I thought Sophocles did a good job of developing the plot of Oedipus Rex, with one exception.  The killing of Laius in a road rage incident was rather contrived. A former girlfriend of mine was a psychologist.  She told me that one of her patients was a boy whose mom was trying to seduce him.  My response was "Lucky Boy".  She didn't appreciate it.   --  Gene On Saturday, June 13, 2020, 3:03:25 PM PDT, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote: I should mention that my wife hates my opening sentence; she said "I'm sick of Oedipus!" But she is a social psychologist, so I think her hatred of Oedipus is really a transference of her deep-seated resentment of Freud. :-) Jim On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 5:56 PM James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:

Here's a link to the current draft of my June essay. Comments of any sort are welcome (even "You should probably stay in the pure-math lane, Jim" if you think my attempts at relevance only expose my own ignorance), as befits an essay on the theme of negative feedback...

http://mathenchant.org/062-draft2.pdf

Jim Propp

I wrote:

On 13/06/2020 22:56, James Propp wrote:

...

Here's a link to the current draft of my June essay. Comments of any sort are welcome [...]

I think "if you ignore nonlinearities in the equations" is one of those things that seems clear and simple to the expert while mystifying the uninitiated. I'm not sure whether this is fixable by adding a few more words of motivation. "In fact, if you assume all the changes are small so that deviations from linearity are small enough to ignore ..." or something. It may be that anyone for whom that would be enough would actually be OK with the current wording, though.

... Though I see that anyone who's been reading the notes will by that point have been exposed to the relevant idea, so perhaps I retract my comment. (I'm not sure, because the readers who need it more are less likely to have read the note.) Your neurotic-couple example is interesting but it seems a little too schematic somehow. (It seems like it might come straight from the pages of R D Laing -- though I just checked through "Knots" and didn't find anything that quite matches.) I'd expect that in most actual instances of the schema something more specific than "love" would be involved in some of the steps. E.g., A loves B _and smothers B with affection_; B finds that excessive and loves A less as a result; etc. My first introduction (so far as I recall) to the idea of negative feedback loops was at age eight or thereabouts when I saw a description of how an old-fashioned electric bell (of the sort that used to be used in telephones) works. I remember being transfixed by the elegance of it. Very similar to your example of a car whose driver's seat is free to slide. In note 4, I think you may want "the upshot" rather than "but upshot". -- g