Suppose you have a list of choices a selection must be made from, and that the decision theory axioms of orderability and transitivity apply.
It should then be possible to construct a binary tree representing this list of choices, such that a choice can be represented as a binary string.
Likewise, a binary string, in a certain sense, represents a choice.
In this specific sense, what computers automate is the process of selection, of choice. Noticing this, and noticing that computers have automated away considerable amounts of “work”, we must notice that “work”, in the occupational sense, is to a significant extent the process of making selections. The process of mechanization has been the process of converting physical labor into selective labor, and in some cases the creation of physical heuristics that substantially solve selective problems—a vacuum operates on a physical heuristic that things of certain sizes and weights are undesirable to have on/in carpeting, for instance.
Noticing that the information age has largely been an ongoing project of automating selection efforts, one notable exception does crop up—cases of crowdsources selection efforts. Upvotes and downvotes and retweets and the various other crowdsourced mechanisms by which selective pressure is created are selective labor. We tend to think of this process as being to our own benefit, but I will observe the massive amount of monetary value that is extracted by the hosting platforms in the process—value that the hosting platforms enable, but does not create.
There are additionally individuals who create value—and, I would hope, a livelihood—based purely on selective labor we might not notice as labor. Curated musical lists, for example. Additionally, I notice an increasing trend of corporate entities performing selective effort on behalf of individual clients; when you get down to it, housing renting versus buying is a tradeoff between selection power (the ability to make selections) versus selection effort (the requirement to do so). And I notice the cost of renting is increasing relative to the cost of buying, and yet people I know who could buy, are still choosing to rent, and those who do buy, are increasingly buying housing which limits their exposure to selection effort (such as buying condos, duplexes, and in HOAs).
Other ways in which it looks like society is increasingly outsourcing selective effort: Political beliefs, truth-deciding (science), investment, maintenance of household items, movie selection, book selection, food selection. Anything where a company sends people a box of preselected items on a regular basis, where that is supplanting a previous personal selection effort.
The combination of these two things, to me, is interesting, combined with other observations of society. Because the high degree of selective effort we undertake for free in some situations, combined with what I can only describe as an increasingly widespread social resistance to other forms of selective effort, looks like fatigue of executive function. We spend considerable effort making decisions for the financial benefit of social media corporations, and have little selective energy left to make decisions about our own lives.
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This situation might be a problem, might not. It looks odd to me, to be certain, and I’m increasingly dubious over the structure of ownership of commons whose value is not created by those who extract value from them.
However, I think it’s more important than I’m suggesting here. I’ll return to the idea that mechanization has been the process of eliminating all work except selective effort: This suggests that the effectiveness of a corporation is entirely in how effectively selective efforts take place.
The problem for a corporation, government, or other large impersonal entity is compounded, because the first selective effort, is selecting people to make selective efforts, who in turn will be selecting people to make selective efforts. A structure must be created to maintain a consistent form of selective effort—bureaucracy.
This begins to look a lot like the alignment problem, because, indeed, that’s basically what it is. And it is perhaps illlustrative that thousands of years of social development have only really come up with one functional solution to the problem of alignment corruption: Competition, such that structures whose alignment becomes corrupted are dismantled or destroyed. Which is to say, yet another form of selection.
Only loosely related but your first sentences prompted it: A way to convert complex decisions into a tree of binary choices for humans is Final Version Perfected.
Another phrase for “binary string” is “number”. A choice can be represented by a number, ok. I think you’re skipping the hard part—discovering the choices, and mapping them to numbers.
Then you lose me when you start talking about crowdsourcing and political beliefs and investment and such. That’s all the hard part of mapping. And the resulting map is likely to be uncomputable given current limits (possibly even theoretically, if the computation includes the substrate on which it’s computing).
I don’t think there’s any logical chain here—just rambling.
The point is that meaningful labor is increasingly “selection effort”, the work involved in making a decision between multiple competing choices, and some starter thoughts about how society can be viewed once you notice the idea of making choices as meaningful labor (maybe even the only meaningful form of labor).
The idea of mapping binary strings to choices is a point that information is equivalent to a codification of a sequence of choices; that is, the process of making choices is in fact the process of creating information. For a choice between N options, the options can be considered a series of binary gates, whose value can be 0 or 1, and thus the choice between those options produces a binary string; information. Or a number, if you prefer to think of it that way. That is, making decisions is an information-producing activity.
I’m not sure if I’m just misunderstanding, or actively disagreeing.
Whether you model something as a tree of binary choices, or a lookup table of options doesn’t matter much on this level. The tree is less efficient, but easier to modify, but that’s a completely different level than your post seems to be about, and not relevant to whatever you’re trying to show.
But the hard and important point is NOT in making the decision or executing the choice(s) (whether a jump or a sequence of binary). That just does not matter. Actually identifying the options and decisions and figuring out what decisions are POSSIBLE is the only thing that matters.
The FRAMING of decisions is massively information-producing. Making decisions is also information-producing (in that the uncertainty of the future becomes the truth of the past), but isn’t “information labor” in the same way that creating the model is.
What are you calling the “framing” of a decision? Is it something other than a series of decisions about what qualities with regard to the results of that decision that you care about?
The “framing” of a decision is the identification that there’s a decision to make, and the enumeration of the set or series of sub-decisions that describe the possible actions.
Suppose for a moment your washing machine is broken.
You have some options; you could ignore the problem. You could try to fix it yourself. You could call somebody to fix it. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list of options, mind, these are cached thoughts.
Each of these options in turn produce new choices; what to do instead, what to try to do to fix it, who to call.
Let’s suppose for a moment that you decide to call somebody. Who do you call? You could dial random numbers into your phone, but clearly that’s not a great way of making that decision. You could look up a washing machine repair company on the internet; let’s suppose you do this.
How do you decide which repair company to call? There are reviews—these are choices other people have made about how they liked the service. But before you even get there, what site do you use to get reviews? That’s a choice. Maybe you let Google make that choice for you—you just pick whatever is the first listed site. The search engine is making choices for you; the review site algorithm is making choices for you; the people who posted reviews are making choices for you. Out of a vast space of options, you arrive at only a few.
Notice all the choices other people are making on your behalf in that process, however. You’re not calling a car mechanic to repair your washing machine, yet that is, in fact, an option.
---
Suppose you need to drive to a grocery store in a new city. What choices are you making, and what choices do you ask your cell phone navigation application to make for you? Are you making more or less choices than your parents would? What about your grandparents? What is the difference in the kind and quantity of choices being made?
Are there differences in the quality of choices being made? Who benefits from the choices we make now?
Suppose you have a list of choices a selection must be made from, and that the decision theory axioms of orderability and transitivity apply.
It should then be possible to construct a binary tree representing this list of choices, such that a choice can be represented as a binary string.
Likewise, a binary string, in a certain sense, represents a choice.
In this specific sense, what computers automate is the process of selection, of choice. Noticing this, and noticing that computers have automated away considerable amounts of “work”, we must notice that “work”, in the occupational sense, is to a significant extent the process of making selections. The process of mechanization has been the process of converting physical labor into selective labor, and in some cases the creation of physical heuristics that substantially solve selective problems—a vacuum operates on a physical heuristic that things of certain sizes and weights are undesirable to have on/in carpeting, for instance.
Noticing that the information age has largely been an ongoing project of automating selection efforts, one notable exception does crop up—cases of crowdsources selection efforts. Upvotes and downvotes and retweets and the various other crowdsourced mechanisms by which selective pressure is created are selective labor. We tend to think of this process as being to our own benefit, but I will observe the massive amount of monetary value that is extracted by the hosting platforms in the process—value that the hosting platforms enable, but does not create.
There are additionally individuals who create value—and, I would hope, a livelihood—based purely on selective labor we might not notice as labor. Curated musical lists, for example. Additionally, I notice an increasing trend of corporate entities performing selective effort on behalf of individual clients; when you get down to it, housing renting versus buying is a tradeoff between selection power (the ability to make selections) versus selection effort (the requirement to do so). And I notice the cost of renting is increasing relative to the cost of buying, and yet people I know who could buy, are still choosing to rent, and those who do buy, are increasingly buying housing which limits their exposure to selection effort (such as buying condos, duplexes, and in HOAs).
Other ways in which it looks like society is increasingly outsourcing selective effort: Political beliefs, truth-deciding (science), investment, maintenance of household items, movie selection, book selection, food selection. Anything where a company sends people a box of preselected items on a regular basis, where that is supplanting a previous personal selection effort.
The combination of these two things, to me, is interesting, combined with other observations of society. Because the high degree of selective effort we undertake for free in some situations, combined with what I can only describe as an increasingly widespread social resistance to other forms of selective effort, looks like fatigue of executive function. We spend considerable effort making decisions for the financial benefit of social media corporations, and have little selective energy left to make decisions about our own lives.
---
This situation might be a problem, might not. It looks odd to me, to be certain, and I’m increasingly dubious over the structure of ownership of commons whose value is not created by those who extract value from them.
However, I think it’s more important than I’m suggesting here. I’ll return to the idea that mechanization has been the process of eliminating all work except selective effort: This suggests that the effectiveness of a corporation is entirely in how effectively selective efforts take place.
The problem for a corporation, government, or other large impersonal entity is compounded, because the first selective effort, is selecting people to make selective efforts, who in turn will be selecting people to make selective efforts. A structure must be created to maintain a consistent form of selective effort—bureaucracy.
This begins to look a lot like the alignment problem, because, indeed, that’s basically what it is. And it is perhaps illlustrative that thousands of years of social development have only really come up with one functional solution to the problem of alignment corruption: Competition, such that structures whose alignment becomes corrupted are dismantled or destroyed. Which is to say, yet another form of selection.
Only loosely related but your first sentences prompted it: A way to convert complex decisions into a tree of binary choices for humans is Final Version Perfected.
Another phrase for “binary string” is “number”. A choice can be represented by a number, ok. I think you’re skipping the hard part—discovering the choices, and mapping them to numbers.
Then you lose me when you start talking about crowdsourcing and political beliefs and investment and such. That’s all the hard part of mapping. And the resulting map is likely to be uncomputable given current limits (possibly even theoretically, if the computation includes the substrate on which it’s computing).
I don’t think there’s any logical chain here—just rambling.
The point is that meaningful labor is increasingly “selection effort”, the work involved in making a decision between multiple competing choices, and some starter thoughts about how society can be viewed once you notice the idea of making choices as meaningful labor (maybe even the only meaningful form of labor).
The idea of mapping binary strings to choices is a point that information is equivalent to a codification of a sequence of choices; that is, the process of making choices is in fact the process of creating information. For a choice between N options, the options can be considered a series of binary gates, whose value can be 0 or 1, and thus the choice between those options produces a binary string; information. Or a number, if you prefer to think of it that way. That is, making decisions is an information-producing activity.
I’m not sure if I’m just misunderstanding, or actively disagreeing.
Whether you model something as a tree of binary choices, or a lookup table of options doesn’t matter much on this level. The tree is less efficient, but easier to modify, but that’s a completely different level than your post seems to be about, and not relevant to whatever you’re trying to show.
But the hard and important point is NOT in making the decision or executing the choice(s) (whether a jump or a sequence of binary). That just does not matter. Actually identifying the options and decisions and figuring out what decisions are POSSIBLE is the only thing that matters.
The FRAMING of decisions is massively information-producing. Making decisions is also information-producing (in that the uncertainty of the future becomes the truth of the past), but isn’t “information labor” in the same way that creating the model is.
What are you calling the “framing” of a decision? Is it something other than a series of decisions about what qualities with regard to the results of that decision that you care about?
The “framing” of a decision is the identification that there’s a decision to make, and the enumeration of the set or series of sub-decisions that describe the possible actions.
Suppose for a moment your washing machine is broken.
You have some options; you could ignore the problem. You could try to fix it yourself. You could call somebody to fix it. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list of options, mind, these are cached thoughts.
Each of these options in turn produce new choices; what to do instead, what to try to do to fix it, who to call.
Let’s suppose for a moment that you decide to call somebody. Who do you call? You could dial random numbers into your phone, but clearly that’s not a great way of making that decision. You could look up a washing machine repair company on the internet; let’s suppose you do this.
How do you decide which repair company to call? There are reviews—these are choices other people have made about how they liked the service. But before you even get there, what site do you use to get reviews? That’s a choice. Maybe you let Google make that choice for you—you just pick whatever is the first listed site. The search engine is making choices for you; the review site algorithm is making choices for you; the people who posted reviews are making choices for you. Out of a vast space of options, you arrive at only a few.
Notice all the choices other people are making on your behalf in that process, however. You’re not calling a car mechanic to repair your washing machine, yet that is, in fact, an option.
---
Suppose you need to drive to a grocery store in a new city. What choices are you making, and what choices do you ask your cell phone navigation application to make for you? Are you making more or less choices than your parents would? What about your grandparents? What is the difference in the kind and quantity of choices being made?
Are there differences in the quality of choices being made? Who benefits from the choices we make now?