Tag: models

Refining Transductive Subjectivity

Posted in agency, fiction, identity, language, maths, morality, ontology, perception, philosophy, postmodernism, psychology, reality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3ā€“4 minutes

I risk sharing this prematurely. Pushing the Transductive Subjectivity model toward more precision may lose some readers, but the original version still works as an introductory conversation.

Please note: There will be no NotebookLM summary of this page. I don’t even want to test how it might look out the other end.

Apologies in advance for donning my statistician cap, but for those familiar, I feel it will clarify the exposition. For the others, the simple model is good enough. It’s good to remember the words of George Box:

All models are wrong; some are useful.

The Simple Model

Iā€™ve been thinking that my initial explanatory model works well enough for conversation. It lets people grasp the idea that a ‘self’ isnā€™t an enduring nugget but a finite sequence of indexed states:

S0ā†’S1ā†’S2ā†’ā€¦ā†’SnSā‚€ ā†’ Sā‚ ā†’ Sā‚‚ ā†’ ā€¦ ā†’ Sā‚™

The transitions are driven by relative forces, RR, which act as catalysts nudging the system from one episode to the next.

The Markov Model

That basic picture is serviceable, but itā€™s already very close to a dynamical system. More accurate, yesā€”though a bit more forbidding to the casual reader ā€“ and not everybody loves Markov chains:

Si+1=F(Si,Ri)S_{i+1} = F(S_i, R_i)

Here:

  • SiSi is the episodic self at index i
  • RiRi is the configuration of relevant forces acting at that moment
  • FF is the update rule: given this self under these pressures, what comes next?

This already helps. It recognises that the self changes because of pressure from language, institutions, physiology, social context, and so on. But as I noted when chatting with Jason, something important is still missing:

SiSi isnā€™t the only thing in motion, and RiRi isnā€™t the same thing at every step.

And crucially, the update rule FF isnā€™t fixed either.

A person who has lived through trauma, education, and a cultural shift doesnā€™t just become a different state; they become different in how they update their states. Their very ‘logic of change’ evolves.

To capture that, I need one more refinement.

The Transductive Operator Model

This addresses the fact that Si isn’t the only aspect in motion and there are several flavours of R over time, so Ri. We need to introduce the Transductive T:

(Si+1,Fi+1)=T(Si,Fi,Ri)(S_{i+1}, F_{i+1}) = \mathcal{T}(S_i, F_i, R_i)

Now the model matches the reality:

  • SS evolves
  • the pressures RR evolve
  • and the update rule FF evolves

RiRi can be further decomposed as Ri=(Rphys,Rsocial,Rsymbolic,ā€¦)Ri=(R^{phys},R^{social},R^{symbolic},ā€¦), but I’ll save that for the formal essay.

The self is not simply ‘what comes next’, but a rule that keeps rewriting itself as it encounters the world.

That is why this is transductive rather than inductive or deductive:
structure at one moment propagates new structure at the next.

What Transductive Subjectivity Isn’t

What TS rejects is the notion that the self is a summation of the SiSis and other factors; this summation is a heuristic that works as a narrative, and all of its trappings, but it is decidedly incorrect.

Selfā‰ Ī£(Si,ā€¦)Selfā‰ Ī£(Sįµ¢, ā€¦)

Effectively,

Selfā‰ āˆ«0tExperiencedtSelf ā‰  \int_{0}^{t} Experience \, dt

In ordinary life, we talk as if there were a single, stable self that sums all these episodes. Transductive Subjectivity treats that as a convenient narrative, not an underlying fact. For example, someone raised in a rigid environment may initially update by avoiding conflict; after therapy and a cultural shift, they may update by seeking it out when something matters. This fiction is where we project agency and desert, and where we justify retribution.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Church of Pareto: How Economics Learned to Love Collapse

Posted in economics, maths, modernism, philosophy, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

ā€”orā€”How the Invisible Hand Became a Throttling Grip on the Throat of the Biosphere

As many frequent visitors know, I am a recovering economist. I tend to view economics through a philosophical lens. Here. I consider the daft nonsense of Pareto optimality.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.

There is a priesthood in modern economicsā€”pious in its equations, devout in its dispassionā€”that gathers daily to prostrate before the altar of Pareto. Here, in this sanctum of spreadsheet mysticism, it is dogma that an outcome is “optimal” so long as no one is worse off. Never mind if half the world begins in a ditch and the other half in a penthouse jacuzzi. So long as no one’s Jacuzzi is repossessed, the system is just. Hallelujah.

This cult of cleanliness, cloaked in the language of “efficiency,” performs a marvellous sleight of hand: it transforms systemic injustice into mathematical neutrality. The child working in the lithium mines of the Congo is not ā€œharmedā€ā€”she simply doesn’t exist in the model. Her labour is an externality. Her future, an asterisk. Her biosphere, a rounding error in the grand pursuit of equilibrium.

Let us be clear: this is not science. This is not even ideology. It is theologyā€”an abstract faith-based system garlanded with numbers. And like all good religions, it guards its axioms with fire and brimstone. Question the model? Heretic. Suggest the biosphere might matter? Luddite. Propose redistribution? Marxist. There is no room in this holy order for nuance. Only graphs and gospel.

Jevons warned usā€¦that improvements in efficiency could increase, not reduce, resource consumption.

The rot runs deep. William Stanley Jevonsā€”yes, that Jevons, patron saint of unintended consequencesā€”warned us as early as 1865 that improvements in efficiency could increase, not reduce, resource consumption. But his paradox, like Cassandraā€™s prophecy, was fated to be ignored. Instead, we built a civilisation on the back of the very logic he warned would destroy it.

Then came Simon Kuznets, whoā€”bless his empirically addled soulā€”crafted a curve that seemed to promise that inequality would fix itself if we just waited politely. We called it the Kuznets Curve and waved it about like a talisman against the ravages of industrial capitalism, ignoring the empirical wreckage that piled up beneath it like bones in a trench.

Meanwhile, Pareto himself, that nobleman of social Darwinism, famously calculated that 80% of Italyā€™s land was owned by 20% of its peopleā€”and rather than challenge this grotesque asymmetry, he chose to marvel at its elegance. Economics took this insight and said: ā€œYes, more of this, please.ā€

And so the model persistedā€”narrow, bloodless, and exquisitely ill-suited to the world it presumed to explain. The economy, it turns out, is not a closed system of rational actors optimising utility. It is a planetary-scale thermodynamic engine fuelled by fossil sunlight, pumping entropy into the biosphere faster than it can absorb. But donā€™t expect to find that on the syllabus.

Mainstream economics has become a tragic farce, mouthing the language of optimisation while presiding over cascading system failure. Climate change? Not in the model. Biodiversity collapse? A regrettable externality. Intergenerational theft? Discounted at 3% annually.

We are witnessing a slow-motion suicide

We are witnessing a slow-motion suicide cloaked in the rhetoric of balance sheets. The Earth is on fire, and the economists are debating interest rates.

What we need is not reform, but exorcism. Burn the models. Salt the axioms. Replace this ossified pseudoscience with something fit for a living worldā€”ecological economics, systems theory, post-growth thinking, anything with the courage to name what this discipline has long ignored: that there are limits, and we are smashing into them at speed.

History will not be kind to this priesthood of polite annihilation. Nor should it be.

Cognitive Processing Flow Model

Posted in consciousness, intelligence, language, nature, perception, philosophy, psychology, reality, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

The Cognitive Process Flow Model illustrates how we process the phenomenal world. It’s reductionist and is missing aspects because it is just a back-of-the-napkin sketch. I created it because I uttered, “I can model it for you”. And so I did.

EDIT: I’ve updated the model slightly as the article head image, but the copy content refers to the first draft.

My response was to a person making the claim, that all you need to facts and logic prevails. Rather than restate the argument, I’ll just walk through the diagramme.

There’s meta information to set it up. We are subjective entities in the world. We have a sense-perception apparatus as we exist in it. Countless events occur in this world. We recognise only a few of them within our limited range, though technology expands this range in various ways.

Most of us interact in the world. Some are less ambulatory, so the world visits them. Some have sense-perception deficits whilst others have cognitive deficits. My point is not to capture every edge and corner case. This is just a generalised model.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

ā€”George Box

It starts with an event. Events occur ceaselessly. In our small portion of the world and elsewhere. For the purpose of the model, the first thing that happens is an event catches our attention. We might notice a shape, a colour, or a movement; we might hear a sound, smell an aroma, feel a sensation, or taste something.

A pre-emotion, pre-logic function serves to process these available inputs. Perhaps, you hear a report on anthropogenic climate change or read something about a political candidate. This emotional filter will police sensory inputs and unconsciously or preconsciously determine if you will react to the initial stimulus. If not, you’ll continue in an attention-seeking loop. Not that kind of attention-seeking.

As my dialogue was about the presentation of facts, our next stop will be logical evaluation. Does this make sense to us, or can we otherwise make it? This is a process in itself. I’ll assume here that it requires little elaboration. Instead, I’ll focus on the operating environment.

Our logical processes are coloured by past experiences and tainted by cognitive biases and deficits. We may also trigger the calling of additional facts through past experiences or the current engagement.

We’ll process these fragments and reach some logical conclusion. But we’re not done. We take this intermediate conclusion and run it through more emotional processing. Cognitive biases come back into play. If the event conforms with your past experiences and cognitive biases, we may run it through a cognitive dissonance routine. To be honest, this probably is part of the emotional reconciliation process, but I’ve drawn it here, so I’ll let it be. In this case, it’s just a filter. If it happens to conform to our belief system, it will pass unfettered; otherwise, it will be squared with our beliefs. Again, this leads me to believe it’s a subcomponent of emotional reconciliation. I’ll update the chart later.

In any case, we’ll end at Final Acceptance. This acceptance may be that we accept or reject the logic, but we arrive at an opinion that gets catalogued with the rest of them. Some may be elevated to facts or truths in the epistemological hierarchy. Although an end marker is identified, it’s really a wait state for the next event. Rinse and repeat until death.

I’ll update this presently. Be on the lookout. It could include more dimensions and interactions, but that might have to wait until version 3.

Meantime, does this feel right to you? Did it even get your attention?

An Example: Anthropogenic Climate Change

Let’s wrap up with an example. I’ll use climate change. An article comes into your attention field, and you have an interest in these things, so it passes through the emotional filter. If your propensity for these articles is high, it might race to the next stage.

You read the article, and it contains some factsā€”rather, it contains claims for evaluation. To do this, you’ll recall past experiences and cognitive biases are always lying in wait. You may have to look for new facts to add to the mix. These will have to take a similar route past your attention gatekeeper and emotional sidekick.

If you are already predisposed that climate change is a hoax, these facts will filter through that lensā€”or vice versa.

When all of this is resolved, you’ll have arrived at a conclusionā€”perhaps we’ll call it a proto-conclusion. It hasn’t been set yet.

You are still going to introspect emotionally and decide if this is a position you want to hold. Perhaps, you feel that climate change is a hoax but this doesn’t jive with that position. Here, you’ll either accept these facts and flip a bit to a sceptical believer or cognitive dissonance will kick in and ensure your sense of the world isn’t thrown off kilter. You may update your belief system to include this datum for future assessments.

Now we are ready for final acceptance. You can now express your established opinion. If the net event is to counter that acceptance, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

Anatomy of a Social Media Challenge

Posted in equality, identity, language, perception, politics, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As a Social Justice Warrior, I tend to favour diversity and inclusion as a principle. As such, I follow some people who share this interest. In fact, most of these people expend much more energy toward this end than I do. The challenge I am about to convey is that some people don’t read beyond the subject line, and don’t even attempt to assess the underlying claim, let alone the issue at hand.

I recently engaged in a nonsensical interaction that I am sharing and dissecting. It started with this share, an image of the border outline of Nigeria with an overlay caption that reads: “Nigeria becomes the first country to ban white and British models in all advertising”.

I’d like to point out two items in particular. Firstly, the caption is fabricated. I’ll get to the source reference presently. Secondly, the re-poster aptly corrects the caption when he shared itā€””Well, all foreign models, but HELL YEAH!”

Nigeria recently passes a law that essentially assesses a tariff or levy on advertising content using non-Nigerian talent. There is no mention of ‘white’ models, though British models would fall under this umbrella. This protectionist law stems from nationalism. I’d guess that ‘white’ people comprise less than one per cent of the Nigerian national population, but I could be wrong. This is well outside my area of expertise.

My response was to say “Down with Nationalism and the Promotion of Otherism.”
I may be misinterpreting myself, but it feels to me that this is denouncing racism and other forms of otherness.

Sabrina responds, ‘Why is not having white models in advertising a bad thing?” and “Isn’t the whole point of advertising [for] people toā€¦see themselvesā€¦ ?”
In response, I should have pointed out that the initiative had nothing to do with skin colour. Instead, I responded to the second question: the point of advertising is to sell product. Full stop. If people see themselves with the product, then great. Clearly, this comprises a fraction of successful adverts. More common is to make a connection to what they aspire to. It’s not about making a social statementā€”unless, of course, that social statement will sell more product. If an ad with a white model will sell more product, a business would be derelict not to employ one; conversely, if white models result in lower sales, a business would be foolish not to switch to the more successful vector.

Sabrina really goes off the reservation with her reply, somehow conflating Nigeria with the African continent. Attention to detail is not her forte.

At this point, I feed into her laziness and send her a link to an Al-Jazeera article addressing the law.

She leaves with a parting shot, and I quote: “Have you ever thought about the harm you might cause by playing devil’s advocate and “creating an argument”?”

She’s off course and then attempts to diminish my point by calling it ‘playing devil’s advocate’ rather than admitting that she hadn’t even considered the rationale and possible ramifications. She didn’t even grasp the main point, so I suppose I should forgive her for not noticing secondary and edge cases.

At this point, Dr Perkins adds her voice. Her initial question is valid, and as I responded, the answer is “No”. The race card was introduced by some narrator who didn’t know what game he was broadcasting. But then she goes on to “applaud Nigeria for making a [decision] centering [on] Blackness”, save to say that was not what prompted the decision.

Notice, too, that other people “Liked” the other comments, a testament to the principle of least effort of the bystanders, too.

I recognise that the original post anchored the conversation off the actual topic, but it was also very easy to track down the reference and note the content discrepancy. Granted, this takes time and effort, but so does responding on a thread and then escalating commitment to a non-cause. And for one tilting at windmills to be tossing around accusations of playing devil’s advocate. It’s not a good sign.

But wait, there’s more. I commented on this post on a second thread.

In this case, Dr Anderson suggests that this is just “a country celebrating its own citizens by recognizing their beauty and knowing they can move product just as good, and probably better than white women, to which I responded that this is a testable hypothesis. It’s either true that on balance white models sell more product or black models do. Again, don’t fail to miss the point that none of this is about white versus black models.

Somehow, LinkedIn can’t seem to keep their threads in order, but Ms Rice takes my hypothesis testing point as a support for racism before precipitating to full-on troll mode.

It scares me to see that there are two academic doctors participating in this thread, neither with a trait of attention to detail nor even a fundamental pursuit of evidence.

This is why it is difficult to engage with social media. You have no idea what level a commenter is coming in on. And even when spoon-fed information, they refuse to alter their position. In fact, they tend to double down on their wrongness.
Moving onā€¦