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Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death / Re: The Dishonest Minority
« on: May 12, 2011, 02:54:36 PM »
So long as you're admitting you were wrong, I'm happy. Good discussion!
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So therefore all societies must develop guards against huge cocks? That is the logical conclusion of Schneider's argument anyway.
How is developing beneficial mutations tantamount to deception against cooperation? The concept is that cooperative societies must have deceivers who reap benefit from others' cooperation by their deception. Hence in case of bees, there must exist a type of worker bee that tries to pose as a drone so as to be fed without needing to do work.
This, as far as I know, has not happened nor is possible. Yet by Schneider's theory, this is not only possible, it is a requirement, as well as a requirement for the queen, or a class of other bees, to detect and reject such poser workers.
Let me point out further:Quote from: Bruce SchneierAll complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective -- and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives -- as long as they're not too numerous or too effective
Summary: uncooperatives are parasites.
QuoteThe term "dishonest minority" is not a moral judgment; it simply describes the minority who does not follow societal norm. Since many societal norms are in fact immoral, sometimes the dishonest minority serves as a catalyst for social change.
Summary: parasites are...instruments of social change.
Either he is referring to symbiotic parasitism in the latter case (violating his use of the word "uncooperative" in the former), or he is hugely overstepping the limits of the definition of parasitism.
Martin Luther King was very much uncooperative to the status quo during the Civil Rights Era, but I would hardly call him a parasite to society, nor "dishonest" in the manner that he was avoiding the security mechanisms of society.
(I guess you could make that argument, but then what does "dishonest" mean?)
In fact, all I see is Schneider gradually redefining his terms to suit the topic.
And yes guild, sociological. Schneider was the one who brought it into the conversation by making the "dishonest minority" instruments of social change. Sociologically, it is just a relabeling of the existing Marxist framework (yay communism). Marx's contribution to Sociology was the framework that all human society is stratified into classes, and that there is continual conflict between classes. See Marxist Sociology and Conflict theory. So nothing new on that front.
Biologically, Schneider's argument is wholly eclipsed by the evolutionary framework in explaining parasitism. Evolution explains it without issuing blanket statements like "All complex systems contain parasites."
And to go completely overboard, the mathematical definition of a Complex system is one in which the system itself has emergent properties not evident from properties of its constituents. For his argument to be true, one necessary emergent property of ANY system is not just ability to support but existence of constituents who do not contribute to the emergent properties of itself. Consider the Three Body problem in physics. The problem itself is dealing with the mathematical chaos of three sets of very well defined interactions. According to the theory of "dishonest minority", one of the three interactions must be deceptive and not contribute to the chaotic property of the Three Body. Which means the Three Body problem should be generally reducible into a Two Body problem. This is patently, mathematically, false.
lolololololol
- System != Complex system
- Beehive != Single organism
- Randomness != Parasitism
Male bees (drones) are born by one single interaction, that of the queen bee and the cell in which she is laying that egg. Specifically, the larger cells encourage her to lay unfertilized eggs. Bees can and do control the ratio of worker cells to drone cells through a complex interplay of many environmental factors (season, colony size, etc). Even if the process were completely random, that it is random does not necessitate parasitism, much less same-species parasitism.
This is a counter-example, guild. I am not saying all complex systems are like bees, that would be an analogy; rather, bees are an example of a complex system. Calling a whole beehive one organism is very gestalt but not, scientifically speaking, true. That it is one example of a complex system without same-species dishonesty is antithetical to Sneider's original claim that All complex systems have it.
Plus, in reality all he is trying to do is postulate the "necessity" of a security effort to any computer system. That is the core argument of his book. This may or may not have merit from a technical standpoint. But he's arguing from a sociological perspective. And from that perspective, this is unsubstantiated. One can entirely explain the existence of security and parasitism through evolutionary lens and drop his entire argument through scientific parsimony.