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arendt (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Tue Feb-21-06 11:42 PM Original message |
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map2XGA.jpg (sorry - looks like same as before) I don't know how to get non-website hosted images into DU. And here's that file you didn't get. N-K GOVERNMENT by arendt 1. We need a new paradigm for structuring our government 1.1 Miserably incomplete and lame summary of NK model The NK-model is fundamentally a spin-glass model. Consider a system of N components. Let each component be affected by K self+other components, where K < or = N. Now try to maximize some "fitness" function on the N components. In the case where K=1, the fitness function is simple: maximize the fitness of each individual component. The globally most fit system is the one with the largest sum of component fitnesses. ASIDE: This is like money economics, where everything can be reduced to one measure (i.e., money), and where a thoroughly selfish player is free to ignore his impact on all other players. Classical economics "proves" that this kind of behavior creates the invisible hand. And, if you accept the initial hypotheses about single metrics and non-interaction, you are trapped in the ideology of laissez-faire. But, as K increases, the fitness "landscape" becomes much more complicated and non-monotonic. It is easier to become trapped in local maxima and miss the global maxima. Worse than that, Kaufmann proves that as K increases, the fitness of the highest peak falls to the average fitness; i.e., evolution becomes a random walk in a random landscape. How do we get out of this "Red Queen" universe? By limiting the amount of interaction. Kaufmann shows that K=2 systems can find significant fitness peaks. So can higher K systems if the interaction functions are "canalyzing". That is, if the interactions tend to turn things off instead of on, which is exactly how enzyme systems and brains are structured - more inhibitory connections than excitory connections. The briefest thing I've read by Kaufmann is his 1991 Scientific American article "Antichaos and Adaptation". You can get the flavor for most of his work from this ten page article. Truly, he is a windy son of a bitch. 1.2 The New Paradigm: Connectionist Democracy My attempt to state the new paradigm goes like this: Research in brain science has revolutionized our view of how we think. The picture is by no means complete, but the idea of rationality has taken a serious beating. Antonio D'amasio's "Descartes Error" is a thorough debunking of the "cold rationality - good; hot emotion - bad" simplification of how we think. He demonstrates that emotions pre-dispose our rational minds to make judgements. In other words, emotional feelings represent the "value system" used by our rational minds to make decisions. Furthermore, emotions are laid down in the first five years of life. That is why the old saying "As the twig is bent, so grows the tree." is more than a cliche. Neurophysiologists are busy tracing the connections between the limbic system (seat of emotions) and the cortex, especially the pre-frontal cortex (the seat of reason and planning). In the last 30 years, we have learned that what we would call thinking, or intelligent behavior, or adaptive behavior in complex living systems depends on calculational systems (or algorithms) based on N-dimensional representations. Neural net explanations of the Vestibulo-ocular reflex and the cerebellum are based on training an N-dimensional content- addressable memory. Kanerva (Sparse Distributed Memory) has derived properties of N-dimensional space that explain how a distributed system can remember, learn, and behave intelligently. Some audio and video compression systems are built on "vector quantizers", which are yet another flavor of N-dimensional learning system. In short, anywhere that technologists are trying to create artificial learning behavior, we find N-dimensional representational systems. ( The GOFAI (good old-fashioned AI) crowd has met its Waterloo; nobody takes rule based _low-level_ vision systems seriously anymore. Rules are a high-level phenomenon.) The geometric properties of N-dimensional space are not intuitive - intuition would lead us to expect nothing interesting, but it is wrong. There seems to be an emergent property of learning in N-dimensions. The conventional definition of rationality, on the other hand, is one- dimensional: we analyze the situation (no explanation of how we know what is important and what to ignore - the "framing problem" which defeated GOFAI); we give a weight (in the K=1 sense) to each possible outcome (no explanation of how we arrive at the weights), and we decide, i.e., turn the crank (sum the N independent weights) on the rational machinery. The explanation ducks the hard part: in a unique or unprece- dented situation, how do we decide what to attend to and how much weight to give to various events? If there is not enough time or not enough information available to evaluate the situation, what shortcuts do we take? The conventional explanation is full of holes at the level of the individual, but it is even more obviously ludicrous at the level of the society. The current form of representative government was proposed about the time of Descartes, in a Newtonian, determi- nistic worldview. At that time, only the tiniest fraction of the male, land-owning or propertied population was allowed to vote, and the role of government was very limited compared to today. Here is the conventional rationality explanation of how society is governed: government is in the hands of the people. Our elected representatives merely reflect our desires. The citizens analyze the situation, decide what is important, and tell their elected represenatives how to vote. In an era of 500-page Congressional omnibus bills and 10,000 page tax codes with 40,000 lobbyists dispensing hundreds of millions of dollars of PAC money, it is a complete fantasy. Here is what is really going on. The mass media decide what issues will be given coverage. The mass media, by the amount of time or column inches, decide what weight will be given to each issue. (Of course, the concentrated mass media are owned by the richest segment of our society and reflect their opinions faithfully, and often manipulatively and deceptively. Once every couple of years, the voter gets to pick a representative on the basis of summing (i.e., turning the rationalist crank) all the media-determined issues that have occurred during the intervening years. Throughout, the voter is bombarded by a bunch of partisan- sponsored polls and focus group-based advertisements which are crafted to appeal to the emotions. Sound-bite and factoid media coverage further obscure the true issues and prevent anything resembling true rational analysis. The conventional explanation posits an everything-to-everything connected neural net. Each citizen is supposedly capable of informing himself on all important issues. But, everyone knows this is nonsense, so we say that politicians "represent" us. However, they cannot represent us if we have no opinion. In reality, they are a "homunculus" - the little man inside our brain that does the thinking and tells us what the answer is. Once representative democracy has been reduced to homuncular behavior by the drastic increase in complexity required to manage a mixed, global economy, it is only a matter of time before that homunculus will be captured by the most powerful elements of the society. This is exactly what has happened. The situation is not directly a matter of corruption, although there is certainly an immense amount of that present. The capture of homuncular representatives arises from an inadequate organization of governmental information processing. Since the structure of checks and balances, committees, party discipline, etc was codified over two hundred years ago, it is not surprising that it is inadequate to the 20th century situation. Nevertheless, we must get political advertising back under voter control through campaign finance reform. Otherwise, the constant brainwash of consumerism will determine peoples' values insidiously in their early childhood - witness Joe Camel, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, sex stereotyping, etc. Then they will acquiese to the Social Darwinist crowd without a whimper because it is mother's milk to them. 1.3 Connectionist politics Somewhere I read that people rarely vote against evil, but they can be made to vote against stupidity. Liberals have failed with an appeal to justice. Progressives can succeed by pointing out the utterly unscientific structure of politics and supplying a workable alternative. Nobody wants to be perceived as championing a discredited policy. This is why the "Republican revolution" has tried to paint a return to the plantation economy as a step into the future. Here is an attempt to map current politics onto the unscientific and unworkable label, and an alternative. Be warned, it may infringe on some things you think are sacred: 1.3.1 How the current situation works for the moneyed interests Corporate interests have already organized themselves along NK- model lines. Each industry pays attention only to those matters which directly bear on it; i.e., they keep K small. They further canalize the situation by vetoing (i.e., inhibiting) anything not in their interest. Each industry has its captive Congress- critters, so that Congress-critters become the locus of the algorithmic calculation of NK-fitness. Senator Porkbarrel does whatever balancing act keeps enough of his PAC funders happy to fund him and keeps enough of his constituents mollified to assure re-election. This is a very non-rational, situation-dependent process. It works just fine for the corporations, because it is their fitness function that is being calculated. It doesn't work at all for the citizen because their issues never get on the table. Voters are constantly being asked to choose between being hung or being shot when they really want to vote for more cops on the street. 1.3.2 Why the current situation works against the common man This decline of democracy has come about due to technology. It is a historical truism that democracy rises and falls with the need for mass armies. If the military technology becomes dominated by small elites of weapons, like armored knights, then order can be maintained by a moneyed elite. If, however, mass armies are the dominant military factor, then democracy is needed to pursuade the masses to fight. As the Gulf War demonstrated, the military has moved to an elite of jet pilots, special forces, and expensive naval weapons platforms. Masses of first world ground soldiers cannot be used for fear of politcally disastrous casualties. Third world countries can afford to trade their ground soldiers three or five to one for first world soldiers; so the first world takes the high-tech approach, ala the British vs the Zulus. Similarly, it used to be that mobilizing voters was an important part of politics. Labor supplied "armies" of campaign workers. With the rise of TV advertising, we have moved to a small elite of pollsters, pundits, and advertising agencies. Further, the increasing complexity of interest groups in the society makes it hard to create broad consensus on any policy. There are very few genuine problems that all can agree on, but there are immense numbers of manufactured, phony, emotionally provocative issues that we can be divided by. 1.3.3 Reorganizing into an NK electorate The beginnings of an NK electorate are already in place: the genuine citizen special interest groups: Planned Parenthood, Zero Population Growth in the area of population; Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Greenpeace, etc. in the area of environment; etc. The problem is, that citizens still vote by the conventional rationality. Corporations maximize their effectiveness by concentrating their vote. The electorate must specialize in order to obtain similar effectiveness. 1.3.3.1 Voter specialization We need to define a couple of hundred governmental specializations. These specializations are continually adapted on a multi-year basis, sort of like the census. (A good place to start is the Congressional sub-committee specializations.) Voters get to sign up to vote in say five or ten specializations only. Then, we need to reorganize the elections so that Congressmen specialize in some of the specializations. (Which is effectively what Congressional staffers do today; only we don't get to vote for staffers.) Specialized citizens vote for specialized Congressmen, just like the corporations do today. Citizens could change their specializations whenever their is an election. There are some mechanics necessary to prevent everyone from specializing in the currently hot topic. Overall, it makes sense if a trucker specializes in transpor- tation legislation, and a telecommunications engineer specializes in telecommunications legislation. I think that the hot topics problem may work itself out as people realize they have more relative influence in less-popular groups. Some may opt for enfranchisement above relevance, just as some scientists work on obscure but safe topics rather than get involved in the high-risk, high-reward hot topics like cancer research. Needless to say, the representative assembly of these specializations would bevoted for on the national level. This kind of voting, with a 5% or 10% cutoff to get a representative, is quite common in all advanced country democracies except the US. It is called proportional representation. It works something like the brain, which suppresses low-amplitude signals, but allows medium amplitude signals to co-exist and cross-stimulate. "Wait", you may say. "I am giving up my right to vote on all these other issues! I am being disenfranchised." But we are already disenfranchised, so what are we losing? Besides, many voters today are already single-issue voters. Very few track as many as five issues seriously. Why not formalize the information-overload situation that is the de facto reality? Why not acknowledge that everything-to- everything connectivity doesn't work? Information overload wasn't even a concept four hundred years ago. A good feature of national, proportional representation is that it is much harder to intimidate a distributed, nationwide constituency either by moving factories out of the state or cutting off government pork. What we need to make this work is that these various specializations can be connected together into a coherent governmental information processing algorithm. That is, we need a new theory of government based on 20th century knowledge of self-organizing learning systems, just as the 17th century system of checks and balances was based on the best mechanical knowledge of that day. The recent discovery that specialized brain regions (like the ones that track motion, the ones that determine color, and the ones that recognize objects) are pulled together on a millisecond by millisecond basis via a 20-40Hz broadcast network offers some ideas about how to organize the government. Each specialization gets its own internet bulletin board. Legislation must be displayed for all to see for a certain amount of time prior to Congressional debate and voting. This period allows specialized citizens to organize and have their say via the same network, perhaps even actually voting . But notice, this is not the simple-minded electronic townhall that has been proposed. It is not a mindless, unfocussed feels-good-to-get-that-off-my-chest gripe session. The participants are all specialists. There is a formalism or algorithm. Information is displayed and acted upon in some kind of N-dimensional set of bulletin boards, where it may also be cross-posted to K related bulletin boards. 1.3.3.1.1 Issues of general interest Here, I can't quite see how to proceed. If a K-related legislature decides something cross-posted is important, how does it act? Is a supra-majority needed to add it to the legislative calender? (Otherwise, if there could be such a thing as a majority party with 200 almost independent legislatures, the whole NK model could be collapsed back to today's system by voting for the adding of all crossposts to all calenders.) Suppose that an issue is genuinely relevant to many constituencies, how do they all get to vote? Does the K-related crossposting ripple outward, or does it make more sense to have a special mechanism for identifying general issues? It sounds like I'm backing myself into a position where there is some "limbic system" legislature that decides which of the issues of the 200 simultaneous legislatures gets into "the general public's consciousness" as an issue of general importance. The minute we have a limbic legislature, we are right back to today's committee system. But isn't that system much like the brain? The limbic system uses the cortex as its committees. I guess the issue is that today's committee system is too hierarchical - the committees are bottlenecked by the necessity of having all committee work re-validated by the assembly at large. The choke point gives control to the gatekeepers who sell out to the moneyed interests. 1.3.3.2 Genuine decentralization Notice that I said the specialized representatives are voted for nationally. This makes perfect sense. The federal government is concerned with abstract matters of regulation. The issues of how to arrange the details of your locality should be handled in local legislatures, just as with the states today. The next change that needs to happen is decentralization of as much as possible; but, destoying federal oversight without destroying multinational corporate power will result in local corporate feudalism. So, can we decentralize without disarming? If the specialized federal legislature can keep the corporations and mass media from suppressing local citizen activists, then local government will cease to be dominated by absentee landlords. Today, nationwide mass media destroy the intermediate layers of calculation necessary for citizens not to be cut out of the local governmental process. Local news has been reduced to "if it bleeds, it leads". We must restore a genuine participation in local governments, which have long been run by construction companies, real estate agents, the local gentry, and the big employers in the area. The first thing that has to go are the current state boundaries. As Michael Lind points out in "The Next American Nation", currently, 16% of the population (in sparsely populated rural states like Montana or New Hampshire) elects 50% of the Senators. This gives the conservative elements in those rural states an effective veto over the other 84% of the citizenry. Other countries, even England, redraw state boundaries based on census data. In England, they are called New Counties. What should the new boundaries look like? Jane Jacobs has addressed this in her eye-opening "Cities and the Wealth of Nations". Essentially, the city is the basic unit of the economy, not the country. The country was the basic unit of international politics for the past four hundred years, but a single national currency lumps together prosperous cities like San Jose, CA with dead cities like Camden, NJ. The powerful economic feedback of currency value adjustment is denied within countries. If corporations are free to shift their assets all over the world to seek better financial conditions, the same technology could be used by new states to use local revaluation to spur economic health. It could be tracked by the same means the corporations are currently using. I think that state boundaries should be some kind of Voronoi tesselation of the terrain, with the 50 largest cities as the nodes of the tesselation. This was proposed in the early 80s by someone from U. Michigan. By preventing suburbanites from fleeing to bedroom-community neighboring states, states centered geographically on their city will promote regional solidarity and more effective economic integration. If the borders are biased to land on mountain ranges and other impassable and economically useless terrain, then inter-state rivalries and frictions going back hundreds of years could be mitigated. The current state boundaries were determined by farming community settlement patterns and ancient political events like the Missouri compromise and the Civil War. Isn't about time they were rationalized to account for the urban areas that drive today's economies and policies? Sensibly-bordered, economically-integrated states will increase localization of production and consumption and citizen participation. Both these factors are needed to counter the deliberate destruction of local competitors by global megacorps. These corporations are applying the Stalinist development solution of binding disparate provinces into unwilling economic unity by destroying their self- sufficiency and forcing them into an oppressive empire dominated by a planning elite. 1.3.4 What I want to do I need to do two computer simulations to test fly these ideas. Both of them depend on serious databases. I need to create some kind of N-dimensional representation of political issues. This is akin to the net-browser/filter problem that people are just realizing is necessary. (How do I filter all the crap on the net down to the stuff that is really important to me? Can I define a clear category for that filter? Could a vector-quantizer assistant learn to sort on the basis of my selections?) Second, I need to tesselate the US, based on population density, natural features like rivers, lakes, mountains, and economic features, like industrial, agricultural, clerical, etc. This is going to take more serious analysis of what is important, and may again require a self-learning algorithm. Also, I need to play with some numbers about the appropriate size of political units. Sociologists have determined that about 100-150 people are about all that a normal person can deal with as a primary community. This leads me to try to organize two or three levels of local government, with each containing 256 people - a nice computer number. Three layers (ward - 256; town - 64k, and city - up to 16 million) of local government are easy for most people to relate to and historically this is what has been done. Nothing really new here except the binary numbers. Actually, what is new is that the size of the unit is fixed; and, as the population grows, new units are created. What currently happens is that the number of units are fixed, so that their size becomes an increasing impediment to democracy as the population grows. But, I am modeling on the brain. We seem to build about three layers of hierarchical processing before we start using the 20-40 Hz broadcast system. That is, we have some hierarchy in order to calculate something more interesting than what a single neuron can do; but we tend not to go too hierarchical - "grandmother cells" don't work, but the broadcast system does. I'm still not sure if the local government algorithm is organized differently than today. I mean, its supposed to be dealing with local infrastructure issues, such as should we build another road, float bonds to expand the port, open a new community college, etc. Since each citizen's money is being spent, they all seem to need a non-specialized vote in local government. I think that the three-layer structure and the immediacy of local issues can work within the existing policial framework as long as the federal government keeps the big money from skewing things. (Idea of multi-threaded school buildings: sharing expensive facilities, but broken into smaller units whose students don't really interact. Smaller units are more socially cohesive. Why wreck cohesiveness in the name of economic efficiency when you can have both?) Will local governments interact only with their geographic neighbors (low K) or will they form into geographically-based groups (all on the Mississippi) or industrial groups (all heavy manufacturers, all farmers)? (The latter case falls into the national-specialist paradigm.) I hope that good state boundaries will create mixed and somewhat self-sufficient groupings of farmers and city workers. But without database work, I can't predict if the cities won't go to war with each other instead of minding their own business. Regarding the federal, proportional representation scheme, how many voters vote for each representative? Do I use three levels in this scheme as well? Should the number of Congress-critters stay at the current 500, or should we be honest and recognize that the 20,000 or so staffers are actively make government policy? If 200 million voters cast 5 votes each, there are 1 billion votes for 20,000 staffers. Each staffer needs, on average, 50,000 votes for election. That's about right for two layers of voter hierarchy. Only this hierarchy would have to be mediated via the internet due to geography. Also, 20,000 staffers divided by 200 specialties results in assemblies with 100 members - which is also about the right size for effective debate and legislation with alliances forming and reforming to represent the actual situation. One of the problems with the H. of Reps is that 435 is just too big. Of course, these numbers should be adjusted for the size of the country. If this were tried in a country of 10 million people, you might only be able to support 2,000 staffers. Thus, the number of legislatures would have to go down while the jurisdiction of each legislature went up. I'm not sure if this idea scales well. (On the other hand, small countries don't have the resources to do everything. They need to specialize. This system enforces specialization.) Also, should voters be asked to choose whether to cast federal or local votes? Maybe this should be a further area of specialization. |
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