poetix said:
How about the power to modify the primary weighting one of the agents gives to a partiacular option - e.g persuading them through a highly brilliant and affecting advertising campaign that life without plums is not worth living? The deterrance
model you sketched describes a scenario where an agent is dissuaded from doing something by the plausible threat of a consequence that makes the overall outcome less favourable than accepting some prima facie less attractive option with less dire consequences. But rather than threatening people with dire consequences if they, say, vote for a socialist government, it may be more effective just to persuade them that socialism is austere and boring and smells of cabbage.
Thank you very much! That's an interesting point which let's me expand on the issue of aggregation of power, which means to use power to get/maintain power.
First, I would not call it the "deterrance model" since the available alternatives may all be quite positive. Neither eating Ryvita nor eating plums is exactly painful. One misunderstands power where one reduces it to applications of force. I would argue that typically the application of force signals a (partial) breakdown of power because if the powerful resorts to force, the subject of power has little to loose and little interest in cooperation. Power in institutions (in modern democracies) happens mostly via careers for example. In institutions the alternatives for a worker are between different speeds on the career path. None of which is a dire consequence. Anyway, second, Society is a temporal entity made up from temporal events (essentially communications). Society always changes. Islands of stability exist, but are improbable, and require institutional support.
Enough with generalities, and back to the issue at hand. My definition of power is implicitly also temporalised (I should have stated that more clearly, but didn't want to complicate too much). It is based on preferences and expectations. But there's no reason to assume that preferences and expectations are temporally stable, and in fact, it's easy to give examples of changing preferences and expectations. With these changes, power changes. A typical example is the subjugation of women: as long as they were financially dependent on men, the latter had a lot of power over women. With the rise of female employment and financial independence, this has changed.
A government can use its power to get mass media, educational institutions and similar to act as government propagandists. In this example power phenomena might be found on various levels. The institutions may fear withdrawing of funding if they don't tow the government line. The heads of these institutions might worry about their careers, and use their institutional power to pressure underlings ... In non-democratic societies, this power might not be applied via funding/career levers, instead Beria and his thugs might come, visit and execute half of the staff.
In other words, the example fits perfectly!
The change or maintenance of conviction in the general population that you mention is thus an indirect effect of governmental power.
Or let's suppose Deep Blue is playing chess against another chess computer, and hacks into its opponent and changes its algorithm so that it no longer regards winning positions as optimal. You might say that's an "out of band" move, one which alters the nature of the game
This is too counterfactual for my liking. Does it make sense to talk of "power" here in any intuitive sense you like? Do I have power over the toilet if I flush? After all, it wouldn't have flushed otherwise? I don't see a toilet as an actor, it's a causal mechanism (because understand it well), but admittedly, the boundary is fuzzy.
But "power" often is the power to make exceptional moves of this kind
Well, yes, but as in my example above, the "power to make exceptional moves" is typically an instance of my definition.