Bayesian society

This is based on a chorasimilarity post from 2011 and a comment from 2013. Today reality is already a corporate feudalism, but not quite as described in the rest of this note. Once they discovered that they really can move the priors, then they started to educate us. A rational approach would have been to do this only to their benefit. But humans can't live outside their culture. The rational, minimally invasive approach (explained in the note) was replaced with an exageration, according to their very limited and now outdated culture. This brings me hope that a counter reaction may come sooner than later.

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It is maybe a more flexible society one which is guided by a variable ideology, fine-tuned continuously by bayesian techniques. The individual would be replaced by the bayesian individual, an abstraction of the average of individual priors. The real individual will then form its opinions from what comes through a personalized controlled channel. In order to conform to the average, the input informations are made more or less available to the individual by using again bayesian analysis of interests, geographical location and digital footprint, closing the feedback loop.

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In a democracy the society is stirred, in principle, by the opinions of a majority of individuals. In a democracy is not the individual who counts, but a majority of individuals. In a bayesian society, the society is ruled as a control problem, in the mathematical sense. This is done by controlling statistically the input of information at the level of the “bayesian individual”, and by using a variable ideology, as a tool, i.e. by adapting the ideology so that it fits the bayesian individual, it keeps it happy in the bubble of available information which it has access to.

Democracy is based on the primitive notion of the force of a majority of individuals. If you think, this “majority” is an abstract construct, it does not have the reality which individuals have. But we are used with this abstraction, so we speak about the power of the people, democracy, opinions of the people, people’s will, as if this abstract notion of a majority of people has the same reality as individuals.

In a bayesian society this abstraction called majority is replaced by a collection of bayesian individuals.

It is no longer about how many people share a political view. It is about how each individual is positioned with respect to the average.

In order to stir the priors of individuals in a society there has to be a mechanism of inference of the individual priors in real time, for all individuals. Then a centralized entity, like a corporation with the goal to "organize" all knowledge, can compute the bayesian individual. This is an average, it does not correspond to any real majority. It is a simplified model of an average individual.

The problem comes when the individual is softly stirred in the right direction of that average.

This is an evolution with respect to the democracy, because in a bayesian society one might claim that not a majority of people feels good, but on average every people feels good almost all the time.

However, everything in the human culture is self-referential, i.e. based on beliefs of humans. In a democracy, the beliefs of individuals are formed through pyramidal structures, controlled by few, as for example school, media, religion. The goal of leaders is not to satisfy eveybody, but just a majority, and leaders can do this by modifying the beliefs of people through these channels. The goal is attained if a majority is satisfied.

In a bayesian society we have (already?) a more sophisticated notion, the one of a society of “average” individuals. The channels of information are finely-tuned, so that not a majority is satisfied, but (statistically) everybody, most of the time.

Of course, the problem of a democracy is that there always are minorities, i.e. groups of people which share opinions, but which are not the ones of a majority.

In a bayesian society, those individuals which are not close to the average are alone and feel bad, because the bubble of information which is accesible to them, individually, filters only information showing that they are not normal, that nobody shares their individual views.