Not so long ago, in the process of research and modeling of socio-economic formations and in the light, I am not afraid of this word, a huge stream of news about corruption in both world and local media, I surprisingly came to an interesting conclusion that prompted me to write of this article. I will try to express my thoughts briefly but succinctly, please do not judge strictly for the style. I hope this small note will appeal to those who like to read something interesting over a cup of coffee.
It all started with a small model of economic interactions between organizations, the purpose of which was to visualize a statistically reliable definition of the behavior pattern (strategy) of companies in the context of their evolutionary state. In other words, I tried to model evolution taking into account the correlation between the state of development and the strategy of players in the market ...
Small companies behave completely differently from large ones, but their behavior within a proportionate group is very similar, which seemed strange to me, although it is not at all obvious from a mathematical point of view.
With age, with sufficient experience and a detailed understanding of the processes, a certain worldview develops, within which almost all the processes that surround us in everyday life become conceptually the same type. To some extent, the difference between building a complex information system and peeling potatoes comes down only to the peculiarities of the subject area, within which sometimes the same optimization principle is used. From this point of view, when over the years of your life you get used to a certain form of thinking, a strange effect occurs - absolutely everything observed is automatically decomposed into separate subject areas and connections between them, and it is experience that allows you to represent this topology in the smallest possible configuration (automatic striving to decrease the level difficulties).
This is exactly what happens when analyzing social structures and various schemes of interaction between counterparties, in particular when analyzing business processes. But this time something went wrong ...
In accordance with the proposed definition of information by Claude Shannon - the increase in information is equal to the lost uncertainty, and in my case I encountered something that was always under my nose, but which I had not noticed all these years. Of course, I couldn't just walk by.
The point is that the optimization strategy in a closed-loop system does not change if the goal is set absolute. The economy is a closed system. Only in a local context, optimization can be of a different nature depending on telemetry (from the parameters and configuration of the system), but the same statement implies the fundamental assumption that the economy is an uncertainty, the size of which is so large relative to the size of the enterprise that it is conventionally represented endless. Perhaps I am overestimating my understanding of the vision of many players of the "field on which the game is played." My surprise was based on the fact that many of the strategies I analyzed turned out to be counterproductive from an enterprise lifecycle perspective. But I didn't understand why?
Imagine this analogy: let's say your goal is to survive in a changeable and aggressive environment, let it be an arid desert. You have a smartphone with you, on which maps of the area with a high degree of detail (on a good scale) are downloaded in advance. Everything suits you and you cross the desert from water source to source, plotting a route, and everything goes well, until along the way you meet interesting blooming cacti. You very quickly realize that this is a rare occurrence (some kind of abstract value within the model), and you want to capture it on your smartphone, but you quickly find that all your memory is full of cards. The paradox is that many players choose to “remove the cards in high resolution” so that “the pictures of a blooming cactus fit”. In practice, this is expressed in both the form of technical debt,which may not be so obvious, or in the form of degradation of big data analysis, when the accuracy is deliberately reduced for one reason or another (the most frequent of which is the same technical debt in the form of architectural restrictions on scaling, for example, the laboriousness of implementing cluster data analysis or transferring logic to optimized computers (GPU / TPU / ASIC)).
From this point of view, the process of evolution will seem to be quite natural in the form of a direct correlation with the overall experience of the organization, precisely as a form of reducing uncertainty, and, as a consequence, reducing errors in choosing a strategy of action. But in practice, everything is different. And here we come to the most interesting.
In order to better understand what is happening, I decided to decompose the very concept of "behavior strategy" into elementary components. In a sense, a strategy of behavior can be interpreted as a set of actions, generalized by the desire for a specific goal. Actions are determined by choice. But what determines the choice? As a rule, the choice is determined by the acceptable possibilities and the assessment of these possibilities, that is, by a certain set from which we are free to choose. If we consider in more detail this set itself, then it will obviously be clear that it is potential in nature and in a sense “loses its uncertainty” at the moment of choice, when the choice becomes a specific “one of ...”.
But if the choice is made strictly in favor of one of the available options, then the remaining options turn out to be unrealized potential, that is, they are not implemented as part of the behavior strategy, they remain in phase space and are not part of the causal chain of choices and actions that determine strategy. And here we smoothly come through the definition of a set to the definition of an algorithm for making a choice. We do not know what the selection algorithm itself is, but we see its consequence as telemetry of actions in relation to the phase space of possibilities. In other words, it is representable by functional logic F (P) -> D, where P is a potential choice set, F is a logic given the context (experience), and D is a consequence of a choice that falls into the context of logic.
We do this permanently, when we read, write, listen, speak, make a choice in favor of spaghetti from a set of analogues, or when solving vital issues, often even automatically, but nevertheless for some reason. We constantly "collapse" the phase space to a concretized chain of cause-and-effect relationships. Thus, all our behavior is actually reduced to the process of reducing the potential set. And this would seem to be a very common thing, there is nothing complicated, but it is this property of the impossibility of the existence of more than one deterministic state of the system at the same time when measuring it (when making an interaction - a choice) that leads us to interesting consequences.
The fact is that from this point of view, the concept of "choice" underlies the very process of evolution. I deliberately wrote "choice" in quotation marks, since from that moment on this term is somewhat broader in nature and rather reflects the semantic equivalent of the concept "it happened so", that is, the concept of choice is revealed by the phrase - "this is how the coherent superposition of states was determined (a set potential states - phase space) ".
Based on the “choice” process, like the process of crystallization or polymerization in chemistry, or the process of electron transfer between orbitals, the tunneling effect, the formation of socio-economic formations, the choice of partners in relationships, friends, building social ties, potential opportunities, etc. occurs. All this takes the form of a deterministic system of potentially possible states, but the point is that any particular state differs from any potential state in that it is realized as a choice, which gives rise to the effect of "discrimination" in relation to the unrealized set. If you are married, then you chose as your spouse the one you loved, who turned out to be worthy among other things being equal, but you thereby deprived the attention of others, based on your choice, your logic.When you chose certain people as friends, you deprived other people of the opportunity to be your friends, even if you are the most benevolent and sociable person, you are limited by the resource of time, all people cannot be your friends purely physically. And this applies to any choice.
I believe (on the rights of an exclusively subjective interpretation of reality) that the concept of choice is also reflected deeply in the system of cultural values ​​that in one way or another permeate each of us from childhood, we receive and consolidate some patterns of behavior through imprinting, even part of our morphology is a consequence Of "choice" at the moment of DNA formation, we are completely from the physical to the mental component of the implementation of one configuration out of many, and this manifests itself in everyday life (based on empirical observations) when people greet you, when you greet those whom you you know, since you cannot say hello to everyone individually, but shout in the middle of the street at the same time to everyone and to everyone "hello!" will be at least strange.
But what does corruption have to do with it?
The fact is that a corrupt component, by definition, the purpose of which was the entire above text, is a consequence of the choice by some people of certain decisions that infringe on the interests of other people (many people), but the choice cannot have only one side, the choice is always only one state from the potential set. Among the many outside observers, there will always be one for which someone has made a choice in favor of “their people” (the fact of nepotism) and will be perceived as a blatant form of infringement of their rights, since it automatically becomes “not our own” (not realized potential) , but each subject is endowed with a program of behavior that shapes how it determines the potential set of choices F (P) -> D, and this program of behavior assumes thatwhat people call "nepotism" and the choice of friends or spouse is basically of a single nature, and therefore the choice is made exclusively subjectively within the framework of their program of behavior, which on a global scale creates such a structure of society in which the legislative framework fixes provisions that contradict the concept of "choice" , and, in fact, declaring the expectation of the existence in a deterministic form of a coherent superposition of states, in other words - justice as a form of equality.declaring the expectation of existence in a deterministic form of a coherent superposition of states, in other words - justice as a form of equality.declaring the expectation of existence in a deterministic form of a coherent superposition of states, in other words - justice as a form of equality.
The unpleasant side effects of such declared provisions are the generation of kleptocracy, such as forms of government, local bribes, choice in favor of their own, etc., or an orthogonal form of behavior - obstruction (Italian strike) - which presupposes absolutely strict observance of instructions (deliberate the inability to adapt to the situation, which inevitably leads to undesirable consequences).
The declared striving for an impossible configuration of the system leads to the formation of "places of tension" - this applies to any society, any social structure (from a family to a corporation) and is a property of the structure itself, regardless of the form of socio-economic formation, since the nature of this property originates at a much deeper level - at the level of the very process of making the "choice".
All this negates the concept of equality in a mathematically strict sense, leaving the term justice only in a highly context-dependent form, in fact, a speech turnover in relation to local choice within an interested group of persons. In other words, the choice of a corrupt official in relation to “his own” is subjectively fair for him and a group of interested persons, and any form of criticism in relation to a subjective choice is an act of aggression and is interpreted as an attempt to violate that very (isomorphic, context-dependent) “justice” ...
This is partly due to the same counter-productive form of behavior (remember the metaphor with the desert and cacti), when "the cards are removed to capture a beautiful cactus." This is a form of choice that subjectively within the limited scope of a complexly organized social structure leads to fatal consequences for the life cycle of the structure itself - which is also a certain form of corruption (Latin corruptio “bribery, venality; corruption, decay; corruption”).
In your opinion, will the degree of errors in management increase with the inevitable increase in the level of complexity of systems, due to their evolution and growth?
From this point of view, it becomes obvious why a seemingly correct model of evolution based on a single optimization principle does not exist in practice and represents a gradient of forms and management strategies, often destructive ... Because the nature of the formation of a behavior strategy is fundamentally corrupt based on the phenomenon of determination coherent superposition.
