Glen writes: “Well, I'm not much of a sports oriented person. But sometimes they're useful.”
Certainly, sports metaphors are useful to understand tribalism, because sports are tribal activity. I’m reminded of visiting a company in Austin to discuss a project of mutual interest. I didn’t realize I was being pre-interviewed (or whatever that is called) and didn’t even intend to give those signals. Our discussion was going along fine and then they brought up football. I have never watched football and don’t understand its appeal. When they understood this several of them visibly recoiled. My take is that they wanted someone that would project into their (lower dimensional) tribal space in a seamless way. It was an important part of how they got along. You alluded to collective measures of fitness. A progressive’s measure of fitness is not unlike Shannon entropy – let a thousand flowers bloom. A conservative, however, fears that entropy will be too costly and that people will forget previous fit strategies. In principle, maximizing entropy could push out cultural norms since that is copied information. Imagine a finite length bit string representing a program where skills related to football were sacrificed for skills related to curling or dancing (or more esoteric topics). If you think that the available bit string is short, that then one might worry about locally (or universally) promoting the `right’ cultural information in order for people to get along. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
