is outsourcing good control

CSGnet Archive CSG2006
1

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.

Best

Jim D.

2

[From Bill Powers (2006.06.15.1327 MDT)]

Somewhere in Bill’s writing he
indicates that good control equals minimum
effort.

The context was a discussion of conflict. Control always requires more
effort when there is conflict than when there is not.

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.

That’s what the current economic religion says, but I don’t believe it.
The present economic system in a number of countries is based on
encouraging conflict, which results in different companies expending a
lot of effort simply to nullify the efforts of other companies. That is
not efficient.

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.

In the long run, as someone said once, we shall all be dead. 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. There
is probably no harm in a small number of companies using cheap foreign
labor, but when this becomes a general policy one has to wonder where the
American consumers are going to get the money with which to buy the
products. The inevitable result of outsourcing will be to lower the
income of American workers until it matches that of the workers in the
offshore companies who now make the products. Somehow enough wages and
capital income, but no more than enough, must flow from producer to
consumer to purchase all the goods and services being produced. One can
only hope that the Chinese will become so prosperous that their workers’
wages will rise to a level more in line with ours. Otherwise we are in
for some tough times.

Best,

Bill P.

3

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.

4

(From Bryan Thalhammer [2006.06.15.1606 CDT])

Jim,

I think you might be confusing PCT with something else or that you are misunderstanding the level control that B:CP describes. Are you mistaking the part for the whole or the whole for the part? Control is internal control over perceptions, rather than external control of money or other people's actions. I do believe that money and satisfaction are perceptions you control, but PCT is not really a theory of economic efficiency, but of the efficiency of balancing the control of very many parallel perceptions. From the point of view of a person who has a high gain on a principle/program of maintaining efficient use of resources at hand, but perhaps does not have a good organization of principles/programs that deal with social interactions, society, equality and all that stuff.

I guess you can presume that good control equals minimum effort in a use of resources, but PCT is more than a mere description of efficient use of resources with greatest satisfaction. Rather it is a description of how a living control system functions with regard to behavior, perception and conflict. If anything, PCT describes the problem of how to balance principles such as efficiency and satisfaction with other principles such as social interactions, society, equality and all that stuff.

But this wasn't an attempt to be cynical on your part, was it? My goal was to explore what I thought was a misunderstanding.

--Bry

jim dundon wrote:

···

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.
Best
Jim D.

5

[From Fred Nickols (2006.06.16.0825 EDT)]

Bill Powers (2006.06.15.1327 MDT)]

In the course of responding to Jim Dundon, Bill writes:

In the long run, as someone said once, we shall all be dead.
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. There is probably no harm in a small
number of companies using cheap foreign labor, but when this
becomes a general policy one has to wonder where the American
consumers are going to get the money with which to buy the products.
The inevitable result of outsourcing will be to lower the income of
American workers until it matches that of the workers in the offshore
companies who now make the products. Somehow enough wages and capital
income, but no more than enough, must flow from producer to consumer
to purchase all the goods and services being produced. One can only
hope that the Chinese will become so prosperous that their workers'
wages will rise to a level more in line with ours. Otherwise we are
in for some tough times.

Sure, such a "leveling" of income would constitute a "disturbance" for many of the people whose incomes are being lowered. Moreover, it strikes me as a somewhat overpowering disturbance, that is, individually, people can do little about it. Good paying jobs simply disappear and people have to make do. But the money isn't simply going overseas: the rich here in America are getting richer and richer and richer. There is a great divide between the high end and low end of income in this country and that divide grows deeper every day. Moreover, this bi-modal distribution isn't one of two roughly equal humps; instead, the high-end is a very small hump and the low-end hump is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. As several have noted, the middle class is disappearing. This "great divide" is also showing up in other places, most notably in standardized test scores (which might not tell us much about individuals but they do tell us something about groups and distributions). !
There,
the test scores for blacks and hispanics grow increasingly worse, joined by an influx of lower-income whites. Once again, we see a bi-modal distribution: a small hump of high-scorers and a big hump of low-scorers (projected to get worse, by the way). The curve of so-called "normal distribution" is disappearing from the socio-economic scene.

So, in PCT terms, it seems to me that an overwhelming disturbance of the kind posed by relentless outsourcing and off-shorting will sooner or later be answerable only through some kind of reorganization. Individually, that won't amount to much but, collectively, it might.

Hmm. What would be the term for a collective reorganization of society?

···

--
Regards,

Fred Nickols
nickols@att.net
www.nickols.us

6

[From Rick Marken (2006.06.20.2205)]

···

On Tuesday, June 20, 2006, at 01:27 PM, jim dundon wrote:

Let me quote from your paper the origins of purpose. "
A control system is a dissipated system with a continuously renewable source of energy.

I would be willing to bet a lot of money that Bill was talking about a _dissipative_ system. An example of a dissipated system is the current occupant of the White House.

Best

Rick
---
Richard S. Marken Consulting
marken@mindreadings.com
Home 310 474-0313
Cell 310 729-1400