Dear Sudo folk -
A reminder that Friday Filosophy will start at noon again today at Sudo Room. This week we’ll be talking about the Imperative of Responsibility. The filo dough entree today will again be Spanakopita from Bacheeso's on Grand (http://www.bacheesos.net/).
Last week we focused on how we would go about describing the shift from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy. We started by watching the "Fear the Boom and Bust" video clip - a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem, at http://youtu.be/d0nERTFo-Sk. We also read an excerpt (included at the bottom) from Joel Mokyr - The Gifts of Athena.
We ended with a pretty useful question - How do we know, or rather how should we demonstrate, that openness is in itself good? We consistently assume that open means good, but it’s actually used as descriptive of engineering principles and even of entire systems, but without any explicit sort of moral claim. Though we didn’t arrive at a confident answer at the time, we were able to conclude though that best practices for Sudo Room initiatives would be at the intersection of -- (1) openness as a more efficient means of developing technology; and (2) openness in terms of transparency for democratic reasons.
To start us off somewhere on the relationship between openness and ethics, I’ve suggested below an excerpt from Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility. We can of course, as is now traditional, go with whatever else people want to talk about as well.
-sent from eddan.com
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Friday Filosophy, 1/18; The Imperative of Responsibility
Knowledge, under these circumstances, becomes a prime duty beyond anything claimed for it heretofore, and the knowledge must be commensurate with the causal scale of our action. The fact that it cannot really be thus commensurate, that is, that the predictive knowledge falls behind the technical knowledge that nourishes our power to act, itself assumes ethical importance. The gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act creates a novel moral problem. With the latter so superior to the former, recognition of ignorance becomes the obverse of the duty to know and thus part of the ethics that must govern the evermore necessary self-policing of our outsized might. No previous ethics had to consider the global condition of human life and the far-off future, even existence, of the race. These now being an issue demands, in brief, a new conception of duties and rights, for which previous ethics and metaphysics provide not even the principles, let alone a ready doctrine.
[1. The Altered Nature of Human Action; III. The New Dimensions of Responsibility; (2) The New Role of Knowledge in Morality]
Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (1984). [http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Imperative_of_Responsibility.html?i…]
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Friday Filosophy, 1/11; Post-Industrial Society
How should we think of resistance to new knowledge? Knowledge systems are self-organizing systems that in many ways can be thought of in evolutionary terms. The idea of self-organizing decentralized systems, or "catallaxy" as Hayek has called it, is one of the most powerful and influential ideas of the modern age ... Outside economics, self-organizing systems appear throughout our social system. Language, for instance, is such a system, as are science, technology, the arts, manners, and so on. These systems are all information systems that are organized in a particular fashion. They are, in effect, conventions, and as such self-replicating. Conventions are not chosen; they evolve (Sugden, 1989). Ex ante, an infinite number of ways of organizing the information can be imagined, but once the system settles on a Nash equilibrium, certain rules are observed that give the system its coherence. Ideally we would like it to be an ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) in which no single individual or knowledge systems, they do change, although it is possible for such systems to lapse eventually into complete stasis.
Joel Mokyr - The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (2002), pg. 221 [http://books.google.com/books?id=ivmaEn7vTT0C&pg=PA221&lpg=PA221&dq=%22how+…]
Dear Sudo folk -
In anticipation of the Oakland Wiki Edit-a-thon this Sunday --
12-1p: Brown Couch Cafe noontime meet-n-greet
1-5p: Oakland History Room, 2nd floor of Oakland Public Library (main branch)
-- eddan.com is pleased to announce the first meeting of the Goldrush Operations Research Pod (GORP), which will take place immediately following the aforementioned event.
After the Edit-a-Thon wraps up, those interested in taking part in the exploratory committee to establish GORP will all head on over to Lake Chalet for food, drink, and a great view of Lake Merritt (http://www.thelakechalet.com/), which is about half a block from the Oakland Library.
As one possible branch of research focus, I'd like to propose seeking historical evidence of the extent of violence in those early Wild West days of the California Goldrush. If you were to base your knowledge of what it was like then entirely on movies and TV shows, you'd likely conclude that it was a very violent place. You'd think that everyone always felt in danger of being robbed or bullied, that justice was meted out instantaneously by shoot-out, and it would seem like there couldn't have been much time left over for gold mining.
Turns out that this period was relatively peaceful, especially during the first year before the hoards came from all over the world. When you think about it, the cost to the miners of forming agreements could not have been so high that it was more economical to compete through fighting than to collaborate and divvy up the spoils. John R. Umbeck, in A Theory of Property Rights: With Application to the California Gold Rush (1981), works through the choices that these gold-miners had in entering into a contract with one another rather than resorting to the use of violence.
He breaks down this process of contract formation into 3 closely related, yet logically distinct choices:
Individuals must decide whether or not they want to enter into a contract with others.
If they decide to form some contractual arrangement, the next decision is what rights or constraints they will place on resource use.
Finally, they must agree on how these rights will be distributed or which individuals will be allowed the rights to use and derive income from the resources.
He argues that you can actually come to an equilibrium of relative peace when most of everyone's efforts go into productively mining for gold through the prudent administration of property rights. In order to maximize the chance of these optimal conditions, the total amount of mining land would, he concludes, best be divided evenly among competing miners. This is basically the theoretical model supporting the evidence of sharing contracts in the historical analysis of early gold miner agreements.
From a wealth-maximizing reasonable person point of view, he suggests that all exclusive rights are ultimately based on the threat or the use of violence. I think there's something sadly true about that. Whenever a group of individuals agrees to some system by which exclusive rights to scarce resources will be rationed, they are implicitly agreeing not to use violence. Even when one excludes the use of weapons, the contract must provide for the use of violence in order to punish any member who does not follow the rules; and it must maintain the rights of members against attacks from non-members.
If the group is not willing or able to use violence in either of these two situations, their property rights over resources will be lost to those who are. To clarify - by violence, Umbeck means the labor time allocated to the use of physical force against another miner. So this isn't just about gun fighting and theft, but rather also includes such activity as building walls for protection or even making threats to allocate labor to these uses.
For those graphically inclined, the diagram below from his chapter on Violence and Property Rights Contracts might make more sense. Miners X and Y are each willing to allocate AQ/BA labor to exclude other miners from a marginal unit of land. Miner Z, with no land, is willing to use DO/O labor to exclude X or Y from the unit of land.
The horizontal axis measures the ratio of land to labor as inputs in the mining process. The vertical axis measures the marginal product of land (∂G/∂h) and labor (∂G/∂L). Ignoring any work-leisure tradeoffs, this individual has a fixed amount of labor (L) that he is willing to allocate to mining in this time period. Suppose ∂G/∂h = AC = 10 gold units; ∂G/∂L = AB - 1 unit.
An extra unit of land would increase the miner's wealth by 10 units of gold, while the extra labor unit would increase it by only 1. He would be willing to allocate up to 10 labor units to violence if it would get him an additional unit of land. Equilibrium will only be reached when X, Y, and Z all have the same land/labor ratio, OP. Here, they are each willing to allocate PT/PS labor to violence, so any additional conflict will result in a draw. With OP land and L labor, each miner will be producing ODTP units of gold.
sent from eddan.com
