Great article.   Here are a couple more.   These seem to me like the 
bleeding-heart variety of liberal taking their eye off the ball.   No, I say 
win the culture war.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/opinion/tech-rural-america.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/there-is-much-to-fear-about-nationalism-but-liberals-need-to-address-it-the-right-way/2018/12/30/2c6e8f24-0ab7-11e9-88e3-989a3e456820_story.html
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of Roger Critchlow 
<r...@elf.org>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Date: Monday, December 31, 2018 at 11:33 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Preference Order Ecosystems: was Trumpism

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/the-philosopher-redefining-equality
 was a good read this morning,

-- rec --


On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:36 PM Marcus Daniels 
<mar...@snoutfarm.com<mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
The political doctrine of liberalism aims to increase the freedom of the 
individual.  The institutions and rules that optimize for this freedom must be 
evaluated in aggregate and so for every increase of one group must be 
understood for a decrease in freedom of another group.    It is a very hard 
optimization problem involving high order interactions and horizons that can be 
difficult to agree upon.    Is success reflected by an increase in per-capita 
income or by some definition of happiness or engagement?  Is it for people 
entering the workforce or leaving it?    Why measure at the median and not the 
1st or 99th percentile?    A liberal wouldn’t necessarily have an opinion on 
how to measure freedom other than to do say that the more diverse the cacophony 
of opinions, the better.

But let’s not confuse diversity with amplitude.    Reactionary idiocy isn’t 
about diversity, it is about loudness.    A giant tumor isn’t contributing the 
health of an animal, it is just a tumor.   If there are a hundred million 
people just chanting the same angry slogans to themselves, indifferent to the 
facts of the matter, what we have is the socio-political equivalent of a tumor.

Imagine you have two computer programs, both that have the task of zeroing out 
some memory.  The first one looks like this:

int A[1000000];
A[0] = 0
A[1] = 0
A[2] = 0
…
A[999999] = 0

The other one looks like this:

int A[1000000];
A = 0

If there are any resource limitations (let’s say instruction cache), it is 
insane to favor the former program.    It functionality achieves the same 
thing, but taken literally will result in memory exhaustion. [1]   (Suppose 
that an instance of the program is an individual, and there are millions of 
individuals.)   Why should a society encourage individuals like the first 
program?  For that matter, does A even need to be zeroed out?

Given resource limitations, I would argue it is reasonable to recombine 
programs like the latter sort, and unreasonable to recombine programs like the 
first sort.    The latter has discovered the concept of shape (or tail 
recursion) and the latter has not.

Marcus

[1] Actually it wouldn’t on a modern operating system.   The text section would 
be generated read-only and just remapped.   Thank you, urban planner.



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