category theory & cybernetics
Oct. 31st, 2005 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslHypothesis: the kind of people who like cybernetics are similar to the kind of people who like category theory. Both fields are about abstract structures that can be applied to several different fields. I am one such person.
My housemate is going to teach a series titled "Baby Category Theory" to the logic students. I intend to go, but I'm a bit afraid that the math will be too fascinating, causing me to become a mathematician and never spend another day of my life as a productive human being.
Cybernetics has an image problem, unfortunately. Its name is frequently abused by the likes of spamferences and crackpots. I hope that respectable scientists don't dismiss its ideas, many of which are common sense.
When teaching us about the common ion effect (about the solubility of pairs of salts), my high school chemistry teacher used to say "equilibria retaliate" (I used to think that he was speaking Latin, but this was just his way of remembering Le Chatelier's Principle). But this is reminescent of the principle of diminishing returns from economics (how far can we make an analogy?). Are we applying chemistry to economics or vice-versa? Neither! That's why we need a more general framework... both of these results are special cases of more or less "universal" structures. This may not be saying much, but it provides me something with which to think: when I see a situation that is analogous, I will predict that adding twice as much of the stuff will give less than twice the return.
What about homeostasis? You see it in economics as well as biology. (keyword for later reference: qualitative reasoning)
Did anyone see Art De Vany - Our Body is Not Communist, arguing that the human body is kept living through an invisible hand? I think he would say that cancer is a market failure, caused by irrational agents.
My housemate is going to teach a series titled "Baby Category Theory" to the logic students. I intend to go, but I'm a bit afraid that the math will be too fascinating, causing me to become a mathematician and never spend another day of my life as a productive human being.
Cybernetics has an image problem, unfortunately. Its name is frequently abused by the likes of spamferences and crackpots. I hope that respectable scientists don't dismiss its ideas, many of which are common sense.
When teaching us about the common ion effect (about the solubility of pairs of salts), my high school chemistry teacher used to say "equilibria retaliate" (I used to think that he was speaking Latin, but this was just his way of remembering Le Chatelier's Principle). But this is reminescent of the principle of diminishing returns from economics (how far can we make an analogy?). Are we applying chemistry to economics or vice-versa? Neither! That's why we need a more general framework... both of these results are special cases of more or less "universal" structures. This may not be saying much, but it provides me something with which to think: when I see a situation that is analogous, I will predict that adding twice as much of the stuff will give less than twice the return.
What about homeostasis? You see it in economics as well as biology. (keyword for later reference: qualitative reasoning)
Did anyone see Art De Vany - Our Body is Not Communist, arguing that the human body is kept living through an invisible hand? I think he would say that cancer is a market failure, caused by irrational agents.
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Date: 2005-11-06 06:52 pm (UTC)Le Chatelier
(Anonymous)
2005-11-06 06:51 am UTC (from 82.35.48.187)
Spot on Gustavo. As a cybernetician with an image problem Le Chateliers principle is a great way into understanding homeostasis and market reactions but both can be seen as statistical versions of Newton's third: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I just spent some years thinking about Pask's Last Theorem: "Like concepts repel and unlike concepts attract". To Pask a concept was any persisting circular process in any medium- not just brains, but stars, solids, liquids or gases so it has implications for cosmology, evolution and learning. But how does that sit in economics?
Personally I'm fighting off getting involved with Lie groups to understand the spin physics underlying all this in favour of concurrent coherence automata- as for Category Theory- well it is general but coherence, well now that is refreshingly direct and deep. Let's use English when we can!