Degrees of Freedom
6 DoF is the gold standard in Virtual Reality today. It refers to the six degrees of freedom, or six ways user motion can be tracked by the headset and controllers : X, Y, and Z Position, and Orientation, (direction of motion).
I would just as soon call it 6m, for six motions or something a little more concrete, but I understand that ‘Degrees of Freedom’ has a specific meaning in engineering and statistics and several scientific fields that all come together to make VR Headsets. The details vary and I can’t understand some of them but the basic unifying idea of the Degrees of Freedom concept are clear.
Degree of Freedom refers to what a dynamic system or an entity in a dynamic system can actually do, given the constraints that exist. This idea turns out to be central to the way statistics are used to make inferences about the results of scientific experiments. In common sense terms it comes down to how many other possible results there could possibly be other than the result we’re looking at.
Freedom is also a political concept, but at least in its popular usage there is no strong sense of Degrees of Freedom.
The United States was once frequently and unironically referred to as the Leader of the Free World. It wasn’t quite binary — there was Free, Communist (unfree), and non-aligned. Now it’s just Democratic or Authoritarian. India is a Democracy. China isn’t. Done— there’s almost half of humanity categorized right there.
Freedom House is more nuanced. The organization has been recognizing Levels of Freedom and giving nations a Freedom Score, with 100% being Fully Free, since 1973. United States is currently ranked #51, just behind Slovakia, Greece and Italy, with an 86.
The current political situation in the United States is not discussed in these relative terms. Instead we hear only about the existential threat to Our Democracy, as if it has two states only, living or dead. It would be more accurate to say, the current situation threatens to drop the United States further in the rankings — behind Croatia, Mongolia, and Poland.
In fact, I would go further. Lots of respectable and even beloved public intellectuals like Heather Cox Richardson say we are on the verge of becoming not a Democracy at all, but an Oligarchy.
A couple of professors, Martin Gillen and Benjamin Page, from Princeton and Northwestern, said that ship has already sailed back in 2014. The U.S. already is an Oligarchy. The influence on public policy by citizens is negligible compared to the influence of what they define as economic elites and interest groups. They measure influence empirically, in terms of legislation and executive actions.
Well, that’s just their opinion, (they defend their opinion very rigorously using the accepted standards of their academic disciplines).
Now mostly, Our Liberty is represented as a simple matter. Today we are free. Today we are a Democracy. But tomorrow we may not be, because there are threats to our freedom everywhere.
Who benefits from this simplistic, on/off perspective? Small networks of elite players whose role is ignored in the Children’s Theater of Good and Evil, of course. The narrative managers.
Our degrees of freedom derive from the narratives we are invested in. What behaviors are possible, given the constraints? It depends on what you call constraints. The most limiting constraints are the ones we put on ourselves, based on the narrative we see ourselves in.