Maybe an experiment that leads to a horrible results makes society (voters) decide, "We don't want to do that again".
----------------------------------- Frank Wimberly My memoir: https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly My scientific publications: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2 Phone (505) 670-9918 On Sun, Dec 30, 2018, 4:48 PM Ron Newman <[email protected] wrote: > Stepping back to 40,000 ft. for a second... > > '[Morality] is an evolutionary process in which societies constantly > perform experiments, and whether or not those experiments succeed > determines which cultural ideas and moral precepts propagate into the > future.' If so, he says, then a theory that rigorously explains how > coevolutionary systems are driven to the edge of chaos might tell us a lot > about cultural dynamics, and how societies reach that elusive, > ever-changing balance between freedom and control. > > 'Witness the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union...the whole > situation seems all too reminiscent of the power-law distribution of > stability and upheaval at the edge of chaos. 'When you think of it', he > says, 'the Cold War was one of these long periods where mot much > changed...But now that period of stability is ending...in the models, once > you get out of one of these metastable periods, you get into one of these > chaotic periods where a lot of change happens..It's much more sensitive now > to initial conditions.' > > 'So what's the right course of action?' he asks. 'I don't know, except > that this is like punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary history. It > doesn't happen without a great deal of extinction. And it's not > necessarily a step for the better. There are models where the species that > dominate in the stable period after the upheaval may be less fit than the > species that dominated beforehand.' > > 'And now suppose it's really true that coevolving, complex systems get > themselves to the edge of chaos...if we imagine that this really carries > over into economic systems, then it's a state where technologies come into > existence and replace others, et cetera. But if this is true, it means > that the edge of chaos is, on average, the best that we can do...You can go > extinct, or broke. But here we are on the edge of chaos because that's > where, on average, we all do the best.' > > - Doyne Farmer, Chris Langton, and Stuart Kauffman, in that order, quoted > in "Complexity", M. Mitchell Waldrop, p. 319-322. > > I wrote a layman's blog post on a similar idea, "On the Importance of > Idiots", speculating that societal chaos might be moving the solution space > out of local minima into novel areas in the solution space, and that the > process might be solving for long-term resiliency of the system as a whole, > in opposition to short-term sanity. I did filter it through Norm Johnson > at SFI to remove egregious errors, but make no claim for completeness or > rigor: > https://blog.ideatreelive.com/?p=481 > > Ron Newman, M.S., M.M.E. > Founder, IdeaTreeLive.com <http://www.Ideatreelive.com> Knowledge Modeling > Piano <https://www.ronnewmanpiano.com> > ============================================================ > 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 > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
