Yes! My mind is, at the moment, polluted with modal logic, which will probably corrupt what I'm about to write. In my ignorance, I'll call the Hayekian principle: that the *imposition of engineered controllers on open systems* will bias the evolution of the system toward undesirable outcomes. What Merle is identifying is that these engineered controllers have resulted in programming in competitive tendencies that are not (may not be?) as likely/prevalent as they would have been with counterfactual, alternative controllers they *could* have imposed.
I can interpret Merle (and SteveG) [◇] as suggesting we might be (or might have been [□]) able to dig deep into the fundamental dynamics and allow the underlying system to *teach* us a more natural understanding of the mechanism(s) so that any controller we derive and then apply could be more "organic", "softer", "more human", more affine with the system being controlled. Even further, we may not need an abstracted controller at all. Any "governmental" manipulation of the system might consist of distributed tweaks, the logic of which is only descriptively coherent, but mechanistically decoherent/heterogeneous. I.e. the government(s) would be endogenous as opposed to exogenous, in/of the system being governed. [◇] Not that they actually *said* anything like this ... only that I can decode what they said this way. [□] Whether we could get to such a societal state (with an endogenous government) is *reachable* from the state we're in, now, without going through a major heat bath, is an interesting question. It's possible competitive structures are frozen into society at this point and no amount of tweaks can get us from here to there. On 7/29/20 5:00 PM, Steve Smith wrote: > I haven't been able to retrieve the reference but I recently read/heard > something about the fact that post-feudal economic/political organizations > inherited the paradigm of managing scale and complexity through hierarchy. > Capitalistic Republics/Democracies and Socialist/Communist societies with > "Central Planning" are both effectively structured this way, in spite of > attempting (each in it's own way) to empower or equalize the "common > (hu)man"... > > I think what Guerin has been babbling <grin> about most recently (at least > since Stockholm) is his vision of what an otherwise organized "collective > awareness/action/consciousness/intelligence/etc" might be as well as what I > think Glen might have been gesturing-at when he criticized Nick's recent > offering up of BHL vs NJL. > > I'd be interested in more discussion of what I think Glen is alluding to with > a purists notion of "Collective Action". It might be contradictory to "talk > about" something which is inherently not about talking/language, at least (or > may entirely) in the common sense of "language". > > I could rattle on a few more paragraphs describing my own half-baked ideas, > but I'll save that until maybe there are more well-baked ideas on the table. > > - Steve > > On 7/29/20 3:02 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote: >> Eric, thank you for your reply. Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic >> problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our >> global economic system, and our international governance system--and also >> ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living >> systems that nurture our species. >> >> The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th >> century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome. The global economic >> system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar >> structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome. The >> United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new >> international order shares similar structural problems. There is a pattern >> here. At its core is domination and exclusivity. >> >> The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that >> created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of >> gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops >> that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors. -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
