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Can I just braindump here for now?
"Cost function": In computer science algorithms, a cost function is a thing that an algorithm optimizes for. It takes some inputs and produces a score/cost. Also known as a "loss function" in math/machine learning.
For example: A pathfinding heuristic (like A*) will have a cost function like "minimize travel time between points A and B", and the algorithm will evaluate how it's doing at each step to check if it's getting better or worse. Machine learning works similarly, each training epoch is evaluated against some loss function to see if it's improving (keep going) or getting worse (need to stop/do something else).
In society, a cost function is how we frame what we're optimizing. "Increase GDP" is a cost function, we input economic factors and get a score. Each quarter, we evaluate how we performed against this core and change our behaviour in order to improve the score.
Related concept: “You can't improve what you don't measure."
How is this left-coded? This is perhaps a hot take, but I think it's not a crazy claim that "we should be improving the baseline quality of life of all people, rather than optimizing for how much wealth corporations can amass" is a debate around cost functions.
Today, society values networth (or GDP or what have you) above baseline quality of life. A people-first (or nature-first, or whatever other variant) policy demands a change in which cost functions we're using.
Part of the challenge is that networth/GDP is a simpler, more robust, and more encompassing score to compute than "quality of life" or "person-centric policy" or "freedom" or what have you. Where do we start? Child mortality? Happiness scores? Education? BMI? Crime?
GDP also "feeds into itself" at a rapid pace (YoY rather than generations), through re-investment and the ponzi nature of society's dependence on population growth to support debt (a loan against the future).
It's hard to come up with a holistic leftist "cost function" that feeds into itself this way (do you have examples?), especially within the scale of years rather than generations (traditionally education begets more education, but it takes so long!!!). 0 reply
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