rail stop.

But to become complex and well integrated requires a more messy looking break up into functional geographies. Cities with universities, malls and abattoirs. Cities that have many large functional centres as well as the finer mesh as each of these functional centres spreads its own regulatory flow network across the wider collective body.

London for example had a problem that its supermarkets were getting ever larger and so spaced out, and yet road congestion was getting ever worse. This was literally the issue when I thought enough was enough. My routine had become driving to the supermarket before it opened on a Saturday morning or just not go at all.

But go back now and tiny supermarkets are run by the same chains on every corner. A hierarchy of supermarket size fixed at least that one problem.

So arterial arcology may sound linear, but that is different from segmented and speaks to the fractal principles of hierarchical design. Which is standard wisdom in urban planning - if only voters and politicians would allow them get on and implement it.

In NZ, there is another illustrative example. The case to retrofit a light rail network was financially justified as it would immediately make the housing along the path a more attractive corridor. An easy way to revitalise now aging inner suburbs. But it didn’t fly as no one likes change and good ideas can always be delayed to some other year.

Some 20 years later has come the crisis response. Central government has slyly slipped through laws to just tear up local council urban planning. Carefully organised building regulations - those with a hierarchy of protections that were eagerly voted for because of NIMBY self-interest - have just been vapourised. Now the elegant villa in the tree lined street can suddenly find two three storey apartment blocks - made of shit panelling and with a concrete pad for half a dozen cars - looming over it within a year.

One way or another, the hierarchical imperative of nature is going to impose itself on our architectural forms. The only question is how much in control of the pace and the consequences do we want to be.

Every person then under not a passive obligation to merely obey the law, but a radical obligation to evaluate and to act to correct its flaws, usually by legal and lawful active participation in government at whatever level is possible, in whatever way is available. — tim wood

Yep. This is in fact just how self-organising systems work. They require a constant interaction between their global constraints and their local freedoms. It has to be a two-way thing so that the overall system can continue to evolve and adapt. It is the basis of being an intelligent organism in the most general possible sense.

The trick is in the tuning of the balance. What neural networkers call the stability~plasticity dilemma. A system with too much local freedom can learn and change fast, but what it learns then can be prone to "catastrophic forgetting" – a sudden overwhelming breakdown of accumulated knowledge structures. An adaptive system needs to be regulated by its equally robust habits – the longterm wisdom to match the immediate intelligence.

So the design of any natural system – one that can develop and evolve, repair itself and reproduce itself over time – is always of this kind. A hierarchical balance of its top-down constraint and bottom-up construction.

In the human social system, this is how a good legal system functions. It is suitably stable but not rigid and thus brittle. It is wise but listens to intelligence. It expects to still learn something new.

A slightly different way of looking at the same problem is what he added. — Metaphysician Undercover

You seem to be talking about notions of the continuum which would be a small part of Peirce’s semiotics. And you have your own ideas about how to abuse logic I fear.

Or I was thinking it might be a problem with aggression during peacetime. We turn on each other. — frank

Read Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox for an evolutionary perspective of how we are set up for social organisation. We shifted from the reactive aggression of apes to the proactive aggression of social groups.

So within the tribal structure, you are either in or you are out. And simply agreeing to kill the tribe mate that doesn’t fit is a very human response. Wrangham argues this is how we became the self-domesticated ape. This capacity for blunt and bloody in/out group assessments.

Obviously a psychology that worked well in a world of a few million hunter/gatherers needed some rejigging to turn it into the world of agrarian empires, then colonial trading empires, and now a fossil-fuelled technocracy sustaining a population closing fast on 9 billion.

But the basic dynamic is plain to see. The village all gets along until it collectively decides someone is actually “not one of us”. We are evolved to make these sudden in-group/out-group determinations at the level of a general democratic choice.

Unlike apes, we can plan violence with cool heads. And that can be a good thing when that is channeled into justice systems and police forces.

And also unlike apes, we can be instinctively empathetic and inclusive. We have that complementary side which makes us seem so tame and domesticated in a group setting. We can be good citizens as well. The other side of the coin when it comes to constructing our social hierarchies founded on their balances of competition and cooperation.

And also still, like apes, we can just be reactively violent when lost and confused. That is a further natural response we retain.

So a bit of emotional complexity there. But it helps to explain why certain social structures seem to work. They take what worked as we were evolving as tribal foragers and developed it into social algorithms that could scale economically as we gained technological mastery over the world. As we moved from simple foraging to complex agrarianism and then industrialism, now consumerism as the purest expression of Nature’s entropic imperative.

Is the current state of the world a success? Well it is certainly remarkable that it even exists. A species able to change a planet in its own image. Approaching 9 billion people and with most of its ecology transformed into factory farming.

The democracy vs autocracy debate seems a little superficial as an analysis given the reality we have constructed here. The world is a fairly robust human system for converting natural capital into social capital. And now it is suffering the effects of its own success. Where once people wandered with rumbling bellies, they now sit stuffed on their sofas waiting for the next pizza delivery. That kind of thing.

Sure in the US we witness all the drama of woke vs MAGA. And yet going from Trump to Biden only saw the US’s general economic and international policy continue on its logical self-interested course. The continuity of a direction is more impressive than the threat of an insurrection and civil war.

So my reply is that there is always aggression during peacetime. These are the basic things that a social hierarchy learns to juggle. And we humans are even adapted to be more binary about it. We exist to be in tune with a group mood, a group identity. And thus to be able to flip on a dime as a group.

Whatever you might call democracy or autocracy as a political system then has to operate in recognition that there is this natural dynamic in play. We can still design the world system. But we have to be clear about the realities that underpin it.

In spite of being the most comfortable humans in history, there's a loss of faith in democracy. — frank

When something is working so relatively well, folk can just take it for granted. Then as things start to go wrong, it can take those who have become disconnected from the realities quite some time to understand why.

Authoritarianism has become appealing for a reason, right? — frank

Yep. People like to imagine all the things they could do if they were dictator for a day. But you try actually running a country. Think of all the fun Putin and Xi are having.