I’m trying to think through an idea. These words are simply process of solidifying it in my head.
This is based around Lotkas Principle, the use of natural selection as a fourth law of thermodynamics, and Odum’s Ecological Analog of Ohm’s Law.
It seems to me there exists a mechanism of natural selection for social structures in social systems. I posit this is based on energy/information as in biological and physical systems.
The general idea:
Social structures which are more capacity to utilize energy/information efficiently win out.
I think a good example is that of the theory of the linear progression of history from hunter gatherer through slaves and feudalism to where we are now with liberal capitalism. I have a lot of problems with this theory but it illustrates my point well. At each stage the energy/information efficiency of society increased, the social structures that supported this replacing those that didn’t.
The problem:
This depends on two assumptions. First is that social structures inherently compete for some constrained quantity, and that energy/information utilization helps gain more access to this quantity. Biological systems are constrained by the energy emission of the sun and radioactive decay under the Earth’s crust, but they are also constrained by physical space, breeding partners, etc.
You could base this all on the innate need for energy inherent to the people who make up the social system but this feels like we return back to the original Lotka’s principle. It’s an argument from “well technically everything is physics”, which is one I don’t appreciate. There’s nothing novel in this basis.
There are strict constrained quantities that must be divided among social structures at any given time. For instance people can only be a part of a finite number of social groups, and thus social structures must compete for human attention. There are also a finite number of people at any given time, which provides us another constraint.
My starting point:
There is a feedback loop with relationships, success breeds success and you talk to people you like more often than you don’t. If we interpret human relationships stochastically we can get fuzzy social groups and can avoid doing math on hypergraphs. It also gives us a good probabilistic basis of interpretation so measuring things like entropy is a lot simpler than taking Von-Neumann entropy on a hypergraphs incidence matrix.
If we can solidfy this with simulations we can move onto measuring the actual amount of information being exchanged in these simulations by assuming each person communicates a fixed amount each conversation.
So lets get an agent based model going, something like:
Non-conservative Kinetic Relationship Exchange
Two people contain opinions of each other, i.e. a number in . They meet and a random number is sampled and the new opinion becomes . We can vary as a parameter.
Then let the probability of a person be proportional to the friendship relative to the mass of opinion the person contains.
Wait → this will cause close friends to also have a higher chance of destroying the friendship depending on .
I’ll start coding. I’ll do in manually for the nostalgia.
I’m trying to think through an idea. These words are simply process of solidifying it in my head.
This is based around Lotkas Principle, the use of natural selection as a fourth law of thermodynamics, and Odum’s Ecological Analog of Ohm’s Law.
It seems to me there exists a mechanism of natural selection for social structures in social systems. I posit this is based on energy/information as in biological and physical systems.
The general idea:
Social structures which are more capacity to utilize energy/information efficiently win out.
I think a good example is that of the theory of the linear progression of history from hunter gatherer through slaves and feudalism to where we are now with liberal capitalism. I have a lot of problems with this theory but it illustrates my point well. At each stage the energy/information efficiency of society increased, the social structures that supported this replacing those that didn’t.
The problem:
This depends on two assumptions. First is that social structures inherently compete for some constrained quantity, and that energy/information utilization helps gain more access to this quantity. Biological systems are constrained by the energy emission of the sun and radioactive decay under the Earth’s crust, but they are also constrained by physical space, breeding partners, etc.
You could base this all on the innate need for energy inherent to the people who make up the social system but this feels like we return back to the original Lotka’s principle. It’s an argument from “well technically everything is physics”, which is one I don’t appreciate. There’s nothing novel in this basis.
There are strict constrained quantities that must be divided among social structures at any given time. For instance people can only be a part of a finite number of social groups, and thus social structures must compete for human attention. There are also a finite number of people at any given time, which provides us another constraint.
My starting point:
There is a feedback loop with relationships, success breeds success and you talk to people you like more often than you don’t. If we interpret human relationships stochastically we can get fuzzy social groups and can avoid doing math on hypergraphs. It also gives us a good probabilistic basis of interpretation so measuring things like entropy is a lot simpler than taking Von-Neumann entropy on a hypergraphs incidence matrix.
If we can solidfy this with simulations we can move onto measuring the actual amount of information being exchanged in these simulations by assuming each person communicates a fixed amount each conversation.
So lets get an agent based model going, something like:
Non-conservative Kinetic Relationship Exchange
Two people contain opinions
Then let the probability of a person be proportional to the friendship relative to the mass of opinion the person contains.
Wait → this will cause close friends to also have a higher chance of destroying the friendship depending on
I’ll start coding. I’ll do in manually for the nostalgia.