Quote 16

"Several chapters of the most important Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching, attributed to Laozi, allude to "diminishing doing" or "diminishing will" as the key aspect of the sage's success. Taoist philosophy recognizes that the Universe already works harmoniously according to its own ways; as a person exerts their will against or upon the world they disrupt the harmony that already exists. This is not to say that a person should not exert agency and will. Rather, it is how one acts in relation to the natural processes already existent. The how, the Tao of intention and motivation, that is key." - Wikipedia

Game Theory in Politics

Foil to game theory in politics:
1. The commensurability of goods in terms of utility when preferences are context dependent, including interpersonal, inter-good, and inter-situational utility
2. Computational complexity of changing utility function in each round, which is a function of utility over distributed probabilities
3. Uncertainty
4. Is action by definition utility-maximising, or is utility something which is maximized by action? If the former, see 1, if the latter, how do we know that this concept of utility is commensurable with all goods across different contexts?

That is partly why we apply game theory models by analogy, when the situations are stable and the institutional context, values, preferences and payoff functions do not change too much over rounds.

Social History 1

History consists of multiple competing dynamically shifting equilibria, as motivating forces, whose relative and selected dominance as fact reshapes the conditions within which other equilibria are developed, and so on. Parameter satisfaction levels are based on interests and values, as are the permanence of constraints to the societal features which aim to address them. These parameter values are specified along a continuum, and give rise to other optimal structures and processes, laterally and vertically.

Note 122

Knowledge is a life-process, constantly de-fetishized, led by the hand of truth and evolving the terms of its conditionalities.

Quotes 15

"Suppose then, that you were not that Roman knight, but a freeman. You might nevertheless by your own efforts come to be the only free man amid a throng of gentlemen. "How?", you ask. Simply by distinguishing between good and bad things without patterning your opinion from the populace. You should look, not to the source from which these things come, but to the goal towards which they tend. If there is anything that can make life happy, it is good on its own merits; for it cannot degenerate into evil. Where then, lies the mistake, since all men crave the happy life? It is that they regard the means for producing happiness as happiness itself, and while seeking happiness, they are really fleeing from it. For although the sum and substance of the happy life is unalloyed freedom from care, and though the secret of such freedom is unshaken confidence, yet men gather together that which causes worry, and, while travelling life's treacherous road, not only have burdens to bear, but even draw burdens to themselves; hence they recede farther and farther from the achievement of that which they seek, and the more effort they expend, the more they hinder themselves and are set back. This is what happens when you hurry through a maze; the faster you go, the worse you are entangled." - Seneca