http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/WARNING-Political-Argument-in-Progress-tp5060628p5066331.html
This sounds like a problem for complexitists and control system theorists.
government. Where is abstraction necessary, sufficient, and good?
Nicholas S. Thompson
> [Original Message]
> From: glen e. p. ropella <
[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
[hidden email]>
> Date: 5/17/2010 11:46:40 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] WARNING: Political Argument in Progress
>
> Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 10-05-17 09:08 AM:
> > We all seem to fear most corporate AND government
> > power. That is a huge point to agree on. I think that if we can keep
> > that agreement in mind we can move TOGETHER beyond slogans. But i am
> > not sure how.
>
> Chris Feola wrote circa 10-05-17 10:05 AM:
> > I think the Founders provide insight as to how to proceed.
> > [...]
> > This is why libertarians believe in divided government. The donkeys
> > and elephants both steal and abuse power, but they have somewhat
> > different constituencies. Keeping the government at least partly
> > divided between them guarantees the honesty of thieves. That's why
> > I'm hoping our president will soon be blessed with a worthy opponent,
> > the way Clinton had Gingrich and Reagan had Tip O'Neil. And I think
> > Bush -- and all of us -- would have been much better off if Pelosi
> > had taken the Speaker's gavel in 02.
>
> This is the most interesting direction this discussion/argument could
> take, I think.
>
> Nick points out the dialectic. Chris points out the process of refining
> the semantic content of the terms. And eventually we move from talking
> merely about that abstract nonsense term "the government" into talking
> about the concrete term "types of government".
>
> In order to do that, though, we can't stop at the 1st refinement
> iteration (from "the government" to political parties, branches of
> government, or corporations). We need the 2nd, 3rd, ..., and Nth
> refinements as well.
>
> In particular, as a libertarian myself, I think the non-partisan offices
> are WAYWAYWAY more important than the partisan offices. Local
> government, note the lack of any quotes around the word means I think
> it's _actual_ government... the governing of some specific thing, like a
> water table or a forest, is the most important type of government.
>
> Both "the government" and "corporations" (aka the federal government and
> _large_ corporations) are corrupt in the sense of Steve's
> power/corruption duality. They are so because they over-generalize,
> stereotype, and abstract away from the human (or the pine tree or e.coli
> ... whatever organism you pick). The power/corruption lies in the
> abstraction.
>
> We see this in biological models, as well. Why is Fick's law
> _powerful_? Why are these equational laws more powerful than
> agent-based models? On the flipside, why is Fick's law (by itself)
> insufficient for a specific treatment protocol for a specific condition?
> And why is (something like) an ABM necessary for any explicit, fully
> concrete, situation.
>
> It seems that to take the next step from what the "founding fathers" set
> up for us, we need to apply what we've been working on all this time to
> government. Where is abstraction necessary, sufficient, and good?
> Where is concreteness necessary, sufficient, and good?
>
> --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
http://agent-based-modeling.com>
>
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