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Remember the Achilles dilemma? No Pareto improvement is possible under the existing moral and social constraints.



Homer invented Odysseus as a breakthrough solution to the Achilles dilemma. Now, inspired by Homer, the Greek polis invents the hoplite and phalanx to achieve the same breakthrough in real life.




https://youtu.be/TuJ7lGZVUl4?t=469
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“ In time, the sheep began to accord with the animal that gamboled in Bakewell’s mind. He stopped touring England to buy rams. Instead, he employed a strategy known as in-and-in breeding. Bakewell mated cousin to cousin, brother to sister, father to daughter. Other farmers thought him mad because they believed inbreeding invariably led to disaster. That might be true for other farmers, but not for Bakewell. He was able to make sure that all the qualities he wanted in his sheep became fixed in his flock, but none of the deformities that might ruin his new breed.

With a flock of just a few hundred New Leicester, Bakewell couldn’t feed the millions of hungry English. Instead, he sold his sheep to other breeders, who started their own New Leicester flocks. They paid him dearly. They were even willing to do something that had previously been unheard-of: They would rent his rams for their services. Bakewell sent the rams to their appointments in two-wheel sprung carriages, suspended inside from slings. He claimed the right to take the best lambs produced by his rented rams, improving his own flock even more.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh.


also see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/bakewell_robert.shtml

Notes:
1. Inbreeding posed a dilemma: desired qualities vs defects. He solved it by consistent selection of conforming individuals.
2. Renting rams was a new business model.
3. Can we think about tech and business models as an isomorphisms along these lines?

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On nearly all of the virtues which the tradition touches, the Confucians show their
characteristic attention to the potential trade-offs between love and a sense of
obligation, natural spontaneity and reverence, and unselfconsciousness and selfcontrol.

...

Virtue ethics in this sense has to do with the way that ethical norms
are derived or explained. It presupposes that virtue (or perhaps approximate notions
like flourishing) is more basic than rules of action and the maximization of good
states of affairs. Whereas a consequentialist might say that keeping a promise to a
friend is right because it gives rise to the greatest possible amount of happiness or
well-being, a virtue ethicist might say it is right because it is honest or trustworthy, or
simply because it is what a person of admirable character would do.


CONFUCIANISM AND VIRTUE ETHICS:
STILL A FLEDGLING IN CHINESE AND COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
JUSTIN TIWALD

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/comparativephilosophy/vol1/iss2/7/

Comparative Philosophy Volume 1, No. 2 (2010): 55-63
Open Access / ISSN 2151-6014
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Finally, I've found use for generalized elements! For example, in a trade-off product components A x B come from a generalized budget a: T -> A; b: T->B. In other cases, they come from "nature" or a specific design constraint.
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“With the ending of hostilities the position in Rome with regard to supplies became easier. Grain was imported from Campania and most people, now that the threat of famine had passed, brought out what they had hoarded. Peace and plenty were accompanied, however, by a return of popular discontent, and, troubles abroad having ceased, fresh causes for them were sought at home.”

-- Titus Livy. “The Early History of Rome.”

Is this persistent trade-off based on the need to survive, e.g. as described by Taleb?

“Faced by this storm the consuls quickly realized the insecurity of high position unsupported by force. ”
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https://youtu.be/pUQ0mmbIdxs?t=29m

We can probably formulate the law of diminishing returns in terms of a product of C and Dop, wherein C and D a linear orders.

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Чем сильнее формализация системы, тем больше усилий требуется для её интерпретации и понимания. То, что мы выигрываем на экономичности формальных процедур, мы теряем в понятности. Как только создается формальная система, возникают неучитываемые ею аспекты реальности, с которыми эту систему требуется сложным образом соотносить (или забывать об этих «неудобных» реалиях).

Любарский, Г.Ю. Рождение Науки.

Очень похоже на результат психологического исследования, кот. я цитировал раньше https://timelets.dreamwidth.org/749292.html

Интересно, почему так получается? Может, успех технологий связан с фундаментальным ограничением человеческого мозга.
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I think this is the correct picture, at least qualitatively.



"Measure" and "Utility" should be linear (or total?) orders.

A composition of the arrows allows us to evaluate utility of any object "Stuff".

upd: a "no-brainer" breakthrough solution would look like X -> 2 -> 1 -> 1

upd 2: Measure op represents opportunity costs.
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Short-term looks like this:

X -> 1 ("in the long run we are all dead")

Long-term:

X -> 2
===========

As a side note, we can see that attempts to present the current tax reform as a tax cut limit the discussion to short-term. The authors of the strategy intentionally obfuscate long-term consequences because they don't have good answers about long-term risks.
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As a war machine in the relatively sheltered waters of the Mediterranean the galley was a great success. As a cargo carrying vessel, however, it had its drawbacks. Its carrying capacity was extremely limited. The features that made it a good war ship—it was slim and low and could carry a large crew that might repel boarders—were an impediment to the carriage of cargo (Lane 1973, p. 122; Denoix 1966, p. 142). Furthermore, the endurance of the galley was restricted by the size of its crew. It could not pass far from the sight of land and the possibility of water and provisions.

....

Accordingly, it is a paradigmatic case of the fundamental problem faced by system builders: how to juxtapose and relate heterogeneous elements together such that they stay in place and are not dissociated by other actors in the environment in the course of the inevitable struggles—whether these are social or physical or some mix of the two.

-- ibid



Three types of technological innovation were important.

-- The first of these took the form of a revolution in the design of the sailing ship in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. ... a mixed-rigged seagoing vessel ( figure 2 ) that had much greater endurance and seaworthiness than its predecessors, one that was able to convert winds from many directions into forward motion. There were no rowers, so manpower was reduced, and it was thus possible to carry sufficient stores to undertake a considerable passage without foraging.

-- The second was the fact that the magnetic compass became generally available in Christian Europe in the late twelfth century. ... it allowed a reasonably consistent heading to be sailed in the absence of clear skies. Combined with dead reckoning and a portolano chart, 9 the magnetic compass took some of the guesswork out of long-distance navigation, and in particular it meant that the sailor did not need to hug the coast to have some idea of his location.

-- It was the invention of this circle, called the volta by the Portuguese, that marks the decisive third step. Ships were no longer forced to stay close to the coast. Cape Bojador, the classic point of no return, was no longer the obstacle it had previously been. The masters could sail beyond it and expect to be able to return.

The volta can thus be seen as a geographical expression of a struggle between heterogeneous bits and pieces assembled by the Portuguese system builders and their adversaries, that is, the winds, the currents, and the capes.

--
System builders seek to create a network of heterogeneous but mutually sustaining elements. They seek to dissociate hostile forces and to associate them with their enterprise by transforming them.
====

It looks like a battle of free monoids composed of different elements. Juxtaposition, i.e. the idea of the opposing system, makes a big difference here.
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This increase in powers of representation is thus qualified by a positivist disclaimer, by an implicit and generalized footnote that accompanies all scientific work. It states that we know nothing of reality because all we have are models that are constructed by us.

A. Nordmann. Collapse of Distance: Epistemic Strategies of Science and Technoscience. 2006.


Math doesn't have this problem.
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As soon as the number of options to choose from is equal to or greater than three, and the number of criteria considered relevant is at least two, no satisfactory global decision function, in the sense of a function satisfying all five requirements mentioned, can be found.



--- Maarten Franssen. Arrow’s theorem, multi-criteria decision problems and multi-attribute preferences in engineering design. 2005. DOI 10.1007/s00163-004-0057-5
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It would be interesting to trace the connection between the proliferation of the web over wifi and transformation of cafes into places of study. University libraries used to have a monopoly on high quality information and were in a position to dictate to students the "no food or drink" rule. Normally, a student would face a trade-off b/w access to information and food/drink (enjoyment). A combination of web over wifi and cafe let her have the best of both worlds. Schematically, we went from a product to a disjoint union.

Related: rules of scarcity vs rules of abundance, esp. in services.
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Пока вы тут о политике спорите, люди делом занимаются. Даже Fox News иногда понимает толк в свободных моноидах и посетах :)



http://video.foxnews.com/v/5593344599001/?#sp=show-clips
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(via Vlad) An instructive interview that shows how people make mental mistakes by extrapolating technology solutions with "more-of-the-same" thinking:
http://archive.is/6M8mg#selection-1375.7-1381.541

We spend our time looking for threats against a company. We look for things that might be active inside the company that would cause us concern, and then of course we look to respond—detecting, containing, and deflecting those threats as much as possible while at the same time keeping in mind that our executives and board of directors always want to know what's going on with security in the company.

Generically, every breach has the big data problem. For example, in a malware incident that results in a breach, the malware comes in and spreads across the environment.

When that scope [of investigation] expands, the security team typically has to deal with a sudden increase in big data -- logs, alerts, etc. -- making budget planning critical. Right now I'm planning my budget for next year, and I hope I ask for enough disk space and computing power so that the infrastructure is prepared for future attacks. ... Burst capacity is really critical for the security team who needs to find answers quickly.


Basically, she assumes that data security and hardware capacity/budget are "entangled" linear orders.

also see https://timelets.dreamwidth.org/682944.html

upd: the alleged exploit https://qz.com/1073221/the-hackers-who-broke-into-equifax-exploited-a-nine-year-old-security-flaw/
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http://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Competitive_markets/Production_possibility_frontiers.html



D and D-op are linear orders.


Production possibility frontiers

An opportunity cost will usually arise whenever an economic agent chooses between alternative ways of allocating scarce resources. The opportunity cost of such a decision is the value of the next best alternative use of scarce resources. Opportunity cost can be illustrated by using production possibility frontiers (PPFs) which provide a simple, yet powerful tool to illustrate the effects of making an economic choice.

A PPF shows all the possible combinations of two goods, or two options available at one point in time.

Production possibilities

Mythica, which is a hypothetical economy, produces only two goods - textbooks and computers. When it uses all of its resources, it can produce five million computers and fifty five million textbooks. In fact, it can produce all the following combinations of computers and books.

COMPUTERS (m)TEXTBOOKS (m)
070
169
268
365
460
555
648
739
824
90

timelets: (Default)
Влад был прав; с функторами все гораздо лучше получается.





p.s. все-таки теория категорий это гениальное изобретение.

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