Wisdom of Crowds vs Kenneth Arrow

[Marcus G. Daniels]

"We tie a heavy chain around our ankle and
then whine that we can hardly keep our head above water treading...   If
this kind of self-handicapping makes us into olympic swimmers, then I suppose I'm all for it... but it reminds me a bit too much of Vonnegut's "breakfast of champions" theme!"

Similar psychology:  Putting off writing a talk in order to get results you "like" better, but that no one else will notice.   No, I would never do that!

Marcus

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[gepr]

On 09/14/2016 12:56 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Similar psychology:  Putting off writing a talk in order to get results you "like" better, but that no one else will notice.   No, I would never do that!

Heh, my entire life seems to orbit around doing things nobody (but me) cares about.  I was at an atheist meeting awhile back where they asked the question: From what do atheists derive life's value and satisfaction? Most of them are humanists and, therefore, yapped about human things, relationships, artifacts, social structures they work on, elimination of cruelty or whatever.  Some of them hold animals and plants to equal esteem and talked about environmental stewardship, etc.  I trotted out my old saw about how each being is/maintains a completely closed-off, private, unique world within themselves that, when they die, disappears completely from the universe never to arise again.  So, for me, the value, satisfaction, and purpose to life is to explore the nooks and crannies of the universe that you and only you are uniquely poised to explore, think thoughts nobody else thinks, act in ways nobody else acts, modify the world in ways nobody else modifies it, etc.

By so doing, we fulfil our evolutionary mandate to discover and exploit (or make available for exploitation by some other being) as many possibilities before the biosphere collapses (or the supernova or whatever kills us all).

In other words, your very purpose is exactly that, to work your way to results that no one else will notice ... until you tell them to notice it, of course.

--
☣ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

"In other words, your very purpose is exactly that, to work your way to results that no one else will notice ... until you tell them to notice it, of course."

I suppose if work/life lasts long enough, folks will identify ways to avoid the attractors.
A tabu search needs a global data structure to be most efficient.   In other words, workers need some literacy.

Marcus
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[gepr]

On 09/14/2016 01:50 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I suppose if work/life lasts long enough, folks will identify ways to avoid the attractors.
> A tabu search needs a global data structure to be most efficient.   In other words, workers need some literacy.

Yes, except there are no optima other than uniqueness.  Even _if_ a bunch is on an attractor, as long as your path around it is distinct from another's path around it, you're good.  But you're right that the individuals need some literacy.  You have to be able to locally compare your path to your neighbors and tell whether or not your path is unique in any sense.  I'll admit that's more difficult than it seems, depending on one's ability to navigate the concrete ←→ abstract spectrum.  The more abstract one's thinking, the more difficult it will be to find a unique path.  Concreteness is bliss.

--
☣ glen

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[gepr]

On 09/13/2016 09:28 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>  they *RARELY* can stand one another... harsh meets harsh and one or both kneejerk response triggers the other kneejerk and well, you know the rest!

Hm.  Your statement got me to thinking yesterday.  I tend to claim that I like and seek out disagreement.  But I admit that it must be the proper type of disagreement.  When people disagree in a limiting way, when they _reduce_ the amount of opportunity I see, that turns into harsh meets harsh.  But when people disagree in a way that opens up new possibilities, then I get a dopamine flush.  The trouble, of course, is that I don't always see whatever new opportunities might have been opened when someone disagrees with me.  Part of a good soft-style is to relax into a disagreement, allow it to wash over you, then you can sedately clarify it and see how it might change the landscape.

Too often, I find myself at wit's end, trying to _pry_ someone out of what I [mis]interpret as a limiting scope.  My angst and arrogance prevent me from using the soft styles.

--
☣ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

"Too often, I find myself at wit's end, trying to _pry_ someone out of what I [mis]interpret as a limiting scope.  My angst and arrogance prevent me from using the soft styles."

"Leaders" of various sorts have been known to create situations in which soft styles are required from their people.   This is typically sold as a driver toward civilized behavior, "team productivity" or whatever.  It has a darker side though, in that it Bad Ideas can't be taken down directly in any way that might embarrass anyone, especially those in power (individuals prone to seeing things that way).   It means that communication involves large, clumsy, transactions, and the transactions are often a stinky mix of repetition, turf-taking, non-sequiturs and so on.  Thus, the tendency to refuse to use a soft style is a cognitive defense mechanism to not spend ones' time navigating "appearances" for those that have other objectives than to get to the bottom of things.   How much time do I want to spend in filter operations & ambiguous signal detection, as opposed to analysis?  How much time to spend modeling the goals of other people, staging "soft" responses as a part of a "long game
 " .   If these players (or the whole strategy) can be sabotaged, is it not good to do so?   Is the game worth it?  It pretty quickly degenerates into a distinction between agents that have inherent intellectual value, and the very different concept of using agents because of their social standing.   The area in between must be populated somehow, but it often seems to be a wasteland.  
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[gepr]

On 09/15/2016 09:52 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If these players (or the whole strategy) can be sabotaged, is it not good to do so?   Is the game worth it?  It pretty quickly degenerates into a distinction between agents that have inherent intellectual value, and the very different concept of using agents because of their social standing.   The area in between must be populated somehow, but it often seems to be a wasteland.

That's a great point!  It reminds me of the time I was accused of "jockeying" for a particular position in one of the brain-dead startups I worked for ... a position I most definitely did not want.  The accusation confused me because I was trying to use a soft rhetorical style (since I was purposefully hired as an "influence manager" [sigh]).  On the other hand, I did help keep a couple of hard style programmers from being fired, prior to the sale of the company, at which point they got to cash in some stock.  So, maybe it was worth it that time.

--
☣ glen

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