Ideally, it's Realistic

Apologies for not having written much recently. I’ve tried a few times - even ‘finished’ a couple of pieces and then thought “nah, not really quite there yet”. I also have too many ‘unfinished’ thoughts - ideas that have not yet crystallized enough. So, just to say ‘hello’ to everyone and to not get too rusty, I thought I’d try to say a bit about one of those things that has occupied me over the last few weeks.

When I think about some of the major issues that concern me I keep veering towards a ‘framing’ of idealism vs realism. I think we can blame Rikard for this; his comment on how idealism tends to close down the ‘solution space’ whereas realism implies an exploration of this space to optimise things has been bubbling away under the surface.

It is, I believe, an idea worth pursuing. So I’m going to try to lay out some of my initial thoughts. It’s a work in progress and will doubtless contain some woolly shit, but it is what it is and isn’t what it isn’t and water is also wet.

One of the ways of thinking about evolution is as an ‘exploration’ of the solution space to find a (locally) optimised solution. Evolution works on what is already there and seeks (not consciously, obviously) to find a ‘better’ way of doing things. Better here, of course, means an improvement in reproductive fitness. Over time you end up with the appearance of ‘design’ as if someone had planned it all out.

Now, take a look at almost any object in your house. The toaster, the TV, the light switch and ask how did it get there? Obviously these items have really been designed, but think about the underlying system that had to be in place in order to make that happen. You click on that ‘buy now’ button and, as if by magic, it arrives on your doorstep and you can now make better toast.

If you had to build this ‘system’ from scratch, could you do it? Could anyone? Think about all of the component parts - from the mining to the machining to the distribution networks required - it is an ‘impossibly’ complex system that needed to be in place before you could get your hands on the device of breakfast joy.

Each ‘element’ - and the more you think about the requirements the more you realize just how many ‘elements’ need to be in place - has been designed by someone, but you quickly realize that the system as a whole is far too complex to have been engineered (designed) from scratch by any one individual, or even some committee of very smart people.

Bit by bit, over history, the ‘system’ has grown and advanced. There has been no central planning to much of it - it isn’t the work of some cabal of Einsteins - and yet it works. It is more accurate to describe it as an evolved system. Various ‘mutations’ have been tried - and some failed whereas others succeeded - and gradually there has been some kind of optimisation (which may only be locally optimised given the initial conditions).

The drivers for much of it have been more ‘base’ - greed, the desire for material comfort, and so on - but the result has been the steady (but decidedly patchy) improvement of the lot of humanity in a material sense.

Along comes your typical idealist. I was once one of those. What will they see? They’ll see inequity and unfairness everywhere. There are winners and losers and there are a few winners who seem to win beyond any ‘reasonable’ measure. The idealist will then say things like “we need to do X” where X is some way of helping more of the losers.

The idealist, thus, seeks to throw the spanner of compassion into the works. It’s kind of like someone deciding that it’s really unfair that some birds fly faster than others and so the fast flying ones have to be limited by attaching weights to their wings. Such an attempt at introducing ‘equity’ would, I think we might all agree, be a colossal fuck-up.

It’s another of those “it is what it is” kind of statements (and water is still wet) but any attempt to perturb the system will, erm . . . , well . . . , perturb the system. But no-one alive is smart enough to be able to figure out all of the consequences of introducing that perturbation to such an existing complex system. Some will be smart enough to figure out some of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th order effects - and that might be enough in some cases - but the general rule should be “tinker at your peril”.

That ‘peril’ might be something we want. I’m not a fan of full free-market ‘capitalism’. It does, in my view, need to be constrained (the perturbation) so that excesses can be moderated - and this will likely lead to a reduction in ‘optimisation’ (the reduction being the ‘peril’). We might then think in terms of things like ‘moral’ optimisation vs ‘economic’ optimisation - and where we would like to strike that balance.

But any tinkering with a system that has, by and large, organically evolved will affect the equilibrium that has developed as a response to the environmental pressures. In biology the environment is anything that affects reproductive fitness. In terms of this human-derived complex ‘system’ I’m alluding to, the metrics of success (the equivalent of reproductive fitness in biological systems) will be different - things like maximising profit or efficiency, amongst others.

A good way to really perturb the system is to have a war. All sorts of benefits accrue to those who know how to exploit such things. Wars are a bit like a reboot of the system in some sense, or the installation of a new operating system.

In maths terms we’re talking about constrained optimisation. The difficulty is in deciding which constraints are the ‘right’ ones. If you’re one of those influential ‘elites’ you may seek to constrain the system in ways that benefit you without worrying about how those constraints affect the majority too much. This is like WEF thinking - a system designed and promoted to benefit a certain class of people at the expense of those ‘happy’ people who no longer own anything. The constraints and ‘success’ conditions are different for the WEF weirdos than those us normal plebs might choose. The ones who are in ‘control’ are the ones who get to influence the environment and who can set the parameters for ‘success’ within that environment - the ‘system’ will then respond by optimising against the given constraints and success conditions.

If you want to ‘understand’ the WEFoids and the like - look to the underlying constraints and parameters for success they’re arguing for, because that reveals their optimisation strategy. What conditions are they trying to optimise for?

In a manufacturing process these things become more apparent. Suppose you have a factory that at full speed is capable of making 1,000 items per day. However, running at that speed can only be done with an error rate (defective product) of 10%. You can run slower and introduce expensive equipment to reduce that error to 1% but that means you can only make 500 items per day. You may want to set ‘maximise profit’ as your overall success parameter. You may want to set ‘maximise quality’ as your overall success parameter - or you may want to set ‘maximise profit given a threshold quality’ parameter - or the other way round, demand a certain quality consistent with a minimum profit threshold. And so on.

This is the ‘textbook’ example of a constrained optimisation problem and the constraints and ‘success’ parameters determine the shape of the eventual solution.

When you’re a (naïve) idealist you will think “tax the rich, give to the poor” as a good solution. It’s a very popular idea because most of us aren’t rich and as human beings we have a shit load of envy and jealousy lurking amongst the compassion. The ‘success’ parameter here is a more equitable distribution of wealth. This is an attempt to reset the system’s ‘reproductive fitness’ into what we might call “equity fitness”. The system will then try to optimize according to this new set of success parameters.

It doesn’t ‘work’, of course, because you’re optimising against the wrong success parameter. For example, if everyone is equally poor (a very ‘equitable’ solution) then the system succeeds in its optimisation (to maximise equity). Job done!

Idealism, in its purest form, tends I think to be totalitarian in nature. It seeks to impose an ‘ideal’. It constrains the kind of ‘solutions’ that can be achieved.

Letting the ‘system’ run free to ‘evolve’ to optimise against different success parameters (like maximising profit) might not produce the best ‘moral’ results, either, but it will enable a more thorough exploration of the solution space (given the constraints).

If we want some degree of ‘morality’, where people have some intrinsic value above their function as cogs in a vast system of profit maximisation, then we might wish to set certain minimum threshold constraints that will (almost inevitably?) lead to a reduced profit.

Note that a ‘free’ system to maximise profit can produce ‘moral’ improvements. There’s a good example of this in Gaskell’s North and South where the ‘hero’ mill owner argues that improved (and expensive) air filtration improves the health of his workers and so he gets more productive work from them. By being ‘morally good’ to his workers he’s actually maximising profit is his argument.

Like I said - my thinking hasn’t fully crystallised yet and all you very fine people reading will doubtless spot flaws and inconsistencies in what I’m trying to piece together here. I’ve spotted a few myself, but will press on regardless.

If we take almost any ‘hot topic’ of the day we can often frame it in terms of idealism vs realism. This is perhaps most readily apparent when it comes to something like the whole GCF¹ where, amongst other things, you end up with some middle-aged men who turn themselves into Frankenlumps (the reality) against the imagined view of rainbow glitter beauty they desire (the ideal).

As the wonderful Róisín Michaux intimates, you have to be particularly lucky when playing meat-Lego for the reality to approximate to the ideal to any reasonable degree.

Brave? Probably. Stunning? In the sense of ‘set phasers to stun’ then definitely. Beautiful? Well, perhaps we can leave that to the eye of the beholder.

Unfortunately, Stevie Wonder, his victim, was unavailable for comment.

As I’ve written about recently, and others have explained better than I ever could, there is a very worrying recent trend, almost certainly amplified by social media and heavily promoted by ‘mainstream’ sources, to blur the distinction between reality and idealism.

The Gazans, allegedly on the brink of being wiped out by mass starvation, have recently popped up in post-Trump-deal photos looking remarkably well-fed. It’s a classic example of idealism (in this case a kind of negative idealism which posits ‘Zionists’ as uniquely cruel and evil) vs the reality. The ideal has been heavily promoted by the mainstream with the word ‘genocide’ being the negative ideal of the day.

The idealism of mass immigration jars with the reality of its economic and social consequences which are all too apparent to see. In the US Trump is trying to tackle this head-on, perhaps in a way that is overly authoritarian and harsh, but the idealism of ‘due process’, a good ideal, is not capable of dealing with the scale of the problem, the reality². The reality is ‘serious problem that needs to be fixed asap’ vs the idealism of allowing the (very) slow process of due process. Another of those issues I’m trying to crystallise my thinking on - the conflict between the ideal of doing things right and fairly according to principles set when things were nowhere near this bad, vs the reality of the scale of the immediate problem.

The ideal of ‘saving the planet by tweaking the big CO₂ control knob in the sky’ vs the reality of national impoverishment and restriction.

But what do we do when (by design, I believe) there is no firm agreement on what reality is? You end up with idealism running amok without any tempering mechanisms. You end up with perturbations to the system all over the place and optimisations against all the wrong things.

Eventually you realise that the system reprogramming you ordered (change of success parameters and constraints) has right royally buggered things up. At this stage you can try to implement ‘patches’ - or further perturbations - or you can roll-back the operating system to a previous working version and start again.

These, such as they are, are my current musings on the state of play. Unfinished, uncalibrated, incomplete, and inadequate. I have had some family commitments over the last few weeks and also for the next couple of weeks and may not be able to write much (I hope this will not be the case) but I wanted to at least write something today - as unpolished as it might be.

1. Gender Cluster Fuck

2. You’d have to import millions of lawyers and judges and federal agents perhaps?