I read a piece of news this morning, and it struck me as a bit surprising and confusing at first glance, so I tried to see it in topology to see whether there’s any ways to interprete it better.
The news went like this: some school teachers shared grievances over irrelevant responsibilities attached to their performance evaluation, which concerns new governmental incentives that applies to general citizens. In order to propogate the nudges, school teachers were ordered to encourage the students to ask their parents to adapt to them, and if it failed, the teachers would get public reprimand in school. Both the teachers and the parents complaint about it, and it triggered much criticism from the public as well.
I draw a simple graph to represent this structure:
In the graph we can see that there are several players in the interaction: government, school, teachers, students and parents, the edges represents some kind of connection, least of all, they know each other, but most possibly much more complicated.
For civil responsibilities, we can transform the graph into a digraph with arrows representing responsibility-taking direction. Each player in the field takes their own responsibilities, i.e., are reflexive, and at the same time there is a partial order existing among government, school, teacher and students.
These arrows can also be interpreted as “who directly imposes influences on the other’s decision-making.” Here, I am only taking consideration of obligations, not implicit influences like propoganda and rhetoric. And these decision-makings are all under the condition that their behaviors are legal, i.e., not breaching any rules that are forbidden by law.
We can see that in this power hierarchy, there isn’t a path from govenment to parents. The nudges can only influence the parents through softer methods to persuade them to make their own decisions, either by stimuli or rhetoric.
But at the same time, there are other layers of these same modes, as a multiplex network.
This layer represents a subtler relation among the multiple members. This is the human psyche that strive to get into someone else’s good books, for the benefit of future gain, either of political benefits, career growth, educational resouces, emotional bonding, etc. One could also say there are arrows too from teachers to students and teachers to parents, making them reciprocal relations, but the desires this way are not as strong as the other way around, so I omitted them for simplification purpose.
We can see that in this representation, there are two paths from parents to the government. The one who wants favor is in a less powerful position and the ones pointed to more powerful ones. Thus there emerges an established power system with the inversion of the arrows.
Here the hierarchy is established. And now the decision-making is no longer based upon a responsibility system but an inversive struture of favor-seeking. In other words, this favor-seeking human psyche is taken advantage of for executive purpose.
There are also two components that worth ponder about in this graph, namingly the one bounded by bureaucratical obligation (gov, school, teachers) and the one by moral, legal and emotional obligation (teachers, students, parents). The former one is an executive path and the latter one is not much so, and there could also be interesting findings. But I ran out of time, so I guess that’s it for now.