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RE: The tragedy of the commons

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@S...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2001 11:13:00 -0500

From: Champion, Mike [mailto:Mike.Champion@S...]

>Ah, but who gets to be Gardener, and who makes the plan?

The choice of choosing choices. 

>And what if an idiot steals the election for Gardener, poisons the garden
>with his friends' petroleum products, and spends all his energy planning
how
>to defend against the woodchucks rather than watering and fertilizing?

That is your fault.  You chose badly.  Either you chose a bad gardener 
or you chose a system that cannot resolve a near tie (lost in statistical 
noise) and therefore punts to another chooser (in the case alluded to, 
the supreme court which itself was culled for such choosing:  again, 
depends on authority to choose the legitimate choices).

>Many prefer confusion to incompetent leadership.

Or many prefer to identify with what is most like their own 
world view and will actively eliminate other choices.

> Natural Selection makes
> for messy gardens, but few Gardeners are wise enough to know in advance
what
> will survive a drought or early frost.

Study projects such as Amodeus 

"Interacting Cognitive Subsystems: A Framework for Considering the
Relationships 
Between Performance and Knowledge Representations"
Alison J. K. Green

and look at the issues of representation as they affect expert or 
novice approaches to problem solving.  You will discover that 
many gardeners can and do know in advance what they need to 
know.  However, choosing a gardener is choosing the system 
that chooses.  Note the problems of punting to procedural 
decision making and issues of oscillation given uncertainty.

There is no such thing as *natural* selection in 
the creation of artificial systems.  Someone chooses the 
choices in advance and then rallies their supporters.  
The entire web infrastructure is a political system 
and for that reason, the semantic web can follow the 
Forbin project outcomes fairly precisely.  Deontic 
logic isn't precise and context is always local.  The 
SW depends on elminating local choice of representational means.

Ecological metaphors are just that.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h

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