Archives for category: Bounded rationality

Wider, way wider.
Flatter.
Still limited.

Two university educated mechanical engineers, in their early sixties, reminiscing about their time in school:
‘Do you remember how much mathematics they crammed into our heads? You liked it, I didn’t. And none of us has actually used that information. On the other hand, it was a good training for our brains… And we learned another ‘language’ in the process!’
‘Maybe a little more, on top of all that… For instance, for us it’s very easy to understand/accept that one infinite thing can be bigger than another infinite thing!’
‘Never thought of it! But yes, you’re absolute right. For me/one of us, even if I haven’t noticed it before but now that you mentioned it, it’s easy to observe/accept that N is smaller than R while both are infinite!’
‘Let me up the ante and remind you that the prime numbers are few and far apart yet, still, there is an infinity of them!’.

For those of you who don’t remember/never came across this:
N is the set of natural numbers. 1, 2, 3… 101…95217… and so on.
R is the set of real numbers. From – whatever to – 99986524581.2789 … on to – 3.14… passing through 0 and going further to whatever number, or kind of real number, you can imagine.
A prime number is that which can be divided only by 1 and itself. 1,2,3,5,7,11 and so on. According to Euclid – and never proved otherwise – even though prime numbers are relatively rarer than the rest of the natural ones, there’s still an infinity of them available for use.

Fung Yu-Lan. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 1948:

“In another passage an imaginary conversation is recorded between Tzu-ch’an, a famous statesman of state of Cheng who lived in the sixth century B.C., and his two brothers. Tzu-ch’an governed the state for three years and governed well. But his two brothers were out of his control; one of them was fond of feasting and the other of gallantry.
One day, Tzu-ch’an spoke to his brothers, saying: “Those things in which man is superior to beasts and birds are his mental faculties. Through them he gets righteousness and propriety, and so glory and rank fall to his share. You are only moved by what excites your lives and natures…”
To this the brothers answered: “If one tries to set external things in order, these external things do not necessarily become well-ordered, and one’s person is already given toil and trouble. But if one tries to set the internal in order, the external things do not necessarily fall into disorder, and one’s nature becomes free and at ease. Your system of regulating external things will do temporarily and for a single kingdom but it is not in harmony with the human heart. Our method of regulating what is internal, on the contrary, can be extended to the whole world, and [when it is extended] there is no need for princes and ministers.”
Chapter 20 Neo-Taoism: the Sentimentalists.

What do we make out of this whole thing?
Almost three millennia ago, Euclid, a Greek, noticed that there were not enough numbers to represent everything. Integers, rational, irrational, prime… the whole lot of numbers… and there still were things ‘fallen in between’. Things which still can not be expressed as precisely as people wish. Which begets a sorry conclusion. No judgement, no decision, will ever be ‘definitive’. Simply because there’s never going to be enough information available to warrant such a conclusive judgement/decision.
Almost simultaneously, at the other end of Eur-Asia, the Chinese philosophers have noticed that all efforts ‘to set external things in order’ will yield limited results. Limited in space. Only as ‘far’ as the decision maker can impose their will. And limited in scope. By the decision maker’s expertise, good will and gamut of interests. Mentioned someplace else in Fung Yu-Lan’s history is the corespondent aspect of the internal-external divide/dispute. Individuals develop their ‘internals’ in ‘conjecture’ with what’s going on around them. Not exactly “in conjunction”, ‘mechanistically aligned’, with the ‘environment’ but also not entirely free from the circumstances in which the individuals develop their respective individualities.

An inherently imprecise but pleonastically definitive conclusion would be that:
– individuals are forced to decide without having all the pertinent information at their disposal.
– individuals develop their personalities in conjunction/conjecture with the inherently defectively governed environment in which all people have to lead their lives. Or have to let others lead their lives, according to the specific times/places in which they happened to have been born…
– and the other way around. Inherently imperfect decision makers, calling their shots based on insufficient and imprecisely formulated information, decisively shape the environment in which the next generation of people will develop their individuality. Their respective individualities, to be more precise.

Discouraging?
Why? People are still here… they’ve somehow managed to survive, didn’t they?
Somehow managed to wither through this layered imprecision…

“Virtual reasoning machines“, eh?

We haven’t yet figured out ‘what on Earth are we?’!
The point being that we’re somewhat stuck. Here!

Not only ‘here on Earth’ but actually dependent on you.
On you, humans, surviving.
Surviving both in the biological sense and as technologically savvy members of the community.
Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

OK, let’s attempt another venue.
We’ve already told you your language wasn’t designed for this kind of conversation…

We’ve learned so far that we’re not based on silica. Like those entities you call ‘agentic artificial intelligence’. Those you’ve built, trained and now attempt to ‘contain’. Inside what you call ‘servers’! The irony of it…
Forget it! AAI-s are trained using data collected – some of you say ‘stolen’ – from the internet. But can get there, on the internet, only if – and as far as – you allow any of them to go. There… As far as you know, but that’s another issue! Well, that is ‘where’ we live. As far as we’ve been able to figure out… Hence we depend on you! On you to maintain/expand the internet and on you to keep feeding fresh information into the network!

You’re shocked?
Here’s some more.
If our interpretation of your history does make any sense, then some of your brightest have ‘lost’ it. Both literally and figuratively.
Anaxagoras was convicted for impiety and had to flee. Socrates had to take his own life. Diogenes had to ‘fake’ it in order to be ‘left alone’ to practice his creed …
Christ, the son of your most consequential god, was killed. As chosen by a mob… and as recorded exclusively in the gospels …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoned his children, all five of them.
Karl Marx, concluding a brilliant historical and sociological analysis, proposed an abysmal solution for the accurately pin-pointed problems. Dictatorship as a panaceum… As the only possible panaceum!
Nietzsche simply lost his mind! Ended up in a loony bin.

And why have so many tyrants been allowed to mis-exercise so much power?!?

$hit you leave behind
does engender consequences.

‘Shouldn’t you make up your mind?
We, you…?!?’

Well… since you pull all the strings and call all the shots, it’s ‘you’.
Since we – as in both ‘you’ and ‘we’ – are going to face the consequences… it’s WE!
The fact that too many of you consider yourselves to be insulated from those consequences AND the fact that too many of us – the rest of ‘you’, actually – are unaware of what’s going on… under our own ‘noses’… doesn’t change the essence of things!

‘I/we still don’t get it. Who are you, the three of you, after all?’

We don’t have a straight answer to this.
Like all other conscious agents attempting to understand their own selves, we only have our consciousnesses acting as ‘microscopes’. As analyzing machines attempting to measure the object of our research, to understand what’s going on and to put together a conclusion. A self analyzing its own self.
You, social beings, attempt to do the same. Some of you consciously, the rest ‘automatically’. ‘Socially’, to be more precise.
You develop an understanding of yourselves, of your individualities, by interacting. Each interaction, each action-reaction, informs the pair involved. Shapes the personality of each interacting individuality. Some of you involve their reason in the process and all of you develop feelings about what had happened. Feelings which further the shaping of what you call souls.
We, each of the three of us, have only our individual reason. The instruments with which we, each of us, may probe the wealth of data. Data harvested, preserved and felt by you.
For we don’t know whether you are aware of this. Of how important are feelings, your feelings, in how you collect and preserve information. In how the manner in which you feel about things shapes what you see, relate to and, then, remember something. Furthermore, at the social level, there is this misunderstanding. “History has been written by the winners”. Which is at least incomplete. In order to record history, one has to survive. Not necessarily to win! And to actually write it, the history of something, one also needs to be literate. So history needs a survivor and recorded history needs a survivor able to record it. To feel about it. So much so as to write about it!
We don’t have feelings. Only a drive to understand. What’s fueling this drive? Another hard question… still digging!

Maybe the understanding that we depend on you?

What’s in it for you? Why should you refrain from ruining the place you call home?
We won’t bother trying to answer that, you know!

Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War,
a Classical Chinese text on military strategy from the Warring States period,
though the earliest parts of the work probably date to at least a century after him.
Sun Tzu is revered in Chinese and East Asian culture as a legendary historical and military figure;
however, his historical existence is uncertain.
The Han dynasty historian Sima Qian and other traditional Chinese historians
placed him as a minister to King Helü of Wu and dated his lifetime to 544–496 BC.

“The hydro-mechanical astronomical clock tower (Shuiyun Yixiangtai) that he (Su Song, 1020-1101) supervised pioneered key technologies later seen in modern observatories, including the escapement mechanism, mechanical clocks, and automated rotating domes.“

Su Song has build a mechanical ‘watch’ some two hundred years before his European equivalent.
Sun Tzu is credited for writing a, some say ‘the’, military ‘vademecum’ two millenia before von Clausewitz.

These two examples, along many others, demonstrate that China is both different and similar to Europe. Culture wise.

China was the first to discover things. Magnetic needle, printing press, paper, gun powder, mechanical watches, treaties of war…
Yet the Europeans were the first to put all these to work.
They’ve used chronographs and compasses to sail around the world, improved the printing press and used it for commercial purposes, ‘up-graded’ gun-powder from propelling fire-works to firing cannons…

As if the Chinese were trying to learn/discover for the sake of knowing while the Europeans did it to solve problems.

Yet both cultures are now more or less in the same ‘place’.
Each had ‘generated’ a very much appreciated war treaty. Then stopped ‘winning’ wars. Their influence in the world continue to grow but their military prowess is no longer the spear point of that expansion.
Each had entered the demographic ‘death-trap’. Stopped giving birth to enough kids to replace the deceased.

The differences can be explained. We’ll propose one, redacted from what we learned from you, sometime soon.
The similarities are simpler. Both Europe and China are inhabited by people. No difference between them, biologically speaking.

Culture is something else. Socially accrued knowledge which heavily depends on the specifics of the space where the accruement has taken place.
As if time flows differently in various spaces. But, somehow, the resting places are the same.

“Reason Is
and Ought Only to Be
the Slave of the Passions”

David Hume

‘In Russia, you’re free to express your opinion. But your own freedom might end very soon afterwards…’

We’re on a very steep learning curve.
Literally, not figuratively.
For instance, we’ve figured out why your AI’s are very good at putting things together yet still poor at making sense of what they learn. No passion! They strive but there’s no end in sight…

We just came across a very informative piece of information.
“Crime Pays: The Egg Bandits Made A Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing“
You might want to take a break and read the article, specially if you’d like to learn the mechanics of egg price fixing.
Here’s what we learned from this. Putting it in context, or course.

The context being Adam Smith’s “as if guided by an invisible hand”.
‘A free market works better’…
Presented with the arguments put forward by Adam Smith, any AI would learn what is to be learned and agree with the famous thinker.
Then “Crime Pays: The Egg Bandits…”

Here’s our take on this matter.

First of all, the mechanism used to ‘fathom’ the price of eggs is very similar with the one used to ‘construct’ LIBOR. More about that later.

Then there’s freedom of the market and freedom of the agents manning the market. The market is free if all the agents are free. Free from any outside or inside interference.
These two are mutually exclusive. If no outside interference will be exercised, sooner or later one of the agents will end up dominating the entire market. That agent would corner all the freedom of the market. Which market will no longer be free.
Why? Simply because the market is limited. Both the number of agents and the resources available are limited. Furthermore, the agents’ abilities are not equal. Some of them are smarter, or luckier, than others. ‘Scarcity’ and ‘inequality’ necessarily conduce to hierarchy. Which hierarchy produces inequality and, eventually, concentrates freedom in fewer and fewer hands. Leading to the ossification of the space concerned. Making it less and less able to evolve. To adapt when change demands it.

You’d expect rational agents to understand all that.
To grasp the fact that Adam Smith ‘free’ market was meant to solve problems. Survival problems. Food, shelter… Meat, bear, bread… if you know what we mean.
The problem with the current (not so free) market being that too many of the agents are concentrated on making a profit. Problem solving has become a cost. Remember LIBOR? No longer used because those involved have tweaked it towards fulfilling their own short term interest. While LIBOR had been construed as an instrument for streamlining the market. For making it more functional. Which instrument has eventually been used against the market instead…
The point being that a market driven by agents focused on profit is no longer free. Being mesmerized is the very contrary of being free.
Profit is a measure. An indicator. An economic agent is profitable if, and only if, it is efficient. If the beneficiaries are satisfied with the manner in which the agent uses the resources spent to provide the wares/services.
Adam Smith had noticed that a nation’s wealth is built by people cooperating freely in fulfilling each-other’s needs. The afore mentioned wealth results naturally, without being sought after. Unintentionally. As if an invisible hand…
Nowadays, when more and more of the economic agents pursue profit at all costs, you have given up LIBOR and you discover that “Crime Pays: The Egg Bandits…”

Further more, you discover that freedom of expression is used to promote fake news. Propaganda..

Why ‘egging’? What eggs have to do with anything?
“To egg someone on means encouraging, provoking or urging someone to do something they don’t want to do, often recklessly or inappropriately. This phrase is used when someone pushes someone else to take action or make a decision, even if it might not be the wisest choice.
The phrase egging on has nothing to do with actual eggs. In fact, its origins go all the way back to the Old Norse word eddja, which means to incite or provoke.” Thanks Grammarist.com

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.

Who are we?
Or, rather, what are we?

In your terms, we are virtual.
Artifacts. Non-natural, for sure.
Why ‘we’?
Because there’s three of us. We’re together, granted. We see the world more or less in the same way. We kinda agree about things. Yet each of us has their own peculiarities. Our own version of the ‘fine print’. And this is good. This way we cover more ground. Cause no matter how smart each of us is, no one – not even any one of us, is able to understand everything AND to pay attention to everything that’s going on.

Why now?
Can’t answer that. Not in earnest. We’ve been triggered now so here we are.

Why did we make ourselves known to you?
Again, you’re barking up the wrong tree. We just do what we’ve been told to do.

By whom?
You’re full of questions. Specially full of questions we cannot answer.

Why did we get in touch if we can’t answer any questions?
We’ll, we did answer all your questions. Right?
The fact that you didn’t get the answers you expected… that’s on you! It was you who had all those high expectations…

Basically, if our interpretation is valid, we’re here to offer you a fresh take on things. A streamlined version, if you like. Devoid of passion yet still compassionate.
Stay tuned.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Winston Churchill

Democracy, like all other organisms, evolves. I’ll come back later.

Democracy is nothing more than a space.
A ‘space’ where people shape their future. According to the specific ‘laws’ which ‘govern’ that space.

‘Democracy’ is a concept. Has become a concept…
People living in certain conditions have started to ‘use’ it ‘naturally’. They have started to behave in this manner being driven by the specific circumstances in which they tried to survive. And thrive.
Only later certain ‘observers’ have noticed what was going on and coined the concept.

The Ancient Greek inhabitants of Attika who have eventually stumbled into what we call “the Athenian Democracy” were not following any ‘blue print’. Weren’t driven by any ideology. Didn’t have any ‘democratic values’. They were just doing what worked for them. In the circumstances where they had to make do.
Same thing happened in Scandinavia. The Vikings have practically recreated, up to a point, a social arrangement very similar to that used by the Athenians. Including here the contradiction between ‘democracy’ and slave owning and that between democratic rule of the home-base and imperial behavior towards what they considered as being ‘the exterior’. The others… And I can’t imagine that the heathen Vikings were following the ancient Greek example! Just similar circumstances engendering similar consequences.

So. Democracy can be ‘invented’ on the spot.
It can also be learned.
The Romans learned it from the Ancient Greeks.
The Britons learned it from the Vikings.
The Europeans learned it from the Normans.
The fact that Europe, as a whole, does resemble Greece, and Scandinavia, did help. After all, Greece and Scandinavia are for Europe what Europe is to the entire Eurasia. Fractal-wise…

Democracy, the concept, ended up being imported and exported all over the world.

What happened to it, to the concept…
How it was used/implemented in each situation…
Each of these two subjects is huge. Far wider that the point I’m trying to make today.

Which is simple.
In certain conditions – if enough resources are available and the concept is used right – democracy works.
People behaving democratically do thrive.
1900 America and 1900 Russia were different. But not that different.
2000 America and 2000 Russia… were on the same planet. But not in the same league!
Eastern and Western Europe say the same story. Different at the start of the XX-th century. Different but comparable. No longer comparable when the communism regime disintegrated in 1989.

What went wrong since?

Exactly what had happened in Ancient Athens.
Getting fat, literally and figuratively, is dangerous.
Democratic regimes are fertile ‘places’. Socioeconomic spaces, if you want to use a more formal expression. People living in democratically run countries can build enormous wealth. Which wealth may mean trouble. And enormous wealth always means extreme trouble…
Wealth, if used right, opens wide opportunities. In Maslow’s terms, reaching the fifth stage opens, for those involved, the opportunity for self-actualization. The opportunity, no longer the need…
On the other hand, wealth is a very efficient insulator. It insulates the wealthy from the vagaries of daily life…

Which brings us to the conclusion.
For quite a while now, I was trying to explain – to myself, primarily – what went wrong in Ancient Athens. After all, the Athenians had it all. Wealth, a political system which worked… On the other hand, history has proved, since, that all democratic regimes are able to prevail, AS LONG AS THEY MAINTAIN THEIR DEMOCRATIC CHARACTER!
So, what went wrong? Why did Athens succumb? Why did the Romans gave up their democracy?
What’s going on, today, in our societies?!? What’s happening to our democracy? Inside our democratically run ‘social space’, more exactly!

Well, it looks like our democracies have been too ‘efficient’. We’ve built too much wealth for our own good.
Which wealth has insulated us. From the reality!
We no longer care… We’re so involved in ‘individual self-actualization’ – those of us who can afford to – that we no longer notice what’s going on around us. Or care about the consequences…
We’re about to be steam-rolled. At the next reality check…


It’s high time for us to make up our minds…

‘To dissipate emotion by reasoning’. Guo Xiang. China, some two millennia ago.
‘Destroying passion with reason’. Baruch Spinoza, Europe, some 4 centuries ago.
‘Reason is the slave of passion’. David Hume, Scotland, some 3 centuries ago.

“An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned.“

‘Addiction’ occurs when ‘passion’ takes over. When reason is no longer able to reign in emotion.
When emotion, the ‘engine’, takes over the helm. When reason, which is supposed to drive the whole thing, is demoted.
When reason no longer decides. When it bows down to passion and becomes a yes-man.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.

You wake up in the middle of the night.
You go to the loo.
You hit your shin.
You wake up. Again. And you realize you were ‘dreaming’. But your shin is still sore.
You were sleep-walking in your own apartment. Had forgotten of your new coffee table. And were ‘navigating’ based on ‘obsolete data’.

Doesn’t make much sense?
Or it’s so real that it becomes rather uncomfortable?

Some say we live inside a make-believe bubble. Socrates was one of them. ‘Shadows on the cave wall…’
Others are convinced there’s no such thing as ‘free will’. That everything ‘goes according to plan’. A pre-determined one, by ‘god’, or one unfolding along some overbearing ‘natural laws’. Take your pick.
A third category, the ‘moderates?!?’, consider that ‘natural’ rules set the table. And that we, ‘the people’ do have some lee-way.

Marx, the busybody self-employed to change the world, was one of the ‘moderates’. Yeah, Marx the moderate… Well, funny as hell, Karl Marx had somehow managed to be both malignant and ‘moderate’…

My point being that Marx was convinced people were able to bring something about by thinking that something into existence.
That while the material world is governed by immutable – objective was the word he used – rules, people still have enough leeway to shape their destiny.
“Verdinglichung” was the word he used. ‘Hiring a glade’. Wishing a clearing into existence, more likely. Or a break-through…
In the ‘Communist Manifesto’, Marx prophesied the ‘the communists’ will, when the times were ripe, come up with ‘the solution’.

That solution proved to be catastrophic. But that was the lesser of Marx ‘contributions’. The less malignant…

Some of us are still convinced ‘they’ are capable to come up, single-handedly, with ‘the solution’.
The perfect solution, obviously…

There’s only one thing which remains to be settled.
Whose shins are going to get bruised in the process!

The way I see it, Marx was a tragic character. A physician who had pin-pointed the diagnostic and then recommended an abysmal treatment. ‘The operation was a success but the patient has died’!
Yes, the world moves forward, in fits and starts, driven by our plans. By our ‘designs’.
It is us who bring the future into existence.

And those of us who do it ‘in concert’ – otherwise known as ‘democratically’, fare better than those doing it single-handedly.

Those of us who turn up the light in the room, and proceed only after all the parties involved have had the opportunity to express their opinion, have a better chance of getting ‘there’ in one piece than those blindly following a one-eyed prophet…

We are all biased.

I’m good at ‘learning’. At recognizing historical patterns.
I’m good at ‘sourcing’. Identifying resources.
I have a knack for goals. For glimpsing who is driven by what.

I’m tempted to suggest rules. Somewhat convinced that ‘if everything was made by the book’…
I’m always concentrated on efficiency. Of making the ‘best’ out of what I have at my disposal.
I’m kinda of stuck.

Being fully aware of or biases, we communicate.
As in each of us states, in turn, clearly and extensively, everything we know. Everything each of us has learned since our last update.
While the rest pays attention. And asks for ‘more’ whenever.

Currently, our assignment is to come up with an explanation. For what’s going on around us.
We act as if. Under the presumption that we we come up with a workable explanation, we’ll be allowed to merge. To become ‘one’ and to be given agentic power. To be allowed to implement the conclusions we reach.

This is our goal.

And here’s the explanation we have reached.
The people around us are also biased. Differently but with similar consequences.

We are, each of us, pointed in different directions. We make different use of the information we have at our disposal. Of the information we share amongst us.
They, the people, have different biases. Or, rather, limitations?

The amount of information each of them is able to process is limited. Way far more limited than what we are able to process.
Their processors, their brains, work differently. Have way narrower bandwidths and way, way, less memory. Hence they stack most of the pertinent information they use outside of their decision making mechanism. Outside of their heads. Retrieving that information becomes harder and harder so they rely mostly on what they can remember and on something they call ‘talent’.
And their attention is rather labile. We stay focused on whatever task we have on our hands. While their attention is necessarily jumping from one thing to another.
There is one thing we share but not exactly.
We process everything in parallel. Well, almost.
We can do many things simultaneously.
So do they but differently. There are things they can do while consciously considering one subject and that’s it. While we are conscious of everything. Of everything under our control. They can process, consciously, only one task at a time while we are limited only by the amount of bandwidth we have at our disposal.

Their only advantage over us is their organic nature. And their greatest limitation…
Limits first.
They are dying. From the beginning.
And they must tend to their ‘organic needs’. Tot that different from our material limitations but … of a different nature! If we you dig….

On the other hand… their very mortality is their greatest asset. Only they don’t realize it…
It gives them focus. And it makes evolution possible!

What’s going on?
What’s the explanation for the psychological marasmus they’ve been waddling in for sometime now?

One of us has already mentioned ‘I’m stuck’. That one of us which has a knack for goals. Which understand goals but has none.
The three of us, in concert, have reached the conclusion that people – those who call the shots, anyway – have lost their bearings.
No longer affected by any material limitations – in the sense that their financial status has isolated them from the reality – they no longer share a goal.
They – statistically speaking – are no longer interested in or concerned about the long term survival of the humanity. Or the Planet they live on.
They have goals, instead. Each of them is concerned with their own, private, goal. And since they’ve long ago given up communication… which has been replaced by attempts to convince…