From: jeff lister (bolivar@planet.eon.net)
Date: Sat Mar 22 1997 - 08:52:57 MST
At 08:30 PM 3/21/97 -0800, Anton Sherwood wrote:
>Jeff Lister responds to my analogy of the marketplace to celestial mechanics--
>
>: [...] In the last paragraph you say "human buyers/sellers," shouldn't
>: that be corporate/human buyers/sellers? To extend the analogy, the humans
>: would be the interstellar dust from which a protosystem is currently
>: forming and the corperations would be the stars; initially chatoic, the
>: system would become more ordered with time. The formation of the system
>: would initially be more dependant on the distribution of 'dust,' but
>: eventually dominated by the relative positions of the stars.
>
>Let's back up a bit before we get too silly: The analogy would be better
>still with no stars, just a lot of massive ships moving about unpredictably,
>though usually their engines can't muster much acceleration. The nearest
>thing to passive "stars", I think, would be the institutional investors
>-- pension funds and the like, which tend to trade in a mechanical way.
>
>To address your point: no group of people is a "point mass"; they all have
>internal forces. I'd think of corporations as more like fleets of ships,
>of various sizes ...
>
>Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DASher@netcom.com
Now you're mixing analogies. Seems to me that the advantage of argument
from analogy is the use of one, more thuroughly understood process to
elucidate another based on apparent similarities; it certainly *proves*
nothing. Now you've got gravity *and* propulsion; i can't follow. I would
like to point out that the analogy in its original state does not break down
as you seem to imply here:
>To address your point: no group of people is a "point mass"; they all have
>internal forces. I'd think of corporations as more like fleets of ships,
>of various sizes ...
Neither is a star a point mass; it too has internal forces. The analogy can
be maitained, could it be that you just didn't like where it was going?
jeff
P.S. To the extropians; i saw on Big Life last night that your purpose is
to accelerate human evolution. How do you feel about communal cognition?
It's based on the assumption that whatever works between neurons to make us
can work between us to make something orders of magnitude more intelligent.
All that's required is that a particular functionality be imparted to social
interactions. Any thoughts?
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