I don’t exactly think it’s collapsing to perception-only. The state is still acting, and still perceiving, but the dimensionality has been compressed. Often to two or three dimensions, GDP and inflation and unemployment (or in countries with a currency peg, replace inflation with bond rates).
Try designing a self driving car with a three pixel camera! A country is even more complex than a car—it contains many cars, for instance.
Meanwhile the actual people in the country are still doing high-dimensional things like raising children (a tremendous amount of perception, cognition, and action is needed even to raise kids somewhat badly), raising crops, finding mates, running logistics and delivery for groceries… but none of that registers in the system’s measurements, so people end up having to either try to evade the system’s unhelpful notice or treat it as a sucker to be fooled & extracted from, just to live good lifecycles or accomplish other goals like scientific research or tech development.
I think the portrayal of Augustus in I, Claudius might be a more illustrative example than a depressive in a dark room. He’s the apex of a system of narcissistic supply: everyone’s committed to treating him like he’s in charge when he’s in the room, but they don’t think he can be effectively informed or reasoned with, so they fight each other by trying to control his access to information so he makes the decisions they need him to make & thinks they’re all his ideas.
The measurement problem here is better covered in the linked piece on Solow convergence, and in Statisticism, which criticizes the tendency to fixate on low-dimensional indicators that aggregate lots of details as evidence to find out how things are going, like reading the newspaper and counting negative and positive stories.
I very much appreciate the active listening.
I don’t exactly think it’s collapsing to perception-only. The state is still acting, and still perceiving, but the dimensionality has been compressed. Often to two or three dimensions, GDP and inflation and unemployment (or in countries with a currency peg, replace inflation with bond rates).
Try designing a self driving car with a three pixel camera! A country is even more complex than a car—it contains many cars, for instance.
Meanwhile the actual people in the country are still doing high-dimensional things like raising children (a tremendous amount of perception, cognition, and action is needed even to raise kids somewhat badly), raising crops, finding mates, running logistics and delivery for groceries… but none of that registers in the system’s measurements, so people end up having to either try to evade the system’s unhelpful notice or treat it as a sucker to be fooled & extracted from, just to live good lifecycles or accomplish other goals like scientific research or tech development.
I think the portrayal of Augustus in I, Claudius might be a more illustrative example than a depressive in a dark room. He’s the apex of a system of narcissistic supply: everyone’s committed to treating him like he’s in charge when he’s in the room, but they don’t think he can be effectively informed or reasoned with, so they fight each other by trying to control his access to information so he makes the decisions they need him to make & thinks they’re all his ideas.
The measurement problem here is better covered in the linked piece on Solow convergence, and in Statisticism, which criticizes the tendency to fixate on low-dimensional indicators that aggregate lots of details as evidence to find out how things are going, like reading the newspaper and counting negative and positive stories.