12.I.1430
Elements of control theory are often tempting as metaphors in the context of social organization. But treating such analogies as readily mappable to the social subject is a mistake.
As an example , here's an ostensible pearl of wisdom that : "A first-order control mechanism is any mechanism that is controlled by direct motion in a single direction. Similarly, in social theory, a single direct action producing a social change is a first-order control system." (wikipedia) .
This example in itself is innocuous enough. But just a question why would such a taxonomy be useful to social scientists? Why try to be social engineers? Haven't they all watched Adam Curtis' movies? By this question I mean, haven't they learned the disasterous effects of treating society as a machine (it's not) and making atrocious assumptions about human motivation?
tirade segment: haven't the bolsheviks miscalculated human motivation? didn't Hitler miscalculate the anglosaxons' motivations? Weren't both the cold war and the economic restructuring of the post-revolutionary quarter century a result of a very paranoid and a most cynical interpretation of history and economics?
I cite the Adam Curtis movies because they readily convey how a lot of the international politics (eg, the cold war) of the past half-century have evolved out of attempts at mathematical modeling stemming from game theorists who played games called "fuck you buddy", that sought to highlight the utility of betrayal and mistrust. I was left with the impression that such theory encoded the personal paranoia of its authors - particularly after watching John Nash and other supporters admitting as much !
Likewise it seems economic theory is at best based on stupid assumptions. But it's useless to debate them because they are discredited by the practitioners of those theories. For instance, they seem to take natural self-regulation as a guiding principle for the market and "the invisible hand". Yet in practice, the choir and agressive imposers of the theory's policy implications have been practicing selective protectionism (selecting that which protects their voters' interests), anti-labor violence, tying aid to "freer" markets, and interest rate manipulation all along. This is to say nothing of chronic and endemic cheating on the balance sheets by all the biggest players - as the past nine years have repeatedly shown us.
So we could criticize the notion of self-regulation, that it is not so instantaneous. Self-regulation is a long winded process, taking much longer in nature than the flashing intervals of market cycles. But it would be useless.
Another fact that undermines economic theory is its acceptance of the banking model of monetary supply as a given. Nonetheless, it should not be a given. it is a swindle. and should be thoroughly replaced with someone reflecting true value, and given the sovereignty of the state not the investor.
So when I see the terminology of control theory being applied so cavalierly and needlessly in social science, I worry. Because this translates into blind and ruthless policies under which millions get crushed figuratively or literally.
P.S.
Disclaimer: i've written before about social organization as well as information transfer, not in engineering terms, but in a formal framework. This was within the computational context of artificial multi-agent systems.
The idea was to apply the obvious social analogies for the sake of designing interesting schemes of social organization for artificial agents, in the vein of bio-mimetics. Not the other way around.
The study of information transfer has for its intent only the study of human communication, and not the control or tailoring of communication.
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