(Rick Marken (920508 8:30) ) --
You're most welcome. It's an excellent paper, and I'm glad to do anything
I can to help your audience "get it".
I realize there are no footnotes in this paper--one of its charms--but I
wonder if it would be appropriate to include your breakdown of the
transition from (2) to (3). Depends on what you can assume about your
audience. Of course, most anyone would assume that it must be right
because you wouldn't risk publishing an error in the algebra deriving
one of your formulae. That's what I did. Like Gary, I just don't have
the day-to-day familiarity. Thanks for asking him, Gary.
Of course, the controller is not REALLY controlling;
but the controller is acting as though he/she can control (and it looks
enough like control so that people imagine that it can be done). The
This is complicated by the fact that people try to make and maintain
social arrangments for cooperative action. This has the effect of
people acting as if they were being controlled. The precursors of this
are pretty basic in animal behavior, I think. Act in a predictable way
around animals and they get used to you. Act unpredictably, and they go
on alert and can get quite upset. Social arrangements for cooperative
action require predictable behavioral outputs of the participants, as
though the participants were being controlled by one another or by the
social arrangement itself.
On another tack, I dropped in to the MIT bookstore the other day and saw
some books by Georges Bataille. In a pair of books with a title
something like "the unbearable share" he (says the cover blub) devlops
the notion that the converse of utility is at the root of social
arrangements and culture. First, the paradox: on a utilitarian theory,
in which X is justified by its utility for the sake of Y, the whole must
be ultimately based on something that is useless. This neatly parallels
the lack of reference perceptions [I almost typoed "reverence
perceptions"] above the highest observable level of the perceptual
hierarchy. He builds up his theory on the notion that useless things
like potlatch, conspicuous consumption, and eroticism are more
fundamental to culture and history than control of the means of
production, etc.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com