Spontaneous order and relational sociology:from the Scottish Enlightenment to human figurations

If viewed from a long-term and large-scale perspective, human interdependencies today can be seen as approaching species integration on a worldwide level. However, emergent worldwide processes of integration and differentiation tend to be reduced to static conceptthings such as “governmentality”, “globalization”, “cosmopolitanization”, “mobilities”, and“networks”, helping to obscure the mundane processes of institution formation, in particular the tenacious endurance of the nation-state. This paper argues that the pathological realism of neoliberal globalization today can be more adequately approached by engaging with the historical precursors of the so-called “relational turn” in contemporary sociology. The earlier relational sociology of the Scottish enlightenment, particularly Adam Ferguson (1767), Adam Smith (1776) and David Hume (1739) developed ideas of spontaneous order and such related concepts as “the invisible hand” and “unintended consequences” in an attempt to understand and control the rapid transformation of Scotland, a relatively under-developed economy on the edge of Europe. The Scottish spontaneous order tradition is compared to Elias’s idea of “figuration” as an unplanned but patterned process of increasingly complex and opaque social interdependencies and functional democratization. This process appears to have reached definite limits. Humanity is ensnared in a compelling global double-bind process of armed states that continue to threaten, endanger and fear each other, and a pervasive elite belief in the spontaneous efficiency and self-correcting mechanisms of the global “magic market”.<br/

When users control the algorithms: Values expressed in practices on the twitter platform

Recent interest in ethical AI has brought a slew of values, including fairness, into conversations about technology design. Research in the area of algorithmic fairness tends to be rooted in questions of distribution that can be subject to precise formalism and technical implementation. We seek to expand this conversation to include the experiences of people subject to algorithmic classification and decision-making. By examining tweets about the “Twitter algorithm” we consider the wide range of concerns and desires Twitter users express. We find a concern with fairness (narrowly construed) is present, particularly in the ways users complain that the platform enacts a political bias against conservatives. However, we find another important category of concern, evident in attempts to exert control over the algorithm. Twitter users who seek control do so for a variety of reasons, many well justified. We argue for the need for better and clearer definitions of what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate control over algorithmic processes and to consider support for users who wish to enact their own collective choices

Efficiency Theory: a Unifying Theory for Information, Computation and Intelligence

The paper serves as the first contribution towards the development of the theory of efficiency: a unifying framework for the currently disjoint theories of information, complexity, communication and computation. Realizing the defining nature of the brute force approach in the fundamental concepts in all of the above mentioned fields, the paper suggests using efficiency or improvement over the brute force algorithm as a common unifying factor necessary for the creation of a unified theory of information manipulation. By defining such diverse terms as randomness, knowledge, intelligence and computability in terms of a common denominator we are able to bring together contributions from Shannon, Levin, Kolmogorov, Solomonoff, Chaitin, Yao and many others under a common umbrella of the efficiency theory. © Taru Publications

Efficiency Theory: a Unifying Theory for Information, Computation and Intelligence

The paper serves as the first contribution towards the development of the theory of efficiency: a unifying framework for the currently disjoint theories of information, complexity, communication and computation. Realizing the defining nature of the brute force approach in the fundamental concepts in all of the above mentioned fields, the paper suggests using efficiency or improvement over the brute force algorithm as a common unifying factor necessary for the creation of a unified theory of information manipulation. By defining such diverse terms as randomness, knowledge, intelligence and computability in terms of a common denominator we are able to bring together contributions from Shannon, Levin, Kolmogorov, Solomonoff, Chaitin, Yao and many others under a common umbrella of the efficiency theory

Symmetry protected topological order at nonzero temperature

We address the question of whether symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order can persist at nonzero temperature, with a focus on understanding the thermal stability of several models studied in the theory of quantum computation. We present three results in this direction. First, we prove that nontrivial SPT order protected by a global on-site symmetry cannot persist at nonzero temperature, demonstrating that several quantum computational structures protected by such on-site symmetries are not thermally stable. Second, we prove that the 3D cluster state model used in the formulation of topological measurement-based quantum computation possesses a nontrivial SPT-ordered thermal phase when protected by a global generalized (1-form) symmetry. The SPT order in this model is detected by long-range localizable entanglement in the thermal state, which compares with related results characterizing SPT order at zero temperature in spin chains using localizable entanglement as an order parameter. Our third result is to demonstrate that the high error tolerance of this 3D cluster state model for quantum computation, even without a protecting symmetry, can be understood as an application of quantum error correction to effectively enforce a 1-form symmetry.Comment: 42 pages, 10 figures, comments welcome; v2 published versio