Yeah I do know that these are of different dimensions.
So your conclusion is that there is no way to maximize all these factors. I get a sense of the reasoning from the Multi-Factor Decision Making Math article, but I guess I’m not completely convinced in the sense that I feel like I understand some things, but it’s not just obvious when I think about it that I couldn’t maximise these three factors, so I think that means I’m misunderstanding something. It feels like a fact I know but that I don’t feel, you know? Like I feel like it’d be dishonest for me to convince someone why they couldn’t maximise multiple factors, because I don’t know it.
So what am I having trouble with right now? I don’t really know what the next thing to do is. I’ll brainstorm things.
read the article again and take notes
read the article from where I remember reading up to ~2 weeks ago
try and find some further notes I made on this article ~2 weeks ago
ask elliot for some advice on what to try next
do some freewriting on the points from the mfdmm article
So without consciously going through each option, the thing that I want to do the most next is trying to find my previous notes. I seem to remember making some.
Okay so I found like, a whole post’s worth of notes that I didn’t share. I don’t know why. I think I had to leave for work for the day and thought I’d get back to it tomorrow but didn’t? It might’ve had something to do with me being disorganised about which threads to respond to. I basically forgot I had done this much work which is weird.
Here are the notes:
Notes
Yup I knew that those were the factors originally being talked about. And yes I think they’re different dimensions.
I’m read through the article more and made some notes:
So I get that you can’t add unlike terms. And, in the same way, that you can’t add things together from different dimensions; you can’t add profits, product quality, and workplace quality together.
So why can’t you maximise these things? Because they have to first be combined somehow in order to maximise them? Why? Why can’t you maximise them without combining them?
Well because maximising all three of them means maximising some combination of them. If we’re considering e.g 5 different combinations of 3 factors, and want to choose the one that maximises them, what we need is a way to rank combinations of factors by our goal of maximising them. So we first need a way to combine factors together in a way that gives us an overall score of each combination that we’re considering.
This is the problem from the MFDM Math article:
The article considers combining them with addition. It concludes that we can’t add them, because that ignore the dimensions. We can only convert between dimensions in relatively rare special cases. It rejects addition as a solution to the problem.
It considers combining them with multiplication, which can give us a single term (an overall evaluation), but the units of the term don’t necessarily correspond to anything useful. Also, if we’re considering different combinations of different factors, multiplying them will give different units; unlike terms, so they couldn’t be ranked (to rank terms they need to be like terms.)
(Why is it that we need a useful term? Why couldn’t we seek to maximise (profit * workplace quality * product quality)? I guess it doesn’t really make sense, like what is that unit but just each thing multiplied together? But what’s wrong with it? I guess you could decide to increase that unit, but the problem is whether you should. Does that unit correspond to something you care about, such that increasing it will make things better in terms of that? Why does the unit need to correspond to something you care about? Because we’re trying to find a unit that corresponds to something we care about? Because that’s part of our goal?)
(I think that multi-dimensional units and whether they are arbitrary or not is interesting. It’s interesting how it depends on problems we have and concepts that we have. How it is not just math.)
Okay this is taking a little while, and I’m not sure what my immediate goal is. I’m going to change what I’m doing and brainstorm how to break this down next.
- what I didn’t understand previously
- why i thought I did understand it
- what’s going on there
- how the article relates to the problem
- any issues i’m having with understanding things from the article
- what did I mean by maximising when I said a business should maximise profits and making great products, and being a great place to work?
Okay I think if I answered these things, and I think I can, then that’s a good plan. I’m going to start again on this tomorrow. I’ll do some other philosophy stuff now.
Notes:
Did I think that some goals like, work towards each other? So that like e.g maximising profits involves maximising other things like product quality, and workplace quality?
Do you have any thought on what I could do next?