Sadbuddhi in Sets

"We tend to forget that throughout history many decision-makers were delighted to accept “double or nothing” tactics if the odds looked sufficiently favorable." Kahn

Too constrained to maximize?

Alexander Kotov, the Chess grandmaster with eyebrows worth a queen sacrifice and probably also a KGB fellow, was quite on the mark while describing a disposition to make judgmental errors and go with a misplaced gut while being constrained with overanalysed choices. The agency of 'constrained maximizers', not necessarily always as rational as in the western conception, has its students in the arena of conflicts beyond the chess board, rooted in its potential for both serendipity as well as misfortune. A Machiavellian adage therefore rightly suggests that true prudence consists in knowing how to distinguish the character of troubles and in the choice to take the lesser evil. In Yogic philosophy there is a word for that, Sadbuddhi, referring to developing the much touted virtue of timely knowing the right thing to do - arguably resolving the groupthink/polythink syndromes that beset most decision making units. This writing is inclined to touch upon political culture and the decision making therein, so we'll follow the lens of intra-species aggression. And although coalationary intra-species aggression spans our non-relatives too, from lions and wolves to even numerous ant species among others, we'll stick to apes likes us.

The term "political culture" itself is recent, though the practices have existed throughout. Like humans, chimpanzees too have a coalationary psychology — that is an inclination to form closely structured groups/ecosystems with strategic hostility toward outgroups, and sometimes even outliers. Other than cooperation, reciprocity and role division - the division of meat and other resources among chimps follows a process of sharing in which power, sex, and violence tend to interact in rather human ways. So different groups of chimps in their territories end up having very different behaviours and social customs, developing different kind of tools and manifesting different communication mechanisms thusly. Reductionism it is, but a chimp order rises with its own crude geopolitics.

The human society too, going by Dunbar's logic, functions in sets of humans. The successful sets have and attract more members (Roman allies rebelled in 80s BC not for secession but for overt Roman citizenship), while losing few to others. This is compounded by the networked nature of an information society. Yet these sets and their members, like those of chimps, never function outside the laws of direct or indirect reciprocity towards each other i.e. I'll help you but when we meet again then you help me. This basic evolutionary dynamics makes Proportionality perhaps the only natural law of war, and other conflicts between sets.

Basis 'Proportionality', the nuclear MAD doctrines would appear as optimized bluffing, for all WMD may be CBRN weapons but not all CBRN weapons are WMD, but that discussion is for another day. As it is, all such interpretations, by nature of self-interest, are biased and susceptible to 'syndromes of the self' i.e. self-deception and self-centeredness. Coming back, it is safe to say that the set-membership nature of society causes, especially in the conditions of present degree of connectedness, an evolving instance of political boundary setting, from physical boundary to the ideological ones shaping member identities.

Basic Structural Coupling

It is well known, that for a system to stay "alive" it must preserve its identity. Though since the gap between perception and reality is also a socio-psychological threat surface, the system must keep maneuvering the environment around it and be fluid enough to evolve along. In the age when goal setting of AIs is termed not an engineering but a political problem, the notions of 'structural coupling' between systems and environment therefore apply equally to political cultures as well. An advice from John Boyd "the maneuverist" suggests decision makers to approach people, ideas, and machines — in that order. However the how-to of such abstractions remains subject to systemic pressures and some degrees of operational and organisational elusiveness, often threatening a conceptually devolving set.

Pursuing a Systemic Sadbuddhi thus becomes a matter of acting on and perceiving reality without letting our beliefs be colored by our desires (and fears), and as Robert Jervis has recommended, making our 'Assumptions, Beliefs, and Predictions' explicit and inquisitory, for it underlines that the predictions are always resting on some assumptions. Taking human society as a whole, the present chimp world order reflects the inertia of the predominant last great war positions. As the economic center-of-gravity shifts from Atlantic to the Pacific and technology gives chimps men equalizing effects over adversaries, how the decision makers of resource constrained competing sets battle it out remains to be seen. One thing is evident though that usually he who would pay the piper, historically speaking, will call the tune.

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