Re: A novel way to look at mathematics...

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Judith Rosen wrote:
snip
> *I've mentioned on the list before that my father wrote a paper based on 
> "the tragedy of the common", where he showed, mathematically, that what 
> is optimal (in terms of strategy with the common and one's herd of 
> sheep) using a short time horizon turns out to be very sub-optimal if 
> the time horizon is lengthened. So the decisions made based on a 
> short-term view are very different from the decisions that would be made 
> if the view of time were lengthened. I should think it would be possible 
> to show, mathematically, how small changes in context can radically 
> alter values and plug the results into a similar gradient like the one 
> involving time. Time is also a context, so this kind of analysis can be 
> extremely useful in a cautionary way. Any takers on the list?*
snip

Judith,

Can you tell me the paper re: Tragedy of the Common, give a
citation or link to online version? I'd be interested to read it.

Avoiding this effect is an interesting aspect of the part-whole
relation in living systems and provides a neat comparison of
the fundamental and systemic/relational difference between
non-human vs human-dominated living systems. Non-human
systems (like forests, other natural communities/ecosystems)
seem largely to avoid this tragedy and in fact show the
opposite - a kind of bounty of the commons. This bounty is seen
in the various forms of stored and accumulated "natural capital"
such as soils, biodiversity, uniquely adapted communities,
novel evolved organisms, etc. etc. By comparison, humans
consume all these forms of shared capital and more, like fossil
fuels. Understanding the organizational differences that lead
to tragedy of commons on one hand vs bounty of commons on
the other could be great for helping us navigate The Great
Transition or the Great Turning as some call the transition to
sustainable human societies and human-environment relation.

One last related point - a paper I have on a software field called
collective intelligence (or COIN) mentions the danger of the
tragedy of the common as arising when interacting adaptive
software agents put individual fitness or utility functions above
some global fitness/utility function. This paper also talks about
another part-whole, group dynamics pitfall, the "liquidity trap",
which I am not familiar with. I can send the link for this paper
if anyone is interested.

Thanks for any info on your father's paper on this...

Dan