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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Shutting Off Feedback or How We Got Into This Fine Mess |
| 2019-11-05 |
| [AccordingToHoyt] One of the things I loved about biology was the concept of feedback. If you get too much inventivium in your blood system, your science fictioning gland shuts down so you don’t get too far from reality. (What, you don’t have those? Really?) ...Well, now I think about it, most feedback is annoying. Economics is full of it ‐ as are other economic systems ‐ and humans find it so annoying they have devised various means of shutting it down, and then become puzzled and do crazy stuff when the system goes out of control. Take price controls. They deliberately shut down feedback. The idea is "people need to eat and the essentials should be cheap." We went tons of rounds on this in the seventies in Portugal. It was FUN ‐ not ‐ and responsible for empty grocery shelves and problems getting the essentials. Because when cooking oil was dirty cheap by price control, everyone who had ridden this pony before (with bread, with toilet paper, with...) would buy everything in the grocery shelves. Meanwhile, because it was impossible for merchants to make a profit on the thing, they didn’t stock it. Which was okay, because the factories that made it couldn’t afford to at that price, so they stopped. And all the way down the line. This is because what the idiot politicians were shutting down was the feedback. Prices are many things ‐ and sometimes annoying when you really want a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones but your bank account is crying, to use a totally random example ‐ but MOSTLY? They’re information. They’re feedback. Because, yes, people work for profit, and profit ‐ things that Warren and Sanders will never get ‐ is not dirty, it’s what people live on, when prices go up ‐ meaning there’s more demand than supply ‐ people go "hey, you can make a profit in this" and start making more, until the supply and demand match, and you can’t make as much money, so people wander off to do other stuff. ...But it is not just in economics (though eh, everything is a branch of economics, as my reading in my 30s informed me. Which means that’s probably when I started going insane) that humans love shutting down feedback. The truth is we don’t like reality very much, and are more or less perpetually at war with it. We have this image of how things should be, and because we imagine it so clearly we think it’s a moral imperative. Which brings us to how we got into a fine mess, in publishing, in universities, in... everything affected by the long march. The long march looks cunning, and it was. And for some people it was a conscious plan. But here’s the thing, it’s also a process that goes automatically when a large enough group of humans in a nation or a field share an image of what’s "ideal". In other words, in theocracies, the shut down of feedback from reality, and the ramping up of bringing in other true believers is standard, and intensifies as it goes. This is not a thing of the left, btw. Every human institution, given the power to do it, shuts off feedback they don’t like. This is why large corporations who can do so buy monopolistic status from governments (in various ways) and then stop heeding reality and go insane. Which is why large and powerful enough corporations become indistinguishable from totalitarian states. And also why, no matter how much influence they have on government, they eventually crumble and fall apart. ...The thing is that once you shut off feedback, the insanity is self-feeding. And if you’re invested in it, you can’t admit it. Also that once you shut off feedback pushing your favorite view becomes THE thing. Hence not just publishing going hard left, but the universities following, and the utter crazy of corporations (I’m looking at you Gillette) rolling left to die is all part of "there are no other standards, everyone agrees with us. We must preach the truth(y) word from on high, because we’re doing good in the world, and it shows how good we are" missionary effort of a religion without an afterlife and with no concept of forgiveness. Oh, and no contact with reality. Sooner or later, feedback wins. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #3 Problem is, it can take a LONG time for feedback to win. And in the meantime it can destroy whole countries. Venezuela still isn't through the process. |
| Posted by: Herb McCoy 2019-11-05 12:11 |
| #2 Could go a step further with this thesis. In engineering, negative feedback controls change from going too far in one direction. Positive feedback, however, forces the system out of control. |
| Posted by: Mercutio 2019-11-05 11:08 |
| #1 (What, you don’t have those? Really?) Denizens of one lesser branch from the evolutionary tree. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2019-11-05 08:42 |