Ideal Human Law.

[Agent Intellect]

Introduction - feel free to skip to next paragraph (I realize this post is long).
Science often utilizes an idealized (and usually impossible) archetype for which real life can be compared. In chemistry there is something called the Ideal Gas Law, which is the ideal state of a single gas: PV = nRT. It shows that Pressure and Volume are inversely proportionate, and that Volume/Pressure and Temperature are directly proportionate. An ideal gas does not exist, but a hypothetical ideal gas can be used to compare actual gases. In evolution, the Hardy-Weinberg principle assumes a population of organisms that are not evolving in any way (the allele frequency at a particular locus is unchanging every generation). Once again, this is something that doesn't actually happen in real life, but it's something that empirical data can be compared to in order to quantify just how much a population of organisms is evolving.



The point to be taken from this is that hypotheticals are used in science in order to have a standard for which to compare things. I'm proposing that this be done for humans. Abnormal psychology tends to assume some norm, which is generally the ambiguous 'average' of normal people. But, if looked at even closer, normal people often have idiosyncrasies that are thought to be abnormal - some people bite their fingernails when anxious, some people drink 'too much' coffee during the day, some people are night owls, some people take more risks than others, and some people spend their free time alone etc. Upon closer inspection, while none of these behaviors are outliers, they are noteworthy enough so as to be seen as different in some small degree to what's average (I hesitate to use the word normal).

So, I wonder what the hypothetical ideal human, like the hypothetical ideal gas or population equilibrium, would be like? This wouldn't have to describe any person that actually exists, but a person for which most (I hesitate to say all) other character traits can be compared. Just like with the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, this would be a model for which we could quantify just how off from the norm someone is.

Some obstacles with this:
1) What is the ideal age? At what age would it be said that someone is ideal - an age that, if a person is older, than being older or younger would be calculated as deviation from this hypothetical norm?
2) What culture would be used? Ideally it would be nice to reduce the deviation from our hypothetical ideal human as a result of culture as much as possible (the problem being that having no culture would be an even bigger deviation from the norm). I think culture deviation could be somewhat avoided by formulating the 'ideal' personality, which would explain how the person would act in any given situation, while their cultural surroundings would merely describe what they would interact with.
3) What sex would be used? I suppose there could be two models made, one for male and one for female. I'm not sure if there could be one made for intersex, transgender, or other gender/sex polymorphisms.

This being said, there would have to be a number of axis used, similar to MBTI or the Big Five. This will require some explanation and justification for my assertions. If you want to skip the justification, then scroll down to the asterisk*

Spoiler

My assumptions are that humans have A) a will to survive and B) an innate sense of incompleteness. The will to survive I think is rather self explanatory and that most people would not disagree that they at the very least avoid dying. So, I think that a will to survive would have to be taken axiomatically for any ideal individual, so the settings of the axes should reflect this. The second assumption basically says that, at no time in a normal persons life (and therefore the ideal person) do they feel fully complete, and therefore devoid of any desire. This sort of goes hand in hand with the will to survive, as the person who feels fully complete would have no drive or conscious reason to continue living; the will to survive is a subconscious sentiment to avoid dead and continue living, while the sense of incompleteness is ones conscious sense of having particular reasons to continue not only remaining alive, but conducting their various affairs and functioning as a goal oriented being.

These assumptions must be taken on a minimal functional level for the ideal being. This means running a sort of cost-benefit analysis for each of the axes of personality. The ideal human needs to be within a certain range so as to, for example, not be too inhibited but also not take too much of a risk (in the case of openness). The axes must also be as inclusive as possible. I will be using the Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) as well as two of my own (rationality and intelligence).

As social organisms, our survival depends on our interactions with other individuals as well as our ability to make personal decisions. I think these seven axes reflect both of these aspects, but in two different ways. While the Big Five tend to represent dichotomies, where there is a middle and two ways to deviate, the two I've added are more like an increase and decrease of a single quality. The Big Five would be easy to calculate, but as numerous discussions on this forum tell us, the other two would be much more difficult.

Intelligence is something that seems to only be defined empirically. It's difficult to define what it means to be intelligent or when someone is intelligent, yet when we interact with someone, we can generally get a sense of whether they are intelligent or not. For the purpose of my axis, I will use intelligence as it pertains to my first assumption: survival. In this case, intelligence is the ability to find novel solutions to new problems, and be able to use previously obtained knowledge to solve immediate problems (in this case, problem doesn't need to be something difficult; it could be as simple as how to stack four boxes of varying weight or how best to organize your DVD collection). Somebody low on intelligence would have a higher probability of stacking the heavy boxes on top of the light ones because they may not even recognize this as a problem in need of a solution (even in spite of past incidents of the light box being crushed). Someone who is high on intelligence can make easy inferences about solving problems (even if they'd never stacked boxes before) or learn how to solve a problem easily (they saw someone else stack them properly and easily inferred why they did it the way they did).

Rationality I would define in the sense of survival as the ability to make optimal decisions based on goals. For instance, if you are running late to go to your grandparents house and need to pick up cousin A and cousin B from two different locations, your ability to do this in the least amount of time (taking into account the number of turns, lights, and speed limits etc) is your ability to make sound decisions. Someone low on the rationality scale is someone you might see doing stupid things a lot: taking the long way around, in this instance. Someone high in rationality is someone who seems to make all the best decisions: when asked why they did something a certain way, they can point to all the reasons it was a good decision.

So, more loosely defined, intelligence might be the ability to manipulate present problems in the mind to derive optimal solutions while rationality might be the ability to foresee consequences of actions and take them into account when making a decision. Intelligence: seeing how all the chess pieces are lined up; Rationality: knowing the best move to make.

*The Big Five would be at 50%.

Intelligence I would put at 7. When I say this, I would mean that someone of average intelligence has a working memory of 7 items (calculated to be the average), which means they can easily solve problems that have 7 interacting components (eg. 7 boxes, like in my example, could be easily manipulated in the mind to solve the problem).

Rationality I would put at 5. By this I mean that the average person can make sound decisions by thinking up to 5 moves ahead - if I do A, then I can do B, then I can do C, then I can do D, then I can do E (each one causally related; B can't be done until A is done etc).


These averages sound like someone who could possibly exist, but where the hypothetical comes in is that it's assumed this ideal person has no idiosyncrasies that deviate from the two basic assumptions listed above. For instance, this ideal person would eat only enough calories as is needed to survive; they fall into the 50th percentile in both height and weight (this would have to be derived empirically); they would sleep 7.75 hours within every 24 hour period diurnally; they would not watch TV (in order to measure someones deviation in time spend watching TV from someone who does not); they would not read books; they would not have sex; their income would reflect both the amount of money required to survive and the amount of calories burned to stay within the daily value of calorie intake and so on - basically, if it doesn't have anything to do with the two assumptions I enumerated on inside the spoiler, it's assumed this ideal person does not do it.

In addition, I would probably put this person at thirty years old. This is slightly arbitrary, but thirty is an age when hormone levels are not too high and not too low, the persons personality could be said to be fully developed, they are not in mental decline and are not increasing in fluid intelligence, judgment faculties have fully developed and so on. So basically, if someone is younger or older than 30, they deviate from the "normal" in age.

--------

Questions:

Are there any criticisms/suggestions/comments/questions about this methodology, these conclusions, or this theory in general?

What changes (or even complete overhauls) might you make to this? What system would you make? What criteria would you use? What personality axes would you utilize?

How could the obstacles enumerated above be fixed or gotten around? What other obstacles might such a theory have to get over? Are the assumptions I used accurate - if not, what ones should be used and how might that alter the theory?

Is it strange that different characteristics and personalities are said to be abnormal when there is no established normal to compare it to?

Is it possible to make a hypothetical ideal human, or can we only make an average based on empirical statistics?

 

[EvilScientist Trainee]

I really, really liked this question AI (May I call you this way?)

You just got me when you started to use chemistry and biology to make your point, but as I read your thread, it was fascinating. I really found your word choice of average instead of normal to be just right.

Now, to the two cents.

Standardizing mankind is a tough job. We have taken on so many paths of development that it becomes hard to tell what is average, or better yet, when the average isn't a very good representative of the whole, it becomes hard to do what you're proposing, unless we're talking of physiological terms.

When we take on something that is not as plastic as our minds are, we can easily arrive at a good number. We could figure an average age, weigh, height and even skin tone - and these would have to be revised every generation or so.

But when it comes to cultural, sociological and psychological aspects, mankind surely fucks up our job. I'm also unsure of what culture should be taken, and that's exactly because of that thing about the average not being a very good representative of the whole.

Think about it: When it was the Cold war era, the main cultures were the American one and the Russian one. If we did a count to check which culture was the average for the mankind, we would have a prevalence towards a culture. But those cultures were really close in prevalence, what we called the average would still fail at representing a lot of the mankind's culture.

The point i'm trying to make is that culture isn't something that is tangible, and can't be well represented by numbers. But when we speak of personality prevalence, we can make some sort of average human, as long as we can use a less subjective tool. I'd suggest behaviourism. Behaviourism is quite empiric, I believe. If we did a broad behaviourism assessment*, we could achieve an average human behaviour, which we could apply to the model.

Spoiler

* Now that i've used the word assessment, I've noticed that both MBTI and big 5 rely on self assessment. That's what makes it a bit unreliable, as not everyone knows themselves well, and even if they did, they're subject to bias

But one thing that I can think of when thinking about that culture issue, I think that we could simplify the system. Think about nature vs nurture: We'll develop our cherished traits if the environment allows it, we'll have to develop other traits if the environment doesn't allow it. We could have a control society, that would be supportive of the individual traits, and study differences by changing variables in the environment.

Of course, i'm assuming this on the premise that we could make a representative of the mankind.

Trying to gather what I just said in that mess, I think that we can standardize mankind as long we can have verifiable data to perform it. Culture and personality are the hardest traits to do so. But if we can tackle a more empiric approach to personality, such as behaviourism, we can have verifiable data to use in the system. And regarding culture, we can simplify it in terms of supportive(control) and unsupportive, where we could try our variables.

Wow, that felt like Mad Science.

 

[Cognisant]

Wow, that felt like Mad Science.

Bah, nobody cares about mad social science

Spoiler

That said, isn't the whole point of human law to facilitate the efficient/sustainable functioning of human society?
Therefore isn't your "ideal human" merely an ideal citizen?

That should be easy enough to define as the factors involved are limited to those relevant in influencing the individual’s interaction/participation with society.

 

[walfin]

What is the purpose of the ideal human?

The ideal gas is useful because it simplifies the equation of state of a gas.

I think an ideal human might depend a bit on the particular thing you are studying. For instance, economics uses a kind of "ideal human" - a human who always acts in rational self-interest.

The ideal human cannot be compared to an ideal gas, too. Rather, it is like a molecule in an ideal gas. A better comparison might be between an ideal gas and an ideal human society. I assume such a society would be used to study human behaviour e.g. like what was called "psychohistory" in the Asimov novels.

Some possible assumptions for an ideal human society might be:
Closed system - no humans may enter or leave the society, there is no inflow or outflow of natural resources etc.
We only care about human behaviour - animals/plants are assumed to have a negligible effect on human behaviour
Every human in the ideal society is assumed to have the same physical needs/defects - no one needs to eat more than anyone else, if one person has a disease for the purposes of some equation, then everyone has that disease etc. For most purposes, physical needs would probably be taken to be negligible.
Every human in the ideal society has perfect knowledge of the actions taken by any other human at any instant time - to prevent time and space considerations from creeping into a model
No human in the ideal society is able to better predict the behaviour of another human than any other human - otherwise the model would be too complicated. We can allow for prediction, as long as every human predicts every other human's action in the same way.
There is no drastic shortage of resources - because human behaviour may be different in such a circumstance.
No human is able to change behaviour.
The society itself does not have any significant effect on humans in that society - i.e. human behaviour is exclusively governed by the actions of other humans.

 

[BigApplePi]

Re: Ideal Human Law - Response #1

Response #1

Introduction - feel free to skip to next paragraph (I realize this post is long).

I'd like to know what this post is about. My first read says it has lots of ideas. Would like to see them realized, one way or the other.

Science often utilizes an idealized (and usually impossible) archetype for which real life can be compared. In chemistry there is something called the Ideal Gas Law, which is the ideal state of a single gas: PV = nRT. It shows that Pressure and Volume are inversely proportionate, and that Volume/Pressure and Temperature are directly proportionate. An ideal gas does not exist, but a hypothetical ideal gas can be used to compare actual gases. In evolution, the Hardy-Weinberg principle assumes a population of organisms that are not evolving in any way (the allele frequency at a particular locus is unchanging every generation). Once again, this is something that doesn't actually happen in real life, but it's something that empirical data can be compared to in order to quantify just how much a population of organisms is evolving.

It is ambitious to combine animates with inanimates for analysis. I'm still working on distinguishing the two.

The point to be taken from this is that hypotheticals are used in science in order to have a standard for which to compare things. I'm proposing that this be done for humans. Abnormal psychology tends to assume some norm, which is generally the ambiguous 'average' of normal people. But, if looked at even closer, normal people often have idiosyncrasies that are thought to be abnormal - some people bite their fingernails when anxious, some people drink 'too much' coffee during the day, some people are night owls, some people take more risks than others, and some people spend their free time alone etc. Upon closer inspection, while none of these behaviors are outliers, they are noteworthy enough so as to be seen as different in some small degree to what's average (I hesitate to use the word normal).

So, I wonder what the hypothetical ideal human, like the hypothetical ideal gas or population equilibrium, would be like? This wouldn't have to describe any person that actually exists, but a person for which most (I hesitate to say all) other character traits can be compared. Just like with the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, this would be a model for which we could quantify just how off from the norm someone is.

Do you mean the "ideal" human or the representative human? Ideal requires some outside standard, undefined. Representative does go to average, or a merger of what the outsider sees.

Some obstacles with this:
1) What is the ideal age? At what age would it be said that someone is ideal - an age that, if a person is older, than being older or younger would be calculated as deviation from this hypothetical norm?
2) What culture would be used? Ideally it would be nice to reduce the deviation from our hypothetical ideal human as a result of culture as much as possible (the problem being that having no culture would be an even bigger deviation from the norm). I think culture deviation could be somewhat avoided by formulating the 'ideal' personality, which would explain how the person would act in any given situation, while their cultural surroundings would merely describe what they would interact with.
3) What sex would be used? I suppose there could be two models made, one for male and one for female. I'm not sure if there could be one made for intersex, transgender, or other gender/sex polymorphisms.

In looking at the variables, it is desirable to know if they are linear, "bell shaped", i.e. continuous or "camel humped", i.e. modular. The sexes are camel humped. It takes an outsider to decide if we pick one sex as ideal or representative. This forces modularity if we are to remain objective.

It may be of some interest to see a little of how the human being operates. I wrote this once about the human organism. If you have any qualms or questions, please ask. This is from 2005:

By: BigApplePi
29 Jan 2005, 12:56 PM EST

Humans. The human being is a puzzling organism. It has self awareness yet doesn't understand that of which it is aware. It operates with a number of parallel systems each of which have varying depths of awarenesses. One system may not be aware of another and multi-awarenesses are difficult to manage.

The human organism is aware of things both inside and outside of itself. It is aware of both input and output. Some bodily desires and needs for input and output are imposed and not subject to easy control. Systems inside have a vital center, a protective intermediary and an exploratory periphery.

Now the human being, unlike other animals, is aware of a great deal outside of itself:: Other things both animate and inanimate as well as other humans like itself. Its awareness of what is inside is vastly different from that of what is outside. This occurs in spite of other humans being organizationally like itself. The difference is it experiences itself as having a center while it experiences others as input/ output not by their center.

Evaluation of input/ output ranges from open to random to controlled to closed. Each in turn has its own advantages and disadvantages.

One of the many human systems is the center of its awareness and is called the brain. This mental system is aware of both the inside and the outside world, but the latter in a hugely different way. While the inner systems are bounded and relatively defined, the domain of the brain is not. The brain experiences outer systems randomly. It is fooled by its experience with inner systems and tries to impose control on the outer ones. It fails miserably.

There are many outer systems. Inanimates are treated not with respect for their intrinsic value but only for their value as input/ output. Animates, though respected, are treated with caution for though they supply input/ output, they themselves can be dangerous as they may take from oneself.

There is such a thing as a "Whole" outer system but the human brain though aware of its existence has almost no understanding of its input/ output except that it is there. It is worshipped by some and safely ignored by others.

Of the animate outer systems, the human is aware of those like itself. It has no choice but to crudely project its beliefs about its own self onto its fellow humans. It becomes greatly confused when it discovers what is expected to be like itself is not.

While a snapshot of each human system has a center and a periphery, some system centers are constantly in motion. Examples of systems changing focus are::

An expanding micro-organism spreading poisonous output.
An external human being stirring reproductive urges.
A threatened offspring representing the introjected life of oneself.
A goal to win or accumulate representing input insurance.
An annoying poster on a bulletin board.

 

[Agent Intellect]

Standardizing mankind is a tough job. We have taken on so many paths of development that it becomes hard to tell what is average, or better yet, when the average isn't a very good representative of the whole, it becomes hard to do what you're proposing, unless we're talking of physiological terms.

When we take on something that is not as plastic as our minds are, we can easily arrive at a good number. We could figure an average age, weigh, height and even skin tone - and these would have to be revised every generation or so.

I'm attempting to avoid, as much as possible, the averaging of empirical statistics. The problem with empirical statistics is that it does take too many of the variables into account, and this exercise is attempting to reduce the variables so that we can measure how far people are within a variable.

I'm aware that this is impossible for certain things (mainly things like weight and height etc) since there is no Platonic Form for human, for which everyone is gauged by how close they come to it. However, by making the two assumptions I made in the OP (survival and incompleteness) I think various personality traits can be measured by their deviation to these most standard of assumptions.

But when it comes to cultural, sociological and psychological aspects, mankind surely fucks up our job. I'm also unsure of what culture should be taken, and that's exactly because of that thing about the average not being a very good representative of the whole.

Think about it: When it was the Cold war era, the main cultures were the American one and the Russian one. If we did a count to check which culture was the average for the mankind, we would have a prevalence towards a culture. But those cultures were really close in prevalence, what we called the average would still fail at representing a lot of the mankind's culture.

Culture is primarily what people do, where personality is why they do it. I think culture can be excluded when isolating an Ideal Human, because culture may explain what people eat (meat? rice? bugs?) but not why they eat (energy). In the same way, culture may determine what I'm interested in (video games? sports? books?) but not why I'm interested in them (mental stimulation).

Something like MBTI can be used across different cultures, because it's not attempting to explain what it is that people do. An INTP in a western culture is likely to pursue science or engineering, but in tribal Africa and INTP might pursue seasonal growth patterns or the optimal way to build a fence to stave off lions or something. MBTI simply says that an INTP will do either of these things because Ne see's patterns and Ti builds models etc.

So, the deviation from my hypothetical ideal person might be in how far the action deviates from why a certain action is beneficial for A) survival and B) achieving goals (particularly as they related to survival).

The hypothetical ideal human only has to live. Most of what we do is not necessary for survival. Therefore, the things we do will deviate from staying alive by some degree. Everybody will deviate from this "ideal human" by some degree - the point of the exercise is to figure out who deviates from it more.

The point i'm trying to make is that culture isn't something that is tangible, and can't be well represented by numbers. But when we speak of personality prevalence, we can make some sort of average human, as long as we can use a less subjective tool. I'd suggest behaviourism. Behaviourism is quite empiric, I believe. If we did a broad behaviourism assessment*, we could achieve an average human behaviour, which we could apply to the model.

Spoiler

* Now that i've used the word assessment, I've noticed that both MBTI and big 5 rely on self assessment. That's what makes it a bit unreliable, as not everyone knows themselves well, and even if they did, they're subject to bias

The problem with behaviorism is it doesn't take motivations (the why) into account. If someone is being pursued by the police, they are justified in acting paranoid; if someone is not being pursued, then the same behavior (hiding in a dark room and looking through the blinds for the police) is not justified. If I like to spend Friday night sitting in my room reading, behaviorism can only measure the amount of time spent reading on Friday nights, but it can't explain things like introversion, or social anxiety, or misanthropy, or depression, or the enjoyment of a book etc. The point is, behaviorism is an empirical study - it does not have any standard for comparison beside the average derived from the empirical study of behavior. My goal is to derive a standard human based on something that is ubiquitous amongst humans simply by the definition of being human: survival and incompleteness.

That said, isn't the whole point of human law to facilitate the efficient/sustainable functioning of human society?
Therefore isn't your "ideal human" merely an ideal citizen?

That should be easy enough to define as the factors involved are limited to those relevant in influencing the individual’s interaction/participation with society.

I don't mean human law as in the law of being human. I meant it more analogous to the ideal gas law, like a law of science (entropy, light speed, planck's constant etc). I tried to establish in the OP that the "law" of being human is A) survival and B) goal seeking (even a goal as simple as picking up my cup of coffee to drink it - something Parkinson's patients with bradykinesia don't have).

What is the purpose of the ideal human?

To have a basis on which the motivations and behaviors of people can be assessed and quantified based on their deviation from the ideal human.

The ideal gas is useful because it simplifies the equation of state of a gas.

The ideal gas law reduces variables like intermolecular forces and the interactions of multiple gases. This allows us to calculate how much adding more gases or dipolar molecules influences the behavior of gas by measuring the deviation from the ideal gas. I'm attempting to establish an ideal human that we can measure deviations from in order to see just how "abnormal" someone is.

I think an ideal human might depend a bit on the particular thing you are studying. For instance, economics uses a kind of "ideal human" - a human who always acts in rational self-interest.

Just like with an ideal gas, different aspects of a person could be held constant while other aspects are changed in order to study any particular thing. Rational self-interest could be an aspect of assumption two (incompleteness) in that the person has a self-interest in their own incompleteness and therefore set goals in order to fulfill this. Somebody who deviates from this would either be self-sacrificing (altruism if you're an optimist, or gullible if you're a pessimist) or over-indulgent (shopaholic if you're an optimist, hoarder if you're a pessimist). Therefore, if one is studying economics, they would probably hold something like this constant.

The ideal human cannot be compared to an ideal gas, too. Rather, it is like a molecule in an ideal gas. A better comparison might be between an ideal gas and an ideal human society. I assume such a society would be used to study human behaviour e.g. like what was called "psychohistory" in the Asimov novels.

I would see society as being more like a gas when there are multiple gases, each with different solubility, densities, dipole moments, ionization etc with dynamic pressures and temperatures and an open system etc. Just like each gas can be calculated using the ideal gas law, each person can be defined using the ideal human law, then a society could be made by putting together various amounts of people with their own unique deviations from this ideal person. Theoretically, a society could be simulated by adjusting the parameters of each person by their deviation from the ideal human.

Some possible assumptions for an ideal human society might be:
Closed system - no humans may enter or leave the society, there is no inflow or outflow of natural resources etc.
We only care about human behaviour - animals/plants are assumed to have a negligible effect on human behaviour
Every human in the ideal society is assumed to have the same physical needs/defects - no one needs to eat more than anyone else, if one person has a disease for the purposes of some equation, then everyone has that disease etc. For most purposes, physical needs would probably be taken to be negligible.
Every human in the ideal society has perfect knowledge of the actions taken by any other human at any instant time - to prevent time and space considerations from creeping into a model
No human in the ideal society is able to better predict the behaviour of another human than any other human - otherwise the model would be too complicated. We can allow for prediction, as long as every human predicts every other human's action in the same way.
There is no drastic shortage of resources - because human behaviour may be different in such a circumstance.
No human is able to change behaviour.
The society itself does not have any significant effect on humans in that society - i.e. human behaviour is exclusively governed by the actions of other humans.

I think the idea of the ideal society is just as valid, and just as interesting, as the idea of an ideal human - it could be similar to the way that the Hardy-Weinberg principle works (your assumptions here are very similar to the assumptions used in the HWP).

This assumption seems interesting to me:

"Every human in the ideal society has perfect knowledge of the actions taken by any other human at any instant time - to prevent time and space considerations from creeping into a model"

I wonder if having a 'gossip variable' would be more realistic? Maybe, when someone does something, there is a constant rate at which the knowledge of this spreads geometrically from where the incident happened or something.

Also:

"Every human in the ideal society is assumed to have the same physical needs/defects - no one needs to eat more than anyone else, if one person has a disease for the purposes of some equation, then everyone has that disease etc. For most purposes, physical needs would probably be taken to be negligible."

This looks like it would be a good place in the ideal society to be able to adjust the parameters of the ideal human. The two assumptions I based my ideal human on were survival and incompleteness (or desire to seek goals). This would have to do with physical needs/defects. It would be interesting to have a simulation of an ideal society full of ideal humans, and adjust a single parameter on a particular number of people to see how it influences the way the society functions - and to also have meta-parameters that have to do with whatever parameters are used for your hypothetical ideal society.