Re: is outsourcing good
control
[Martin Taylor 2006.06.15.16.22]
Jim Dundon apparently Thu, 15 Jun 2006
15:05:18 -0400
Somewhere in Bill’s
writing he indicates that good control equals minimum effort.
The more I get for my money the more control I have exercised over the
use of land and natural resources and, the more satisfaction I
experience. This is minimum effort. This is efficiency.
The aggregate effect of a consumer market will be efficiency. It
will be personal outsourcing to the maximum. It may be that I’m
adversely affected by this fact if I lose a job but I would be more
adversely affected over the long haul if I did not participate in
shared outsourcing.
So it looks to me like
good control is good outsourcing. It moves toward maximum yield
with the least effort; the embryonic like state of all needs
satisfied with little or no effort.
Bill Powers (2006.06.15.1327 MDT) said that his discussion was in
the context of conflict. But there’s another sense in which
“minimum effort” makes some sense.
Most actions have side effects, meaning that they affect things
in the environment other than the elements of the perception the
actions are intended to control. The energy expended on those side
effects is at best wasted, meaning that the actor must expend more
effort than is needed for control. In that sense, good control
equals minimum effort.
The problem with side effects is that they influence the
environment in ways you don’t see (at least not with the perceptual
input function that generates the perception the action is
controlling). Those influences can come back and affect the
environmental feedback path, as well as possibly acting as
disturbances against which the action must work. Those effects, acting
through unknown and variable pathways MAY be helpful for control, but
it is much more likely that they will be hurtful.
You use “minimum effort” in a third way: tool use. It
is quite possible, indeed normal, to reduce one’s effort by using a
tool that magnifies one’s output. Even a tool as simple as a lever
does that. However, for large force magnifications, you most probably
have to use a self-powered tool (such as another person, or a
mechanical power-assist). To get the power that drives the tool
affects the environment.
If the tool is a person (which is outsourcing), you are getting
them to do your bidding by disturbing some perception that they are
controlling, in such a way that either a direct effect or a side
effect of their control action influences the perception you want to
control. They are controlling something other than what you are
controlling, even if they are explicitly following your instructions.
If they are doing that, they are controlling for a perception that you
are pleased with them (or at least not displeased, in a coercive
situation).
Using another person as a tool in outsourcing. So, to determine
whether this is helpful to you, you have to analyse the trail of
influences until they return as disturbances to your perceptions or as
changes in the environmental feedback paths open to you for
controlling your perceptions.
Bill Powers (2006.06.15.1327 MDT) said: “The problem is that
if I lose my job, or am displaced from my job and forced to take
another one at lower pay, my buying power is reduced or
eliminated.”. These are possible side effects that alter my
environmental feedback paths, because they reduce my ability to
disturb other people’s perceptions by offering money if they do what I
want.
Of course, I might disturb their perceptions in other ways, such
as by striking, or marching in protest, or rioting, and their control
actions just might possibly result in something I want, though they
probably won’t. Regardless, the return effects of my actions in
outsourcing would have altered my environmetal feedback possibilities,
and thus my ability to control. If I’m a company CEO, that alteration
may have eased my ability to control many of my perceptions; if I’m a
laid off worker, the opposite is probable.
All those are possibilities. What is a near certainty is that
almost any action you do in controlling almost any perception will
have side effects, and some of those side effects will ripple around
the world until they return to you as disturbances, alterations in
perceptions you aren’t controlling, or as changes in your available
environmental feeback paths.
All this is a longwinded way of saying “Beware of
oversimplification.” Einstein (I think) said that a theory should
be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Or something like that. We
often forget the “but no simpler” part.
Martin
PS. I’m away for two weeks starting tomorrow noon.