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.
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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?
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?