mrosswind

You have a convenient definition of causality. We can be done here.

When you talk about signal versus noise, you are referring to measurable material effects. Whether a material effect exists is not dependent on whether someone notices it. When a signal is lost in the noise, it's no longer measurable, but the material effect continues to propagate. If someone spits in the ocean daily, no weather station on Earth could detect the change, but if the person is getting their water from a source not usually in the water cycle, then yes, the average volume of the ocean would increase by an incredibly small amount.

There are market trends that are large enough to be observable despite the chaotic nature of the system. But our collective ability to observe and comprehend the effects depends on how well surveyed the global economy is, the resources put into analyzing the data, and the ideology used by the analysts. If the signal was truly destroyed when it was overtaken by noise, then when corporations see an unfavorable trend coming they could raise the minimum signal to noise ratio to protect themselves materially by firing the analysts, erasing the data, and enforcing a more favorable ideology. This is the magical thinking. Companies and governments attempt this all the time, but it doesn't change their economic situation.

You've thoroughly laid out how the noise amplifies through each layer of the system. The problem is that the system you've described is far too noisy to function if noise wipes out signal. At the opposite end of the chain from the consumer, it's all noise, there's no signal left. Even when something like closing the strait is clearly big enough that it should have some effect, the farm managers have no coherent way of determining what the effect actually is. They're hiring and firing children based on random number generators.

Given that the system operates at least somewhat rationally, that can't be the case. "Signal" and "noise" are subjective concepts. One person's noise is someone else's signal. At each layer, the managers watch the decisions made by their neighbors for signals, make their own decisions, and then pass those on to others as noise. Then they wait for signals to come back in the other direction.

If you fix your perspective to either the consumer or the farm manager, they have no way of ever perceiving each other through their personal noise. But if you look at the system as a whole, their actions do impact each other, and there is an intact chain of decision makers who will continue to communicate the effects of each one to the other. This is evidenced in the physical product repeatedly transported from one to the other. For each step of processing and transportation, there has to be a person maintaining the link between them, or else the product would not arrive.

Industries grow and shrink as a result of changes in consumption. The change in outcome is a sum of all the changes in the conditions. All changes, whether we have the tools to measure and distinguish them or not.

You’re inventing a mechanism where a change being too small to be considered important means its effects are erased from reality. An organized boycott is still composed of many individual immeasurable purchase decisions. If the small actions had no way to exert their effects, they couldn’t make up for that with numbers. Capitalists would be able to will a boycott out of existence just by refusing to see it as a trend. You could will away a dune based on the impossibility of following a single grain of sand.

Again, industries are not boulders that sit static until given a big enough shove. They are dynamic processes that continually fluctuate as a result of all the transactions that did or did not happen at each stage of production and distribution. The friction of whether or not to make a change is already always being overcome by other market forces.

Industries are governed by thousands of people making endless small adjustments to the operation of the node they manage in response to the changes made by the managers of the nodes they interact with. At no point is the manager who decides by how many children the cacao company can expand its workforce going to hear about a movement becoming organized enough to be considered a boycott. They will make their decision as a result of the decisions of their nearest organizational neighbors. The layers and layers of decision makers aggregate and obfuscate the decisions made leading all the way back to the consumer(s). In the same way that it’s impossible to trace the impact of a single purchase forward from a store, it’s also impossible for the person hiring the children to trace back and selectively be influenced only by coordinated efforts, but not by silent individuals. If it is possible for a boycott to succeed, it is only because the individuals who participated each had a small impact.

You can say that it’s a negligible effect, you can say it’s unimportant when compared to the effect of [X], but your claim was “an individual choosing to stop consuming something has no material effect on child labor”. That is not true. It’s a tempting simplification that offers comforting reassurance morally. In many cases it’s close enough to true to accept as a premise. But if you take it to be literally true, then you’ve necessarily buried some magical thinking into your understanding of the world.

You're still making a distinction where there isn't one. The capitalist system has enough layers, buffers, and complexities that trying to quantitatively study the impact of any one transaction becomes impossible after a few steps, but that doesn't mean its impact is zero. Individual choices need to build up to a certain point to have enough impact on a layer to be measured statistically if you're looking to write a paper about it, but there is no actual threshold that prevents small changes from being passed down the production chain. The layers of the economy are not static objects held in place by friction unless shoved by a big enough force. They are an ongoing response that aggregates all of the interactions that feed in to them. They often don't respond efficiently, effectively, or ethically like the propaganda says they should, but they are responsive. The global economy is made up of all the individual transactions, it's not a separate entity that is insulated from all but the biggest market trends.

The chain connecting consumers to child exploitation involves many individual decisions that are generally too big to be affected by one chocolate bar purchase. Hersey's decision of how many tons of ingredients to buy from their suppliers will be rounded to some whole number, so the amount they buy next year is unlikely to be changed by a slight difference in sales numbers this year. But there necessarily has to be some tipping point where any more loss of sales will cause them to cut their order. Although rare, a small number of specific purchases will have a hugely exaggerated effect. For this purpose, the vast scale of the global economy compared to an individual provides a very high number of avenues where a small change can potentially have a unexpectedly large outcome. The bigger the market, the more avenues, and the more transparent the layers are to propagating the impact of the transaction.

Buying one chocolate bar statistically has a direct impact on the extent of child labor in the world. There's no way to know which specific chocolate bars may trigger small tipping points in companies along the line choosing to adjust their production up or down slightly, but every single chocolate bar purchase plays a role in maintaining the child labor used by the industry.

None of this means that buying chocolate is morally equivalent to owning child slaves. The impact of buying a chocolate bar on child labor is incredibly small, and almost any political activism a person does would be far more meaningful, but there is no material basis to say that the end products are disconnected from the workers who made them. The only reason to double down on claiming that is out of moral discomfort.

I agree with you that pressuring people to change individual purchasing decisions is not a good strategy, or a good use of someone's time, and that there are better approaches to reach the same goal. My point is that you're taking the factors that limit a person's ability to exert their consumer choices, and making a leap to say that the consumer has no material impact on the world. That doesn't make much difference for the moral implications of this issue, but it's anti-materialist, and it gets in the way of understanding how the world operates.

The chocolate industry has built a machine of cruelty that controls governments, and has continued for hundreds of years despite all the people it has immiserated and motivated to fight against it. No one is going to take it down by putting a candy bar back on the shelf at the grocery store. And yet, the industry is the size that it is, and no larger. If the capitalists had their way, it would be ten times bigger, and then ten times bigger next year. It's limited by material factors, including the fact that people will only buy so much of the finished product. Marketing, lobbying, mercenaries, etc. are all tools that companies use to push against those limits, but the fact is even someone who doesn't give a shit about labor practices, and puts five cases of chocolate bars in their cart before deciding they only really need four, is participating in limiting how many child laborers cacao companies are capable of exploiting.

The impact that any one person, or the handful of people one person could recruit, can have on overall consumption is very small compared to the global population, but those minuscule changes do propagate through the system of production and exchanges. You can't be a communist and not believe that tiny contributions can add up to meaningful change. Organizing and coordinating those contributions is far more important than any one individual, and it's good to emphasize that and redirect to it, but that can't be done by dismissing that the small changes matter at all.

You make a good case for why the focus shouldn't be on moralizing specific consumer choices, and why the products someone buys says little about them in comparison to the impact they could have in other areas. You're going to have to rely on the strength of those arguments because, while it would be nice if we could fully absolve ourselves by saying that the commodities we buy have exactly zero impact on the world, it isn't true.

You’re limiting the impact purchases have to only companies choosing to adopt more ethical labor practices. This ignores that the scale of the industry matters, and is affected by consumption. If consumers quietly started buying 50% less chocolate, companies would continue to exploit child laborers, but the amount of unethical labor that the industry could bear would be reduced.

You’re claiming to have the materialist position, but you’re ignoring that the commodities embody child labor. The idea of “voting with your wallet” is capitalist bullshit, and market trends will not transmit ethics to ceos. But there is an unbreakable link between the consumption of commodities and the labor used to make them. It doesn’t matter whether the consumers are organized, what their intent is, or if the companies are even aware of what’s happening.

Whatever buying a chocolate bar does or doesn’t say about a person’s morals, you can’t claim that it’s disconnected from the people who produced it. There are plenty of reasons why the relationship is not one to one, but you can’t make a materialist argument that raw cacao has nothing to do with finished chocolate products.

This article is arguing against people who overextend a metaphor comparing brains and computers, but it's doing it by taking the opposite position to a completely absurd extreme. In the framework it describes, not only is a brain not a computer, but there is no such thing as a computer, and it is impossible for one to ever be created.

It could be justified in making a prescriptive case that people should change how we think about and talk about human brains to shift away from computer analogies, but it's written descriptively with a nonsensical portrayal of what people mean when they say "information" or "memory". Many of the things this article attacks are not computer metaphors at all, they're the way language has been used long before modern computers existed.

For a simple enough computer (four function calculator or similar) a human can perform in exactly the same way as the computer for any possible input or interaction. This means that there is at least some conceptual overlap between the behaviors of a human and a computer. Not a metaphor, literal commonality. When someone says that a calculator processed numbers, it's not a statement about the mechanics or philosophical implications of what a calculator is, it's about the role the calculator is playing in transforming inputs to outputs. If a human can take on the exact same role, there's no reason they wouldn't also be processing numbers, unless we choose to categorically exclude them.

information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers

To apply the intent of the article to this list of words, either their definitions need to be changed to explicitly say they can't be applied to humans, or they all need to be removed from the english language completely. From the examples given about brains, unless there's an arbitrary distinction, none of them would apply to any situation ever. The author seems to still want to keep using the words to describe computers, but the only justification for why the same logic used to say humans don't have memories wouldn't also apply to computers is to just state that "Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." Sure, I guess that answers that.

I would have been interested to hear more about how specifically the computer metaphor limits our understanding, and the benefits we can gain by using the alternative of experiences and changes. The article touches on this, but spends most of its length doing a poor job of trying to prove that its framework is an objective truth about reality, rather than a lens that can be adopted or rejected.

They don’t spend even a second actually performing the propaganda and saying the agents are benevolent and gentle. The explicit purpose is that they want to own the libs. All that matters is they get to imagine a wokeist frowning. They still want everyone to know the agents are vicious and bloodthirsty.

It is definitely possible to look back at a miserable stretch of your life and have trouble understanding how it could be connected to the life you’re living at the time. And have a hard time believing it was only a few years ago.