I think this is wrong, but could be reformulated as: a controller must have at least as much variety as the end state it seeks to bring about.
That doesn't really parse, because the variety here is the number of possible states. A single state doesn't have variety; it is the system which has variety. The regulator responds to a perturbation by picking the appropriate action to cancel that perturbation out, so that the regulated system stays within parameters.
A more proper statement might be "the controller or regulator needs to have at least as many state transitions as the system being controlled in order to unconditionally control that system". If you're content with controlling the system most of the time, variety becomes probabilistic and might look quite a bit like information entropy. The controller tries to correct to a state by compensating for perturbations like an error-correcting code tries to correct to a known message by compensating for noise, and if the bandwidth isn't up to it, the objective is impossible.
This doesn't support your point, because the same way of "pushing the system back" may be used against different ways of moving the system out of the state.
I see your point, and I can think of a more mechanistic example, too. Say you want to keep a room lit and not too hot. The controller turns on the lights when it gets dark and a fan when it gets hot. Now the variety is roughly speaking balanced - there are four states (two bits) of interest in the system and also four states in the controller (i.e. what's switched on). However, you could do the same, albeit ineffectively, by making the controller turn on the fan and the light if it either gets dark or hot, since the presence of light doesn't interfere with temperature, nor does the fan make it not-cool if it's already cool. Thus the controller only needs to distinguish between two states (hot or dark or both, everything else), and only needs two states itself.
(I'm being a bit quick here since such a controller would be inconvenient since it would cool the room too much if it's already cool, and it might trip itself up thinking it's no longer dark when it turns on the light, but you see my point, hopefully :) )
What's left unaccounted is the relative power of each action: the "buffering" or degree to which the actions or circumstances themselves regulate the situation without feedback. Again, I can think of a mechanical example: if you insulate a room, that "regulates" the temperature without feedback - the insulator needs no variety at all! Or if you have a controller that gathers rain when it's raining, it doesn't need to know exactly how much rain falls because the short term variety is averaged out in the container where it gathers that rain.
I wonder how that would translate into the error-correcting code concept? It's not altogether intuitive.
Regarding your last paragraph, I would argue that we should be seeking out means of social shaping that are not matters of control.
Ideally, we'd want a situation where no shaping at all is required. If we could make the problem of allocation irrelevant by having an economy of abundance, that would (all other things equal) be preferred to any attempt to solve the problem of allocation itself (through price rationing, etc). If I were to generalize that reasoning, making the problem of regulation go away would be preferable to finding the best way of doing that regulation, so your point would follow, yes. If both of these fail or are inapplicable, though, I think the kind of reasoning I wrote in my post would help constructing a better controller/regulator, avoiding the usual traps of corruption, excessive centralization, lack of accountability, and so on. At least, unless we find ourselves in a utopia, the higher level maintenance - deciding where to go, how to shape society, then having that change happen - involves departing from the natural equilibrium, and thus some sort of steering will be required. That steering or control doesn't have to be as heavyhanded as a state backed up by force, but it would involve feedback.
So yes, in the long run, may we find ourselves not needing to actively adjust the trajectory of society to keep it within what's desired; but as long as that has to be done, it would be really nice if the organizations could work better. As long as there is a bureaucracy, may it have the requisite internal variety so that it doesn't try to simplify the world and force everybody into a few preset molds, or one, to make its own work possible.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-05-08 01:49 pm (UTC)That doesn't really parse, because the variety here is the number of possible states. A single state doesn't have variety; it is the system which has variety. The regulator responds to a perturbation by picking the appropriate action to cancel that perturbation out, so that the regulated system stays within parameters.
A more proper statement might be "the controller or regulator needs to have at least as many state transitions as the system being controlled in order to unconditionally control that system". If you're content with controlling the system most of the time, variety becomes probabilistic and might look quite a bit like information entropy. The controller tries to correct to a state by compensating for perturbations like an error-correcting code tries to correct to a known message by compensating for noise, and if the bandwidth isn't up to it, the objective is impossible.
This doesn't support your point, because the same way of "pushing the system back" may be used against different ways of moving the system out of the state.
I see your point, and I can think of a more mechanistic example, too. Say you want to keep a room lit and not too hot. The controller turns on the lights when it gets dark and a fan when it gets hot. Now the variety is roughly speaking balanced - there are four states (two bits) of interest in the system and also four states in the controller (i.e. what's switched on). However, you could do the same, albeit ineffectively, by making the controller turn on the fan and the light if it either gets dark or hot, since the presence of light doesn't interfere with temperature, nor does the fan make it not-cool if it's already cool. Thus the controller only needs to distinguish between two states (hot or dark or both, everything else), and only needs two states itself.
(I'm being a bit quick here since such a controller would be inconvenient since it would cool the room too much if it's already cool, and it might trip itself up thinking it's no longer dark when it turns on the light, but you see my point, hopefully :) )
What's left unaccounted is the relative power of each action: the "buffering" or degree to which the actions or circumstances themselves regulate the situation without feedback. Again, I can think of a mechanical example: if you insulate a room, that "regulates" the temperature without feedback - the insulator needs no variety at all! Or if you have a controller that gathers rain when it's raining, it doesn't need to know exactly how much rain falls because the short term variety is averaged out in the container where it gathers that rain.
I wonder how that would translate into the error-correcting code concept? It's not altogether intuitive.
Regarding your last paragraph, I would argue that we should be seeking out means of social shaping that are not matters of control.
Ideally, we'd want a situation where no shaping at all is required. If we could make the problem of allocation irrelevant by having an economy of abundance, that would (all other things equal) be preferred to any attempt to solve the problem of allocation itself (through price rationing, etc). If I were to generalize that reasoning, making the problem of regulation go away would be preferable to finding the best way of doing that regulation, so your point would follow, yes. If both of these fail or are inapplicable, though, I think the kind of reasoning I wrote in my post would help constructing a better controller/regulator, avoiding the usual traps of corruption, excessive centralization, lack of accountability, and so on.
At least, unless we find ourselves in a utopia, the higher level maintenance - deciding where to go, how to shape society, then having that change happen - involves departing from the natural equilibrium, and thus some sort of steering will be required. That steering or control doesn't have to be as heavyhanded as a state backed up by force, but it would involve feedback.
So yes, in the long run, may we find ourselves not needing to actively adjust the trajectory of society to keep it within what's desired; but as long as that has to be done, it would be really nice if the organizations could work better. As long as there is a bureaucracy, may it have the requisite internal variety so that it doesn't try to simplify the world and force everybody into a few preset molds, or one, to make its own work possible.