Discuss "the law of conservation of personal problems" that is part of the dialogue between Yugo and Dors in Forward the Foundation, (pp. 268-274, esp. pp. 272-3).
The tie-in to physics implies the following: For a fixed group of people, the sum total of all conflict between and among all the group members is constant over time. Adding, subtracting, or changing individuals *is* expected to change the total conflict of the group. But keeping the group a "closed system" somehow implies conservation of personal problems.
I find this idea of a closed system impractical. I can't think of any populations or systems of people that are not in constant flux. Maybe on a grand scale but that seems to become less useful at that point. The idea makes since but I find it impractical.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking this might work in a Utopian society because of the isolation factor. One thing I was struggling with was seeing how the law would work in a society that is always being influenced by the outside world.
ReplyDeleteWe discussed in-class how the conservation of personal problems was more analogous to the conservation of energy rather than mass because there are various ways that personal problems can be "expressed" in a system. This would require a classification system for the different types of conflict such as potential conflict (arguments waiting to happen), passive conflict (conflicts that are kept from being fully expressed due to external restrictions), and active conflict (conflicts that are fully expressed with no restrictions). I think that the "law" could work if you framed it right. For every resolved problem in a closed system a new potential problem would probably be generated by others in the system (perhaps by some sort of disagreement principle). It would take some general assumptions about the psychology of a closed group of people (a gilligan's island system) but I think that the law could work.
ReplyDeleteOne factor we might also want to consider is the fact that we're looking at human beings, as unstable and ever-changing as we are. Energy is always conserved because it is an inherent property of existence; however, when we look at things like personal problems, we should take into account that people change. For example, after a heated debate, a conclusion can be drawn on a certain issue where personal ideologies are examined and changed. If this is the case, we can actually decrease the net conflict among members.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, we can also say that the psychological tendency of some people to change and conform on issues should be taken into account as well. If this is so, natural change could be considered a factor that affects potential conflict, just as some objects in the physical world have higher and lower potential energies coefficients.
The idea of potential vs kinetic energy seems to be very relevant to this law as Clayton suggested. It seems to me that this may be a possible explanation for why it would appear that personal problems do not always stay in equal balance. Though this quantity (Potential Problems) would be hard to measure it looks very reasonable that the potential problems in a group of people would account for a lack of actual problems (Kinetic Problems). Using these two different factors and some sort of proportionality constant to show how the size of the group effects the number of problems this law does not appear so strange.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was Sam who suggested the potential vs. kinetic energy thing... either way, I think that's a very interesting way of looking at the Conservation of Personal (should probably be *Personnel*) Problems; to "solve" a problem is merely to convert its kinetic energy into stored potential energy, ready to be reactivated at a moment's notice. In this way, problems are never solved, but only "solved" - temporarily mitigated or avoided. If there is nothing new under the sun, then every problem we face is a problem that's been faced before; but the fact that it strikes us as new means that someone was able to bottle it up, for a time, and that somehow that bottle broke.
ReplyDeleteI think the Conservation of Personal Problems also fits nicely with the notion of zero-sum games, such that the diminution of a problem for one person is the growth of that problem for another... but that would be kinda tautological, taking zero-sum games as given before hypothesizing that the mass of problems within a group remained constant over time (which is the very thing a zero-sum game presupposes).
It seems possible to test this theory in a completely closed system, but any results would be useless because closed systems don't occur naturally; even Gilligan's Island had random outside variables like weather, stuff washing up on shore etc..
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