Floppy vs Stiff Concepts

I’m a bit puzzled by how changing culture can change our deep values. If cultures mainly change our status markers and norms, (i.e., game theoretic equilibria re social rules), don’t we need some other channel of influence over deep values? Unless maybe we really do mostly only care about status and avoiding censure? 

One other channel is concepts. In my last post, I told how our usual abstract concepts that describe status, norms, humanities, and the arts naturally change over time. This is like how law changes via precedent, but even more so. We often want and celebrate such concept changes, and the people who cause them. 

Let me call concepts that can change a lot via such processes “floppy”, and contrast them to “stiff” concepts that don’t change so much. For example, our concepts of mass, time and space, and many concepts built on these, are pretty stiff. As are most accounting concepts of cost and revenue. These are also pretty concrete concepts; stiffness here is largely obtained by staying pretty close to concrete observations. 

We also have large STEM areas built on systems with many related more abstract concepts. In these systems, stiffness is obtained via a dense network of tight (often mathematical) interconnections between these abstract concepts, and also some concrete concepts. You can’t change any one of these concepts much without changing many others around them. Floppy concepts, in contrast, can be changed individually, requiring only minor matching changes to related concepts. 

Non-STEM folks in the humanities and the arts are often proud to see themselves as having special social roles re status, norms, and values, roles for which they see STEM as less-suited. And we probably actually accept them in such roles because our usual status and norm concepts are in fact floppy. But they don’t obviously have to be.

One instructive example is the academic field of law and economics. This is the study of law that uses economic analysis to recommend legal processes and rulings that appear to maximize the concept of economic efficiency. As economics offers a stiffer set of concepts than do other frameworks for analyzing legal processes and rulings, these recommendations are more stable and less vulnerable to drifting as much as law usually does via its usual changes embodied in precedent.

Of course law and economics is disliked by many (most?) legal scholars, maybe exactly because of its lower degree of floppiness. A legal world dominated by law and economics would change less, with less room for celebrating legal activists who cause change. But suggests a vision of a way to cut cultural drift: fill the world of status, norms, and values with stiffer concepts, maybe drawn in part from economics. 

This wouldn’t eliminate change, but would slow it down a lot. The difference would be like the rate at which ordinary languages change, compared to the rate at which computer languages change. Committees in charge of such language do sometimes make changes, but rarely.