From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson)
Subject: Re: Libertarians & Butterflies (Was: Re: Causes of the "Cultural Elite")
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 15:25:06 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA

In article <AeP0nrq00h5yA4UZts@andrew.cmu.edu> Conrad Poelman <cp2w+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>I think this chaos theory stuff is being horribly misapplied to the
>discussion of political principles, or at least the connection is not
>being made clearly at all.  For one thing, isn't the interesting thing
>about chaos theory that tiny perturbations in an initial condition can
>have huge effects on the resulting system?  Well, the government is not
>a tiny effect, nor is it an initial condition - it is part of the
>equations modelling the system's behavior. 

  But it's also a result.   Don't forget that one of the defining features
  of a complex system is that it's full of feedback loops, locally,
  globally, everywhere.   You can't change one part without effects 
  rippling through the whole system.

  But my point is that such macroscopics (e.g. government) are the product
  of local interactions ("emergent behavior").  The mistake that too many
  people make is thinking the government is acting as some kind of free
  agent here ("The government does this, the government does that"). 
  That's not how macroscopic features of complex systems behave -- they
  are results of all the *detail* of the system.   The decisions that individual
  members of the government (say, a Congressman, a regulator, or a petty
  bureaucrat) make are the products of *lots* of political, social and other 
  forces impinging on them.   The congressman has to consider pressure groups,
  fundraising, voter sentiment, the press, log-rolling deals he's trying to
  cut with colleagues, etc.  And as an individual he is also the product
  of the culture: his own childhood, religious training, education, the
  extent to which he's been influenced by advertising, popular culture, etc

  It is impossible to posit different behavior on the part of the government
  without first positing a different underlying culture and different behavior
  on the part of the individuals which comprise the culture.   THAT is
  my central message.



> Government directly controls about 40% of our nation's economy, and indirectly
> (through regulation) controls a vast portion of the rest of it.  I think it's
> absurd to say that radical changes of this magnitude will not cause any
> predictable changes in the outcome.

  OK then make a prediction.   Not a theoretical one like "if they hypo-
  thetically did raised the marginal income tax rate to 99% I would predict
  <X> result".  Take some actual government action, such as the recent Fed
  lowering of the discount rate, or the proposed 25% cutback in the DoD
  budget, and predict a testable result.  I'm not saying things that
  big don't have effects; I'm saying you can't reliably predict those
  effects.    



>mathematical equations, and I realize that these sorts of equations are
>used to model many real-world situations, but you haven't said how your
>arguments apply to government but not to, say, an object moving at a
>constant velocity through space.  We clearly are able to predict the
>behavior of those things, even over billions of years.

  But increase the complexity of an n-body problem to even a few objects
  and it becomes mathematically vastly more complex, even when the 
  only interaction between those objects is gravitational.  And you're
  still many, many orders of magnitude below the complexity of living
  organisms.   


>I can clearly predict, in a general way, that the results of communism
>will be economic failure.

  I can predict the effects of setting of a thermonuclear device over 
  a small island on the instantaneous deer population of that island
  too.

  But you can't predict whether people will choose communism in the
  first place, or what sorts of policies will fix their economy after 
  it has collapsed, or whether their leadership will get themselves
  into a war to try to distract them from their poverty, or whether a
  civil war will break when/if they try to break away from communism, 
  or whether they will backslide (i.e., will the current eastern
  European and XSSR's reinstate autocratic government and give up 
  their reforms?), or whether they will attempt to sell off gold, oil,
  etc cheaply for foregn currency, and if so how successful they will
  be and what effect it will have on commodities prices.

  The point is that you can't make *interesting*, *useful* predictions
  with any of the current models.  There is simply nothing about the
  current models that would have reliably predicted 20 years ago the
  current relative GDP growth of Hong Kong, Singapore, Sweden, Canada,
  the US, West Germany, and Japan, just to pull some ideologically
  disparate places out of a hat.       

  What I'm complaining about is that all of the "isms" out there have
  far more faith in the reliability and quality of their models than is
  justified on any theoretical basis.  

   
>think that when those predictions fail, the reason is more likely to be
>unpredictable events which influence the system rather than the
>"butterfly effect" of some tiny initial condition.

  Here's a butterfly effect:  When Saddam Hussein was a child Iraq was
  very poor and many, many children died of simple childhood diseases.
  If he had died at that time, it would have been a completely trivial,
  unnoticed event (butterfly event) in the life of their nation.   But
  it would have totally altered future lives, fortunes, and history
  in Iraq and the world.   Hell, if he had just gotten a slightly 
  different combination of his parent's genes at conception he might have
  turned out totally differently.   The whole point about Lorenz's "butter-
  fly effect" joke is that tiny, "noise" events happen all the time by
  the zillions, and can percolate up and totally confound efforts to 
  predict the macroscopic behavior of chaotic systems.  


>Anyway, I'm certainly interested in hearing a more detailed explanation
>of your ideas.  I just think you're making very overblown claims which
>you haven't supported with what you've said so far.  If you're going to
>apply mathematical models, point out what the variables are, what the
>equations are, what inputs there are to the system, what the initial
>conditions are, etc.

  Nobody can specify what those are and that's the point!  Human
  societies have all the attributes of complex systems including 
  sensitive dependence of initial conditions and emergent behavior.
  Intellectual honesty should compel us to consider what this 
  means about our ability to model it.


---peter
  
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