Put in, get out

(Disclaimer: The title means only what it says; in particular, there is no intended political pun, as might be encouraged by merging words, reading aloud, etc.)


A surprisingly strong duality has recurrently visited me in various guises over the past month. The duality is one between in and out. This deceptively simple pair of opposites, from what it seems, contrive to create quite a stir. I distinguish between a stir and a pact - angels and demons cause a stir, a couple in heat causes a pact. A stir leads to a cancelling effect, destructive to both parties - a pact, on the other hand, leads to a balancing effect, constructive to both parties.

Existence is almost always a form of co-existence, in the sense that there is a context that meddles, and co-exists with the primary focus. Thus existence requires some notion of interface, that allows the focus and context to talk. In a real world, interfaces are never perfect - they are exploited as approximations. Expectations or assumptions in the interface are fuzzed to swallow discrepancies between the focus and the context. On the other hand, such approximations can be allowed only as much as they do not mess up the very rules of existence. In brief, one can take no less than one needs to exist - one can give no more than one can afford.

However, this is still a simplification. The meddling nature of (co)existence is seldom purely passive - it does not necessarily entail taking before giving - that would be much too like calculators and washing machines. Active existence - as one that would be discovered after realizing that isolation from the context is futile, and consequently applying economic sense in getting something out of the context in the bargain - would imply giving to take, feeding and then milking the context in the same way as the context might hope to feed and milk the focus.

Herein lies the problem. Yin and yang do not balance, instead create turmoil - they do not damp, instead resonate. The economic strategy of functioning both as the cow and the dairy annihilates possibilities of approximation - interfaces need to be perfect, for nobody, not the focus, not the context, can take less, or give more - universal laws, with economics, enforce a perfect selfish world.

(And with some thought, one might come up with more interesting aspects of this fundamental dichotomy - here's one. What makes more (economic) sense, introversion? extraversion? ambiversion, then? One might assume some level of information hiding all the time. Beyond that, encapsulation (as expressed as shyness, hypocrisy, indifference) may be good or bad - introverts are terribly hard to use, or in analogy to the discussion above, feed and milk. Prudent contexts would find introverts easy to prune away, by Occam's razor. On the other hand, introverts can coexist, mingle, hence glean more from the context. Being either introvertive or extravertive might have socio-economic implications, yet there exist dynamic possibilities in those choices - whilst being ambivertive leads to a perfect harmonious null, devoid of the spice of approximation, key jammed in lock for ever.)

What do we do, then? Let economics lead us to harmony and perfection? Make pacts, make peace? Or let yin and yang fight it out, and endure the pain of excitement, and let hair go wild in the storm?

There's yin, there's yang. People with either one don't have a choice. Then there's yin and yang, and people with both have choices - suppress yin? suppress yang? freely merge yin and yang? or separate yin and yang? Suppression doesn't make intuitive sense, on counts of imbalance and unconditional bias. A free merge implies Economic Nadir. Almost blindly, we are led to the only choice that makes sense - separation.

...

The separation construct is embarrassingly simple once you hit on it. Forget economics (I've been giving it more attention than it deserves - statistics and economics are arguably the biggest farces when used as proof techniques - one only needs to pick the right angle to view the picture any way one wants). Harmony can be simulated by viewing the focus as a world in itself - with a dynamic pair of secondary focus and secondary context; the yin and the yang of the focus can be separated into dynamic roles within this pair. Approximations can be simulated by letting one of the components of this pair grow and collude to serve a primary role - thus the dynamic secondary focus fights against a dynamic alliance of secondary and primary contexts. The secondary focus can dynamically choose yin or yang, as long as the secondary context acts in (separate) opposition.

The key intuition is that the secondary context serves as a mirror to "remind" the focus when it crosses over from yin to yang, or back. Cancellation is dynamically avoided. One gets the desired effect - Resonating Harmony.