tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post716922934125299359..comments2024-02-18T18:59:06.164+00:00Comments on Econosophy and other musings: Competition versus Cooperation: the final conflict?Tobyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-67962602740803622472009-12-26T13:16:53.508+00:002009-12-26T13:16:53.508+00:00"Yet the odd thing is both viewpoints are 100..."Yet the odd thing is both viewpoints are 100% correct and yet different."<br /><br />This is not true, because neither of us have seen both sides. If we can debate the coin, we are in contact with each other, so, all things being equal, we are in this 3D universe and understand sides, so know we only have half the story. There are other bits of information we don't have either, like composition, weight, etc. So 100% correct cannot be true.<br /><br />"whatever change which occurs in one part of a system must necessarily be felt in every other part of that system in order for "energy to be conserved"."<br /><br />I always like to think in examples. So if I were to have cancer, I might not know it. My system might be sickening and yet the system would not experience this sickening in every other part. Same with a fire in a forest I guess, and many other systems too. The point is how information travels within the system, how the system handles information, what we mean by "felt," and the medium of the system which allows information, as distinct from the medium, to travel. It is a very complex set of variables. <br /><br />Having said all that, I agree with your analogy that perspective is an important part of interpretation, probable the most important part. But then again we arrive at a set of complex variables that goes right down the multiple rabbit holes forever. That's how it seems to me anyway.<br /><br />In the end, the experience of the competitive/cooperative processes at the systemic level is for our purposes perceived from a human perspective, analyzed through the filter of an imperfect language, and discussed among people with different perspectives. One thing is certain though, economics has a piss poor comprehension of both.Tobyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-82706706312684373802009-12-19T17:51:19.215+00:002009-12-19T17:51:19.215+00:00Perhaps I might create a visual to improve communi...Perhaps I might create a visual to improve communication?<br /><br />Imagine a coin with heads on one side and tails on the other and you and I have a conversation about the coin. But we are both simultaneously far away from the coin AND we are looking at it coin from different viewpoints or vectors.<br /><br />When we are both far away, the heads/tails detail is lost and therefore we both talk about "the coin" as an object at a point some distance from us. It therefore would appear to both of us that we are talking about the same thing to a first approximation.<br /><br />But as we get closer to the coin, yet again, we each move towards the coin from opposite vectors, the heads/tails detail become clear. <br /><br />When I talk about "the coin", I have a mental image that includes a heads on it. When you talk about the coin, you are including a mental image that has a tails in it. In other words, I am actually thinking about something which is slightly different than you. <br /><br />Yet the odd thing is both viewpoints are 100% correct and yet different. We are both looking at the same thing- a coin- and yet both are simultaneously different because of this issue of aspect or viewpoint or vector or frame of reference, etc... at the same time. <br /><br /><br />So re: conservation of energy as a version of "systems seek cohesion"<br /><br />Yes, and we are looking at systems differently.<br /><br />I guess I should clarify I am being theoretical. And I do realize that theory is not the same as reality, particular as there is no such thing as a truly "closed" system.<br /><br />But theoretical ideals are helpful for considering things, even as they are only approximations.<br /><br />So when you say "systems seek to maintain cohesion... + leakage" <br /><br />I completely agree with you AND the viewpoint I am try to convey is different. <br /><br />If a system did not stay cohesive, it would cease to exist as a system and a new system would take over.<br /><br />But assuming that the system is constant (again, this is just an assumption), the conservation of energy means that within this system/cohesion, whatever change which occurs in one part of a system must necessarily be felt in every other part of that system in order for "energy to be conserved".<br /><br />My visual for this is a ball filled with colorful cloudy liquid liquid slowly swirling almost like liquid marble in the sphere. If you swirl the fluid in one area within the ball/sphere, and the sphere/ball's wall or boundary condition remains fixed, then all the rest of the fluid in the ball must swirl as well, even though we did not touch it.<br /><br />I do agree with you that all systems must have new energy continually enter them as they loses energy (entropy, etc...) in order to continue to exist, or the system itself will get smaller and smaller like a water balloon slowly shrinking as water leaks out.<br /><br />But within that system/ball/sphere/etc... any change that occurs in one part is felt everywhere else as energy is conserved.<br /><br />Am I making sense?Thaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00700253024420397221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-58495922594582491222009-12-19T15:09:13.946+00:002009-12-19T15:09:13.946+00:00Good points.
"Further, to the extent increas...Good points.<br /><br />"Further, to the extent increasing the numbers of people who cooperation mean one we are increasing the amount of specialization."<br /><br />Doesn't this depend on the way in which we cooperate? Back in Buckminster Fuller's day the navy trained its top people to be comprehensivists and succeeded too. Their motivation was that admirals needed to be able to do a lot "alone" somewhere remote in the world, cut off by slow communications from HQ. We might have a different motivation to move away from excessive specialization today, but it's doable. You can have people cooperating and able to do each other's tasks, or you specialize a la division of labour. Both are forms of cooperation, in that a team is deployed to accomplish a common objective, only the methodology is different.<br /><br />Bernhard Lietaer has done interesting work on redundancy in nature, so we'd be back again at whether nature is inherently competitive or cooperative, but I think specialization and generalization are not joined at the hip with competition and cooperation.<br /><br />"As one scales to larger and larger manifolds, energy is always conserved within these larger and larger manifolds."<br /><br />I can't think this one through, because I'm just a failed poet/philosopher type. In my untrained mind it seems to me that all systems seek to maintain cohesion (although "seek to" is somewhat anthropological), a part of which is conserving energy. However, there is leakage, as you mentioned earlier, and systems do work too. Energy exchange is always occurring. The question of whether risk of loss for systems capable of energy exchange increases at a 1:1 ratio as these systems cooperate with others, strikes me as highly unlikely. That would be ultimate fragility. The ecosystem is incredibly complex, full of countless subsystems which cooperate/compete to "be" the ecosystem. The ecosystem is hardly highly fragile. It has been going for billions of years, changing all the time, and coping with untold amounts of stress and shock.<br /><br />Normally I say "it's not worth the effort." I tend not to think in terms of risk. ;-) I'm quite a reckless person, actually.<br /><br />And I thought Black Swan events were about the unexpected, the impossibility of creating a predictive model that can predict everything. But I haven't looked into this yet. I've been told to though, just haven't got around to it yet.Tobyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-1674285902141302792009-12-19T13:42:10.533+00:002009-12-19T13:42:10.533+00:00Toby
re: "The risk decreases per participant...Toby<br /><br />re: "The risk decreases per participant as the number of participants increases."<br /><br />This is a rabbit hole discussion but I would say "not really" or "it depends on what viewpoint you are looking at this from".<br /><br />As one scales to larger and larger manifolds, energy is always conserved within these larger and larger manifolds.<br /><br />Think about it<br /><br />Further, to the extent increasing the numbers of people who cooperation mean one we are increasing the amount of specialization. <br /><br />Specialization always increases the risk of total failure as specialists are highly dependent on other specialists. <br /><br />So when things go bad, they are much worse than had two specialist never worked together cooperatively.<br /><br />... How many times in your life have you said to yourself "forget it, I will do it myself, it is not worth the risk", etc...?<br /><br />Risk is conserved so the free rider problem never goes away as you scale larger and larger as this just scales as well.<br /><br />What do you think all these books like The Black Swan, etc... have been saying?Thaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00700253024420397221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-2919051862602810412009-12-19T09:27:57.543+00:002009-12-19T09:27:57.543+00:00Hi Thai,
thanks for your thoughts. I've been ...Hi Thai,<br /><br />thanks for your thoughts. I've been ignoring my blog for a while, concentrating on other things, so sorry for the late responses.<br /><br />I'm not a physicist so can offer no educated opinion on Bose-Einstein condensates. What I will say is that you seem not to have addressed the scalability of cooperation. The risk decreases per participant as the number of participants increases. The "free-rider" problem, which is a tiny one in human societies in my opinion, is thereby minimized by larger numbers of cooperators. Also, if one party does not follow through on cooperation, there is a loss of trust, which means likely exclusion from future cooperative efforts. Among ants for example, if a hungry ants approaches a "colleague" who has excess food in and asks for some, should the ant with the surplus refuse, other ants treat the refuser worse even than an enemy. Social animals have all sorts of mechanisms for dealing with free-riders, beyond the simple math of risk.<br /><br />But I agree that the competition-cooperation dichotomy is somewhat misleading. They are quite fused, are somehow part of each other. Cooperative competition and competitive cooperation do not seem like oxymorons to me...Tobyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-83601140862482825692009-12-15T02:32:35.305+00:002009-12-15T02:32:35.305+00:00By the way, I have been contemplating the implicat...By the way, <a href="http://streetratcrazysaloon.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">I have been contemplating the implications of the following</a> as it relates to cooperation of late.<br /><br />My gut tells me cooperating teams are really just Bose-Einstein condensates, much as I suspect consciousness is too.<br /><br />I obviously will not be able to prove this, but I keep searching to see if anyone else has as well.<br /><br />RegardsThaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00700253024420397221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-4687130853043858762009-12-06T12:59:54.468+00:002009-12-06T12:59:54.468+00:00One last thought if you were unaware.
A conservat...One last thought if you were unaware.<br /><br />A conservation of energy in a closed system means a conservation of risk in that same closed system.<br /><br />... And I realize nothing is truly a closed system.<br /><br />Anyway, cooperation trades one benefit for one risk.<br /><br />The benefit of economies of scale from cooperation is exactly off set from the increase risk that cooperation fails.<br /><br />If you could do one thing on your own, and you knew you were going to completed it, yet you and I cooperating could do 6, then it makes sense to cooperate as splitting the gains is an increase of 2 from 1 to 3.<br /><br />But IF cooperating with me means that you would lose everything and not get even the 1 if I (or you) failed to deliver, then the risk of the gain of an additional 2 comes at the loss of the guarantee of making 1.<br /><br />Cooperation changes the nature of risk and offsets the benefit by increase the risk.<br /><br />In the end it is still zero sumThaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00700253024420397221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-37952539042460844032009-12-06T12:40:17.415+00:002009-12-06T12:40:17.415+00:00Sorry, I did not mean to imply they were opposites...Sorry, I did not mean to imply they were opposites at all with the coin analogy.<br /><br />Perhaps a better visual is a mirror? They are both part of the same fractal.<br /><br />Just like the tragedy of the commons is a multi-player version of the prisoner's dilemma and both are really restatements of the conservation of energy from still other viewpoints.<br /><br />RegardsThaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00700253024420397221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-20411613546220190902009-12-06T07:46:02.181+00:002009-12-06T07:46:02.181+00:00That's my thinking too, but also that we have ...That's my thinking too, but also that we have a poor understanding still of both concepts. I'm not even sure they're two sides of the same coin, because that implies opposites. I'm beginning to think they're not in opposition but dynamically interlinked processes of energy exchange, we have mistakenly split (we love to split things in to opposites) into two distinct behaviours. You say we cooperate to compete, don't we also compete to cooperate, like in open source software for example?<br />Thanks for commenting...Tobyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16258136994278139356noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-84484135135719987142009-12-06T03:16:58.664+00:002009-12-06T03:16:58.664+00:00The biggest mistake we all make is concerning the ...The biggest mistake we all make is concerning the idea re: who/what we need to compete against.Thaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00700253024420397221noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7378568575885387942.post-35284881996595032382009-12-06T03:14:52.452+00:002009-12-06T03:14:52.452+00:00Cooperation is a form of competition We cooperate ...Cooperation is a form of competition We cooperate in order to compete. They are different sides of the same coin.Thaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00700253024420397221noreply@blogger.com