Posted by
glen ep ropella on
Sep 05, 2007; 3:53pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/politics-and-cliques-tp524626p524651.html
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Phil Henshaw wrote:
> I may not be speaking directly to your actual phrase, describing what
> you've gathered from complexity theory: "the extent versus the
> objectives of control structures should show something like an
> inverse power law to maintain a balance between diversity and
> efficacy." I read that as meaning that you'd design an inverse square
> relation into your control systems. I don't know what actual kind of
> controls you may be thinking of, or how you'd measure their diversity
> or efficacy, of course.
The actual controls I'm talking about are simple positive and negative
reinforcement of behavior. For example, if someone breaks a law, we try
to apply negative reinforcement through punishment. If someone does a
good job, we try to apply positive reinforcement through compensation.
But, I think the principle would also hold in engineering control systems.
When I say that a graph of extent versus number of objectives _shows_ an
inverse power law, I am not saying that I would design an inverse square
law into a control system. I don't know why you insist on replacing
"power" with "square". And I don't know how one would mistake "design"
for "show". I simply mean that if you measured the panoply of existing
control structures using two measures: extent of the control structure
in space and time and number of objectives for that control structure,
you would see an inverse power relationship between the two measures.
I.e. the larger the extent of the control structure, the fewer its
objectives. The smaller the extent, the higher its number of
objectives. I have no idea if the power of the relation would turn out
to be 2 or not.
> Well, it's not half well enough studied, but inside and outside
> perspectives of organization in systems are so very different it
> takes special care to keep them straight it seems to me. I'm not
> even sure if one can discuss a system as having an inside (network
> cell of relations) since I haven't heard the 'news' in the journals
> yet and it seems to require a radical exception to the traditional
> view of determinism. Isn't the traditional view that all causation
> comes from the outside still the most widespread?
I don't know what the general view of causation is. But, the general
categories for observation from the inside versus the outside are:
constructivism versus formalism. When one observes a system
objectively, from the outside, it seems the tendency is to formalize
everything (a.k.a. remove the semantic grounding of the tokens that
represent constituents of the system). When one observes a system
subjectively, from the inside, it seems the tendency is to retain the
semantics and construct explanations directly from the constituents of
the system.
My point was that, ultimately, there's no fundamental difference between
the two because even a subjective account of a phenomenon will involve
objectively defined sub-elements and an objective account of a
phenomenon will involve subjectively interpreted sub-elements.
The difference is one of _method_ not of substance.
> One of the differences between the two perspectives is the huge
> difference inside and outside views is in the information content of
> your observations. If your view of the world is based on an
> insider's perspective of some self-organized 'hive' of activity, say
> a religious or social movement, it may be extremely hard to make
> sense of an outsider's view of exactly the same thing. The insider's
> view is of all the internalized connections, and the outsider's view
> of essentially all the loose ends. Getting them to connect can be
> very difficult.
But, as eluded to above, the reasons for this is that the inside view
retains the semantics and the outside view tries to reduce the relations
to pure syntax. Pure syntax is best for prediction but piss-poor for
heuristic value. Pure semantics is best for understanding but near
useless for prediction.
- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846,
http://tempusdictum.comWhenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by
using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
- -- Milton Friedman
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