Wisdom Of The Week

Principle 1: Scalability, I

• Between the concrete individual and the abstract collective there are a certain number of  tangible fractal gradations.

Commentary

• An immediate implication: politics is not scale-free. One can be "libertarian at the federal level, Republican at the state level, Democrat at the county level, socialist within the commune, and communist at the family level."
• The conflict "nationalism" vs "globalism" is ill defined.Both ignore fractal strata under monolithic absorbing concepts.
• More technically, groups are never (you) or infinity (mankind plus living things), but renormalize into clusters of intermediate sizes.

Background 

• The fragility interpretation: scalability is a simple property of an object that has a concave or convex response.For instance an elephant has more fragility than a mouse for an equivalent proportional random shock.
• The impossibility of comparing two items of different size without scale transformation is illustrated as follows.Take a human and increase his or her size. Contact with the floor would grow by squares, while the volume is cubic, therefore increasing the pressure on the bone architecture. The compensation would change the shape of the limbs. Few realize that a "giant" human would end up needing to look like an elephant.

Limitations

• One cannot compare scales across heterogeneous items. A scale for restaurants and land animals differs from the one for distribution houses and marine mammals.
• Scale is gauged empirically.

- Multiscale Localism: Political Clarity under Complexity, Nassim Nicholas Taleb