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archangelwar posted:Don't worry, he posts this same copy/paste every few months and then yells at everyone who "doesn't get it." I have posted about this twice. Here's one. That was written for that thread alone and not copied from anywhere else. No one said anything about it in that thread, which was a little silly anyway, and I didn't yell at anyone for "not getting it". I have copied one paragraph from that post in this thread; otherwise, everything in this thread is original. I know I've posted the "marbles from foreheads" thing, but it is probably in the archives because I can't find it in search. It was not an original thread of mine, but a one off description of the idea in another thread about something else, and got almost no response, much like the post above. I had this idea about 4 years ago, and while I admit that I have tried to post the idea on the forums before, I never felt confident enough with the idea to commit to writing about it at length. It certainly isn't a copy/paste I bring out "every few months". I've wanted to write it out, but I always buried it in some other thread and watched it sink without a ripple. But now I'm totally doing this poo poo live.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 01:33 |
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| # ? May 19, 2013 13:43 |
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As much as I hate to discourage someone who is clearly really interesting in thinking about alternatives to our current economy, and as much as I'd like to make constructive comments, but that's actually kinda hard to do right now. You seem to have a fundamentally skewed idea about why people save resources and how saving and investment are related to each other. I mean this really is one of the most pie-in-the-sky ideas I've ever heard. Its not so much that its naive or unrealistic - though it is - what is really weird is the huge number of issues you haven't even bothered to address. Even the wackiest fringe theories usually have a bad explanation for how resources will be invested but yours is literally incoherent. Your system as described so far isn't even internally consistent. A couple posts ago you claimed that competition for attention would lead to capitalist-style competition, but when I pointed out that this is impossible without savings you're response was "good". So are you trying to have competition or aren't you?
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 01:42 |
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Eripsa Can we just talk about your weird story in the first half of your post for a second? I mean, you are acting like the 'Church' (you never address what you mean by this so I am not entirely sure what you are trying to get at) had some monstrous power during the Enlightenment. If you are talking about the Catholic Church, your suggested time period is after the Protestant Reformation drove the Catholic Church out of a large portion of Europe, and irreversibly effected its political power in what countries remained Catholic. (Which isn't to say that the Church had no power in those countries, because it obviously did/does.) Or do you just mean Christianity as a concept when you refer to the Church? I really just don't understand what that first thing had to do with the things that followed.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 01:42 |
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I apologize if I have overstated the frequency with which you have posted this absurdity, but I also remember you posting it along with reference to the notes of someone else from which you derived the concept (possibly later in that same thread) and you were engaged, but mostly dismissed. Honestly, I don't see why you find this concept so fascinating in light of more well researched ideas in post scarcity socioeconomics.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 01:42 |
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DiscipleoftheClaw posted:Eripsa Can we just talk about your weird story in the first half of your post for a second? I mean, you are acting like the 'Church' (you never address what you mean by this so I am not entirely sure what you are trying to get at) had some monstrous power during the Enlightenment. If you are talking about the Catholic Church, your suggested time period is after the Protestant Reformation drove the Catholic Church out of a large portion of Europe, and irreversibly effected its political power in what countries remained Catholic. (Which isn't to say that the Church had no power in those countries, because it obviously did/does.) Do you seriously want to start unpacking the historical beliefs of someone who claimed the Catholic Church was unchanged from "Constantine" until "the late 17th century"?
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 01:44 |
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Just so that this whole thread doesn't become a 'hate on eripsa' bandwagon, allow me to propose my, much simpler, alternative economy:
It might need more marbles though.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 01:52 |
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There are a lot of enterprises that only really work as small units. Restaurants and boutique stores are obvious examples, but hardly the best ones. A lot of technological advances occur when an engineer or designer working at a large firm realizes there's a specific part of the production process that he or she could do much more efficiently than the company. That individual leaves the larger company and starts a new small business devoted exclusively to that one part of the production chain. The woman who invented the bra, for instance, started out as a seamtress in New York. She started experimenting with new types of undergarments to make her clothing hang better on her models and got such good feedback that she ended up starting a new company devoted exclusively to manufacturing this new item. Now this basic story gets turned into some kind of moral passion play about heroic entrepreneurs all the time and I don't want this to be taken as some kind of homage to the beauty of capitalism. That having been said, there are distinct advantages to having an economy with a mixture or large oligopolistic firms plus smaller, leaner start ups. Companies with multiple departments and long histories are rarely as innovative as fresh start ups.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 02:01 |
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Helsing posted:You do realize that many different societies have independently come up with the idea of money, right? If you want to come up with an alternative system then you should go for but you'd have to be insanely ignorant of basic history and anthropology - not to mention political economy - to think that the only reason people use money is force of habit or irrational reverence for how things were done in the past. You're in such a rush to come up with a better system that you haven't spent enough time thinking about why we developed the system we have. If you're going to make a critique of the existing economy then it really needs to be an intelligent and thoughtful one. I'm in the process of writing out the idea in this thread, but I've given it a lot of thought. I'm trying to take it seriously. But it is also a Really Big Idea, and I know I'm not capable of handling it on my own, and I really don't give a poo poo if the forums see me slip and fall a few times while I'm trying to put it together. It's not like I'm trying to make money off the idea. Yes, money has appeared independently in many different societies. Dennett calls it a "Good Trick" of evolution, like flying or vision, which also arose independently several times in the history of species. I've struggled with the idea that it is a "good" trick, but it is certainly a successful trick and one that has been incredibly important for human society for thousands of years. I don't want to take that history lightly. But I also don't want to take it for granted. The human species has spent the vast majority of our history without money. Wikipedia tells me that commodity money is roughly five thousand years old, and we've been so-called "Behaviorally Modern Humans" for roughly fifty thousand years, so we are talking around 10% of our history as Modern Humans, and closer to 1% of our history as Homo Sapiens. It is quite reasonable to think that money is an efficient way of handling social transactions in societies with a certain kind of organization. Hunter-Gathers don't need commodity money, but if you are in an Agricultural society or an Industrial society where the need for specialization and division of labor is high then commodity money is a Good Trick for handling the problems of social coordination. In such a situation, it isn't surprising that the trick gets invented (or discovered) multiple times independently by cultures facing the same basic coordination problem. And that's perfectly compatible with the claim that a Digital society can find other ways of dealing with the problem of coordination. In fact we should expect that a deeply networked society operating on a global scale would need new solutions to the coordination problem. The internet is a Good Trick too, and I think it can solve a lot of the coordination problems that money was used for in other contexts. Someone more moderate than I would probably try to argue that the future will have some contexts where money still is the best solution to the coordination problem- probably in contexts where things are rare, or luxury items, or otherwise "expensive" and hard to get. But perhaps we should divorce those contexts from the contexts of basic human living- the food and shelter and education and medicine that can be supplied to all people without the pretense of expense or luxury, but must be carried out in the name of humanity. Right now these contexts suffer under the centrality of money, and if we can even just shrink the scope of its influence on the coordination problem, it will be a major human victory. quote:You also really need to address why you think it's better to have an economy with no savings and how / why people in this economy will invest in plant and machinery. That's easy. The only thing you have to invest with is you attention, and the only thing that costs you is time. So if you are willing to take the time to build a factory, then do it. If your factory really helps optimize the coordination problem, then I'm sure others will help.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 02:09 |
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I'm sure some of you guys remember the GBS thread from a few years ago where a poster claimed to be from a post-scarcity society thoroughly linked through something like an FTL internet, and where people posted what they wanted on essentially galactic messageboards, and people who were interested in helping out would participate if they felt like it. Sometimes this was in exchange for like services or knowledge or companionship or whatever. Pretty sure the dude said he flew here in a space ship he was free to borrow from an acquaintance. Essentially, it was a faith-based economy, but instead of faith in return on currency, there was general faith that anything needed could simply be had. It was neat, but as a thought experiment it missed the meat-and-potatoes issue of civilized goalposts advancing along with every new generation, and basically side-stepped it by saying that some (type something) civilizations were inherently individualistic and non-altruistic, prone to fighting over resources, and that some intelligent species would just do that, whereas others would be collectively fine with struggling to produce livable standards for each individual before striving for anything else. Eripsa, was this you?
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 02:10 |
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^^ No, but it sounds like a fun thread. DiscipleoftheClaw posted:your suggested time period is after the Protestant Reformation drove the Catholic Church out of a large portion of Europe, and irreversibly effected its political power in what countries remained Catholic. (Which isn't to say that the Church had no power in those countries, because it obviously did/does.) They threw Galileo in prison over a hundred years after the Reformation began, which is explicitly part of the context of the parable.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 02:14 |
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And Catholic lay believers/priests were killed throughout Reformed Europe well into the Enlightenment, so by your logic the Church had no power?? And again, no one is saying the Church had no political power or influence. It did. But we are confused about what that parable is supposed to be, and why you think that the Church had more to do with the state of European affairs than, well, the State did. Edit: Yeah you pretty much ignored my whole post so idk.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 02:30 |
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quote:There are a lot of enterprises that only really work as small units. Restaurants and boutique stores are obvious examples, but hardly the best ones. A lot of technological advances occur when an engineer or designer working at a large firm realizes there's a specific part of the production process that he or she could do much more efficiently than the company. That individual leaves the larger company and starts a new small business devoted exclusively to that one part of the production chain. The woman who invented the bra, for instance, started out as a seamtress in New York. She started experimenting with new types of undergarments to make her clothing hang better on her models and got such good feedback that she ended up starting a new company devoted exclusively to manufacturing this new item. But I don't think my model excludes those advances: remember that technology isn't owned by anyone any more, the engineer who sees this new advance would have no problem just telling his boss or whatever, because everyone gains as much from this advance as the worker does (the worker is not being 'ripped off'). Plus, the workplace is no longer this alienating experience of do-work-get-cash, but part of participating in a small community. You could totally throw in a cash bonus for 'new ideas' to incentivize it better, but I'll admit it's not the same things as controlling your own business. Heck, even well paying engineers have to make a business case to a bank or investors to try and start a business. Which means convincing men in suits that this idea is worthwhile. In that sense, my pet model isn't that much worse, because you're going to have to deal with the board of the company.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 02:42 |
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archangelwar posted:Honestly, I don't see why you find this concept so fascinating in light of more well researched ideas in post scarcity socioeconomics. Do you have something specific in mind? The closest thing I know is The Venus Project, but in all honesty I haven't looking into it much beyond knowing of its existence. But there is an air of Scientology to it that makes me uncomfortable. I know that's a complete knee-jerk reaction, but its association with Zeitgeist leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I haven't looked to get involved or do any more research. My idea was arrived at independently, and I didn't learn about TVP until I started doing research. I don't want to influence it too much by reading what they are doing because if they are a bunch of tinfoil insane types I don't want even the appearance of an association. My ideas are crazy, but they are my crazy ideas, and I don't want to get swept up in a cult because of it.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 02:50 |
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DiscipleoftheClaw posted:And again, no one is saying the Church had no political power or influence. It did. But we are confused about what that parable is supposed to be, and why you think that the Church had more to do with the state of European affairs than, well, the State did. It is a parable. The church represents a sacred and unquestioned authority. The point of the parable was not to address some fact about the church's absolute power, but instead to address the taboo against conceiving of a society without that power. I could have easily referred to the State as well (I do refer to "Kings and Lords"), but this wouldn't have captured the "taboo" aspect of the parable as well, especially to a largely American audience that is quite accustomed to questioning political authority. You are right that the Church was by no means an absolute and unquestioned authority at the dawn of the Enlightenment. But intellectual elites at that time (and well after) did very much live in fear of speaking about atheism or a secular society, and hid or adjusted their works to prevent persecution from the Church, despite its waning power. Both Hobbes and Hume use forms of circumlocution to avoid the appearance of directly questioning the centrality of religion, and they don't even have to worry about the Vatican. So the idea that two young kids at the time would speak in hushed tones about secularism isn't so horribly outlandish. But dude, seriously, its a loving parable. I know its easy to rip on the guy who puts in the effort instead of contributing your own, but you are trying to point out anachronisms in a loving fable. Grow up. edit: In 100 years, people will point to the late 20th and early 21st century as the beginning of the Digital Age that ushered in the cashless society. But I'm in here right now posting to blank stares and accusations of incoherence.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 03:05 |
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Eripsa posted:edit: In 100 years, people will point to the late 20th and early 21st century as the beginning of the Digital Age that ushered in the cashless society. But I'm in here right now posting to blank stares and accusations of incoherence. Right, but do you think the transition will happen quickly, or slowly, or everywhere at once...or even everywhere? I am not giving to blank stares of accusations of incoherence, I just know I can't formulate an economic system that instantly accommodates everyone, because it would require people to accept a global social contract, and we're still too busy fighting and believing in spacegods and stuff.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 03:14 |
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Automation isn't the end of capitalism. Some people own the machines, other people don't. Besides, you'll always have jobs that cannot be cost-effectively automated. Also, the attention thing is delusional.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 03:18 |
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Four marbles on the edge of - ah gently caress it. This is terrible.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 09:05 |
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Is the diversion of capital from East Hampton mansions and manufactured desert subdivisions to sick, starving villages honestly impossible under our current economic system? Our economy does not allow for even marginally equitable distribution of resources and we need a brand new one in order to achieve any kind of sustainable civil society? That's stupid and I don't believe it. I think our problems are simple. There is an obscene amount of profit to be made because we are burning the candle (petroleum reserves) at both ends and in the middle too. Obscene profits have attracted the most cynical and self-serving individuals available to positions of power, and grossly inequitable systems of distribution have become institutionalized. When politics and economics are recombined into political economy, the assumption of growth ceases, and people who give a poo poo about things that are not themselves (there are still a great many) start to take back the reins of power, we will begin to forge an equitable and sustainable world. But for now, I can't imagine putting any faith in government or in markets. Each has thoroughly corrupted the other and neither is to be trusted to do anything important. I have committed myself to a renewed American urbanism, which I see as the solution to almost every single problem. Social cohesion, the fostering of an empathetic and engaged culture, vastly diminished environmental impact; de-suburbanization and re-invigoration of the urban cores can help to realize them all. The first problem it would solve is this awful modern American "conservatism" which is responsible for at least half our problems and making it impossible to address any of them. Conservative hegemony is an imminent threat to the health and security of the nation and the planet, and it needs to be dealt with the day before yesterday.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 10:03 |
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Wouldn't an attention economy turn into an advertising/marketing economy pretty fast?
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 12:26 |
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Eripsa posted:I'm in the process of writing out the idea in this thread, but I've given it a lot of thought. I'm trying to take it seriously. I find that hard to believe. quote:That's easy. The only thing you have to invest with is you attention, and the only thing that costs you is time. The fact that you think its "easy" is actually a lot more telling than your attempted solution. I guess if you consider investments in human capital and physical infrastructure to be an easy or essentially unimportant question when you're designing a new economic situation then there's no wonder you don't really see the need for money. These are the questions that the economy is actually built around. You're totally caught up in this juvenile fantasy about questioning sacred authorities and blowing people's minds with your out of the box thinking while very conspicuously ignoring the actual hard parts of coming up with a solution. You've seized on the flashy parts of designing a society but totally neglected the bigger issues. quote:So if you are willing to take the time to build a factory, then do it. If your factory really helps optimize the coordination problem, then I'm sure others will help. So basically your endgoal is a sort of idealized postcard version of Marxist communism, except that instead of having it come about through a revolution you're anticipating that some kind of magical techno-economy will spring up.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 18:39 |
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Maxwell Lord posted:Except then there's food. This is a Good Post. Attention Economy is meant precisely to address this problem, without appealing to some top-down bureaucratic institution with a monopoly on planning. Instead, it appeals to the bottom-up Digital paradigm of open access, universal participation, and crowd-sourced management and improvement. It is a distributed solution to the coordination problem. I've used the phrase a few times, so let me be specific: The Coordination Problem is the problem of coordinating global human activity to produce and distribute resources in order to satisfy global human need. The Basic Coordination Problem is the problem of coordination global human activity to produce and distribute basic human resources to satisfy basic global human needs. I take the basic human needs to include food, water, shelter, medical care, and education. Since we already meet those levels of production, I think we have a minimal ethical imperative to solve at least the basic coordination problem and work out the method of distribution. One thing I hope we can all agree on is that our current system, what I like to call The Existing Order of Things, although it has been instrumental in solving the production problem, has not solved the distribution problem, and will be in no position to do so for the foreseeable future. Why don't we have a solution to the distribution problem right now? There are all sorts of complex sociohistorical reasons for how we got here, but what prevents a solution? Right now the solution to the distribution problem currently rests on the flow of (commodity) money, and as long as there is no profit in solving the basic coordination problem money can't properly direct the resources where they are needed. Even significant amounts of charity and aid work to patch the problems at best. If we take money for granted, the only potential solutions is to wait for all developing nations to rise up and eventually enter into more significant trade relations within our current global economic system. But not only this process is slow and mired in the sociopolitical realities of the global economy, but the end goal is clearly unsustainable and frankly doesn't have much to say for itself other than that it seems to be the only cards on the table, and no one is coming up with any better solutions. So Attention Economy is meant to be that solution. The idea is to track attention as an indicator of value, not as an abstract and neutral medium of exchange, but as a direct empirical indicator of what people do in fact value. My claim is that as we get better at collecting data about what people actually pay attention to, the better we will be able to solve the distribution problem. As is becoming increasingly clear, the problems of complex networks is tackled with mountains and mountains of data, and I'm trying to argue that the data we want to be tracking for solving the economy is attention. I am so confident of this that I'm willing to push ahead with the theory despite the mocking in this thread. I have a bunch of examples, but my favorites are the ones dealing with highways. Here's a basic rule of thumb: the road that is traveled most often is the road that should receive the most resources and upkeep to ensure that it is operating most effectively. In general, a road should be able to marshal the resources required to maintain its use, and in proportion to the amount that it is used. That seems like a fair principle, and one that settles the basic algorithm for distributing road-constructing resources among all the roads. Apart from one major objection discussed below, this is a pretty clear case where questions about the distribution of resources is settled directly by questions of use. Tracking attention just is tracking use, so my argument is that an attention-based system for distributing resources is going to produce better results (more efficient use of resources) than other methods. It will definitely be superior to the way things work now, where the most profitable road to repair gets repairs, while others languish despite use. So that works for roads, I think, and my idea is to apply it widely. Where do the resources for maintaining those roads come from? Well, track how much asphalt and tar and whatever is used, and distribute those resources as anticipated by those patterns of use. Apply the same pattern down the chain, and horizontally across domains, and you have the basic model for a new and sustainable economy. This seems deceptively simply, I know. The important thing to recognize is not that my idea is right, but that this isn't how we do it now. The way we do things now is to distribute resources based on maximizing profit. Sometimes solving the coordination problem maximizes profit, and then we get examples of where the current system works. But for lots of resources and for lots of people, solving the coordination profit doesn't maximize this external goal of profit maximization, and so the system just fails. My idea is to reorganize this so that our systems of value have direct implications for the coordination problem, and I'm proposing that attention is precisely the mechanism for doing this. The road example also highlights one important feature about attention economy: everyone is a participant in the economy, including our objects. I can pay attention to the road just as much as I can pay attention to other people, and that attention paid needs to be tracked by the system. This is where the marble analogy comes in handy. I haven't laid the full view out yet, so let me explain more how it works. Remember, an individual's rate of marble production is a function of the rate of marble absorption plus some base rate. Every human being will produce a constant base rate of marbles (in virtue of being conscious) which they effortlessly divide among the various things they pay attention to as they go about their day. The marbles are shooting out of their head automatically, so they don't need to think about where they are going, and they certainly aren't 'exchanging' them for anything. They are just producing them, unconsciously, like beats of their heart. I can't change that base rate of marbles. But I can change my rate of marble absorption, and thereby increase the rate at which I produce marbles. I change this by attracting attention. Anyone who pays attention to me or the things I do will ultimately (and unconsciously) be shooting marbles at me, and every marble I get will increase my rate of marble production by some small fraction. The more attention I get, the faster my rate of marble production. A few key points: 1) Nothing that I do on a daily basis will depend on my rate of marble production. I will not be limited from access to any public goods and services based on my rate of marble production. So there is no pressure on me to attract attention. If I want to be completely anonymous and not have anyone bother to notice me, I will still be fully capable of participating in public life. 2) By "pay attention to me", I mean both my self (my body and personality and whatever) but also the things I do. So for instance, if I create some invention or write a book (paging Insanite), the book is labeled as mine in some essential way, such that when anyone who pays attention to that book (and thereby, shoots that book with their marbles), I received some percentage of the marbles shot at that book. I won't receive all the marbles; some will go to the book's manufacture and advertiser and whoever else participated in its creation. But I will be acknowledged for that work with a boost in my marble production rate. It is fundamental to this system that Real People get Real Credit for the work they do, and the credit they get is directly tied to is usefulness within the system. So the same thing will work for the road construction. The road is receiving a certain amount of marbles based on its use, and at least some of those marbles get redirected to the construction crew who put their time and effort into maintaining its use. But again, don't think of this like getting paid to do the work. First of all, if anyone "pays" you it isn't going to be your 'boss', or the managers who are helping coordinate the task. The thing "paying" you is the road itself, the thing you actually worked on. But this isn't "paying" in the old commodity money sense, because a) you don't get any wealth from it, in the form of goods or currency, all you get is a boost to your rate of production, and b) the boost to your rate of production will entirely depend on the use of the thing you produced (that is, how much attention it gets), and not on the work you put into it. 3) The why care if your rate of production goes up? If my ability to feed myself doesn't depend on the work I do, why should I work to increase my rate of marble production? Well the short answer is that you shouldn't, if you don't want to. Although this system will 'reward' the 'popular' people that everyone pays attention to, none of your basic needs (the ones that must be met by the Basic Coordination Problem) depend on your popularity. So if you want to spend all your time building miniature Michael J Fox dolls for the three other people who are into that, do it. You'll still be able to live your life with all your basic needs met. No one will stop you, and you won't be punished for it. You, my friend, are part of the long tail, and a distributed system mostly exists in that small tail, so there is no incentive to punish you for finding a niche role. But if you want it, you can seek out attention to increase your rate of marble production. Because the higher your rate of production, the more influence you have over the overall flow of of marbles in the system. I mentioned a major objection to the road example earlier, and here it is: not all use is equal. Maybe that one road into the forest sits entirely unused the whole year, except when firetrucks use it to clean out the underbrush to ensure there are no fires. It may be mostly unused, but that one use is really loving important. There are all sorts of cases where perhaps we should privilege some use over others. So this objection is right, and the Attention Economy system is supposed to account for this. Not all use is equal, but we have a way of tracking the weighting the relative importance of each use. If I am producing marbles at a higher rate, then I am giving more marbles out during an instance of use than someone who produces at a lower rate. That use isn't "more important" in any meaningful sense, but it weighs the resources more heavily into the things that I use over others. Of course, lots of people pay attention to stupid things, but I'm standing by the basic idea that resources should be distributed according to attention. As long as you are tracking all the people, then enough people will pay attention to enough important things to solve the basic coordination problem. Presumably, enough people will be paying attention to the fire department to ensure that resources lean in its favor enough to support the maintenance of the road, and so on. I'm going to take a break for a bit. I'm not done laying the system out, but hopefully I've put enough meat on it now that the basic outline of the system is apparent, and its virtues can start to become clear. I'd be happy to discuss whatever specific questions or issues anyone raises. Although the basic form of the solution isn't particularly novel, and the end-state looks like classic Marxist utopias, I have never seen anyone propose this specific mechanism for doing it, so I think the idea is genuinely novel. I also think it is in line with contemporary science, including computer and behavioral neuroscience, and seems to ring true with the emerging sciences of complexity. But, I think more importantly, it is generated with values derived explicitly from Digital Culture. So I don't think this I'm completely on the deep end. I'm just tying together some loose threads in the theory. I think it is productive to talk about it either way, and I'm enjoying myself as I write it 
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 20:28 |
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Zodium posted:Wouldn't an attention economy turn into an advertising/marketing economy pretty fast? Good! I suppose an unsympathetic way of describing Attention Economy just is as an Advertising Economy, insofar as my solution is really just to let Google solve it all, and Google is just in the business of advertising. But calling it an "advertising economy" makes it sound slimy. There are a few key differences, the biggest being the GETTING RID OF MONEY part. Advertising is profitable, but current advertising methods don't actually do all that great a job making sure the products actually get into the hands of the people who want them. Ideally, advertisements would only appear when you a) need something, b) don't have it, c) don't know where to get it, and d) want to know where to get it. Otherwise, you should never see an advertisement. It is just attention wasted. Frankly, I think it is an outrage that I'm not directly compensated for the attention that advertisements steal from me everyday. I'd love a transitional system where I got paid for every advertisement I watch. Advertisements are everywhere now not because of the role they play in solving the Coordination Problem, but because marketers want mindshare, and they want mindshare because it is profitable. But if you get rid of the profit motive, then "advertising" really just becomes the issue of efficient and successful resource distribution, which is exactly what Attention Economy is meant to solve.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 20:37 |
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Helsing posted:The fact that you think its "easy" is actually a lot more telling than your attempted solution. No, I meant it was "easy" in the sense that it is exactly the kind of problem an Attention Economy is meant to address. It is built into the way my system works. You asked the question as if it was something I hadn't considered, or it was a trick question, so I said it was "easy" because it is a question I have a ready answer for. A bridge is a tremendous investment in human capital and physical infrastructure. But we know how to coordinate those activities quite well, thank you very much, and when you get rid of all the money, the people and machines to build that bridge will still be here, and nothing about our ability to accomplish that task will have been undermined.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 20:45 |
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I was being charitable by assuming that you hadn't thought of it. Your "solution" actually undermines your credibility more than ignoring the problem altogether would have. Kinda like your attempted solution to the underused but crucial fire-access road: quote:Not all use is equal, but we have a way of tracking the weighting the relative importance of each use. If I am producing marbles at a higher rate, then I am giving more marbles out during an instance of use than someone who produces at a lower rate. That use isn't "more important" in any meaningful sense, but it weighs the resources more heavily into the things that I use over others. Of course, lots of people pay attention to stupid things, but I'm standing by the basic idea that resources should be distributed according to attention. As long as you are tracking all the people, then enough people will pay attention to enough important things to solve the basic coordination problem. Presumably, enough people will be paying attention to the fire department to ensure that resources lean in its favor enough to support the maintenance of the road, and so on You are loving insane man. The more that you talk about your solutions the crazier you sound. I keep trying to come up with more polite ways of telling you this but the more you say the less sense you make. Though I give you credit for one thing: you're description of how you'll solve the coordination problem is actually remarkably similar to the old 1990s arguments about getting rid of Glass-Steagal and deregulating financial markets. The financiers in the 1990s even used the road metaphor and just like you they endlessly hyped the new digital economy that would make it so easy for rational individuals to coordinate their actions in decentralized ways while hedging risk. These posts could almost be an intentional parody for that mid 1990s deregulation crazy mindset. I don't think you have much of a future as an economic theorist but you might think about going into political satire.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 21:01 |
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There is no way you could have ready my post and concluded "Oh, he's talking about deregulation." There's not a hint of free market ideology in Attention Economy. I would respond to criticisms and critiques if you actually had any, but I'm pretty sure you are just posting ad homs. I'd take your insults and attacks personally if I thought you put any effort into reading what I have said, but you clearly haven't.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 21:30 |
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Whenever this thread runs its course I'm moving it to the goldmine, but I wish future generations to know this thread was not a joke, at least intentionally.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 21:33 |
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Eripsa posted:There is no way you could have ready my post and concluded "Oh, he's talking about deregulation." There's not a hint of free market ideology in Attention Economy. "The invisible
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 21:34 |
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evilweasel posted:"The invisible There's no invisible eyeball? I'm not sure what you are referring to. I haven't made reference to any "free market" or or implied the existence of any self-correcting system. There's no force or power of the system apart from the network of relations. I said that hopefully enough people care and attend to the fire station to ensure that it can marshal the resources to maintain the underused fire road. That's not a claim that any "free hand" will correct the system to ensure that happens. There's no guarantee that the people will attend to the things that need attending to. What I've said is that we should marshal resources according to what people in fact pay attention to, and we should trust them to self-organize in order to solve the problems they face. The Attention Economy is a kind of infrastructure to enable that self organization, and is meant as an alternative to the infrastructure of money as a means of distributing resources. Maybe they won't self-organize, and that road will go unmaintained. It depends entirely on what the people do, what they take the time to attend to. All I've argued is that the resources should go to what people in fact attend to, instead of trying to centralize and plan it out in advance according to how money is distributed. Money, or the "Market", free or not, clearly is not suited to solving the coordination problem. All I've argued is that Attenion Economy actually has a shot. There is no way to interpret what I've written as an argument to "make the market more free", especially when I'm explicitly trying to abolish the market entirely.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 21:46 |
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agarjogger posted:Is the diversion of capital from East Hampton mansions and manufactured desert subdivisions to sick, starving villages honestly impossible under our current economic system? Our economy does not allow for even marginally equitable distribution of resources and we need a brand new one in order to achieve any kind of sustainable civil society? That's stupid and I don't believe it. I think our problems are simple.... It is curious that you think a solution to "our" problems seem like solutions to very specific problems of American society in particular. I agree that population contraction in urban centers will be important for reducing environmental impact and such, but that's not going to put a dent in global economic, environmental, and humanitarian problems. "Our" problems don't end at the border; if you have no trust in the state of the markets to correct this problem, then I see no reason to respect their artificial boundaries. The global coordination problem is not a simple problem, and it wont be solved with the death of American suburbs. We need to be thinking on much, much longer scales and timelines, because the problems and impacts are global, and the consequences for failure on the global level are existential.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 22:03 |
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Paying attention is not necessarily productive activity. How do you plan to unfailingly, consistently create value from attention? You might as well turn "golf-clapping" or "nose scratching" into your fiat currency. It makes no sense. At any rate; I have ADD, so I guess I lose out in this Brave New Wor- Hey, a bird just landed on my windowsil!
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 22:06 |
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1) Assuming you get the infrastructure in place for eye trackers, everywhere I guess? How does this work. It simultaneously tracks vision to ascertain attention, and then has some sort of object recognition to see what is being attended to, how exactly is that actionable information? What does that tell anyone about other important details, such as intentions? 2) How would this deal with things like apathy? The system doesn't really provide incentives to act. Who is directing the resources, whose managing the labor to distribute said resources. Is all of this supposed to be part of the infrastructure too? Automated, etc.? 3) You mentioned it earlier, so I know you're aware, but what about people paying attention to and only caring about Stupid poo poo. How does an attention economy not just break down into a constant exercise in creating more and more scintillating, attention grabbing poo poo. If everyone is just paying attention to American idle, when does poo poo that no one wants to pay attention to but which is nonetheless important ever get taken care of. How can a handful of people interested and attending to very niche interests, say, scientists, ever marshall enough of the attention-bound resources necessary to meet their tasks? Especially with a lot of little known and understood problems, such as you typically find on the fringes of understood science, you'll have a small number of "marbles" designating need where in reality a ton of marbles are needed to garner the resources necessary for the research.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 22:21 |
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clammy posted:Paying attention is not necessarily productive activity. How do you plan to unfailingly, consistently create value from attention? You might as well turn "golf-clapping" or "nose scratching" into your fiat currency. It makes no sense. You don't "create value" from attention. Attention is value in my system. Consider facebook. Measured against the dollar, it is worth around $75 billion. The value that system has accumulated is not generated by any product offered by Facebook. No one has 'produced' anything that is worth that much money. Facebook's value is derived entirely from the 800 million people who put the time and effort into maintaining the network and its content. Its value rests entirely on the fact that a lot of people pay attention to it, and that is valuable in itself. Its dollar value comes as an estimation of how profitable exploiting that attention might be, but the dollar value is derivative on the intrinsic value of the attention of its users. This is characteristic and most salient in the networked age, but I'm tempted to claim that there are underlying truths about human value systems generally. Everyone has their hobby or role that they are willing to invest incredible amounts of time and energy into simply in virtue of their own intrinsic passion for it, and it is ultimately this investment in care that makes the thing appreciate in value. In fact, we know that the value people find in satisfying and rewarding work is actually undermined by attaching some extrinsic cash reward for that work. In other words, people would actually like Facebook less if they were getting paid to use it. So measuring that kind of value against the dollar is a bad idea. The hope is that Attention Economy comes closer to approximating a more natural measure of value. You might call it a "care economy", but I don't know how you can measure care. My claim is that you can do a much better job measuring attention as a proxy for care, because attention is going to have sharp and measurable behavioral cues that can actually be measured in objective and unambiguous ways. One nice feature about my system is that, the more sophisticated our science gets at measuring attention, the more accurate our economic model will be, and the better we will be able to distribute resources where they are needed. Keeping the measure of value closely tied to the emerging brain sciences ensures that the system can improve as our understanding matures (again, in sharp contrast to money). quote:At any rate; I have ADD, so I guess I lose out in this Brave New Wor- Hey, a bird just landed on my windowsil! This isn't a trivial problem, and it is important to bring up. A multitasker able to divide their attention in multiple directions will, as a consequence, be able to do more work for the network, and may enjoy a greater control over that network as a result. That might actually work out better for someone with ADD, but someone cognitively limited in other ways may have trouble staying competitive for attention. So the system, in this way, doesn't appear egalitarian. That's a genuine concern. I'm think I'm okay with using a measure of cognitive ability as a measure of value, despite differences in cognitive ability. I think centering the measure on attention solves a lot of these problems. Although you are diagnoses with an "attention deficit", that doesn't mean you don't pay attention to things, it is that (if you are a typical case) that you have trouble giving sustained and undivided attention to things. But in an attention economy you can divide your attention however you please, so a divided and unfocused attention isn't a "deficit" in my sense. In any case, your ability to participate in the system is independent of whatever capacities and abilities you might have. Nothing about one's basic needs depends on the rate of marble production, so the people with cognitive disabilities wont starve. Moreover, attracting attention is not itself dependent on cognitive abilities. Babies are usually instant attention-trackers, not because they are smart, but because they are cute. So having a cognitive disability isn't a social disaster; in fact, I would suggest that human communities evolved in a large part to take care of the weakest in the group, and that absent the limitations on money we would have much more interest in social and care work, not less. I don't know if that is entirely satisfying. My system retains the "entrepreneurial spirit" inherent to Capitalism, in the sense that if I have some neat trick or good idea, I can use that idea to marshal and direct lots of resources in my favor. Any system that has any kind of competition will also inevitably have some form of inequality. But since that competition is not itself over the distribution of resources, is seems incapable of disrupting the solution to the basic coordination problem, and so keeps to the minimum ethical requirements.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 22:48 |
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How much could you instead improve living conditions of people by if you directed resources towards that instead of billions of retina scanners?
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 22:59 |
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MonsterUnderYourBed posted:How much could you instead improve living conditions of people by if you directed resources towards that instead of billions of retina scanners? Retinal scanners are like 5th generation Attention Economy, for when we want extremely highly accurate measures of attention. For a basic started model you wouldn't really need something ore complicated that an Rfid for every object and a Beacon in every pocket, and Rfids are cheap as dirt.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 23:11 |
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A crazy techno-fascist utopia plan from Eripsa? Why I never. Jesus man, the more I read the more I would rather be a prole in 1984 or a ground troop in Starship Troopers.
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| # ? Jan 26, 2012 23:17 |
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Yiggy posted:1) Assuming you get the infrastructure in place for eye trackers, everywhere I guess? How does this work. It simultaneously tracks vision to ascertain attention, and then has some sort of object recognition to see what is being attended to, how exactly is that actionable information? What does that tell anyone about other important details, such as intentions? Good question. Measuring attention doesn't say anything about intention. When I protest outside the Fed, I am giving it attention despite my negative intentions. You might think about attention as the absolute value of value: it measures relative degree of value but not its valence. This is just how the system works, and I actually consider it a feature. Receiving attention means gaining influence, and increased influence increases the ability to marshal resources. So, for instance, the more people that drive on a road, the more road-constructing materials it should be able to marshal. But "marshalling resources" is neither a good nor bad thing; its just what needs to be done to keep the system working optimally. So say I am the sole user of a largely unused road, and that road has fallen into disrepair because of lack of use. I might want to try and raise a big public stink about it and attract attention to this cause, with a Twitter campaign or whatever. Now that might not be enough to attract the resources to fix all the potholes, but the system has suddenly taken notice of an issue that had previously fallen under the radar, and it is more likely that at least some of the necessary resources will find their way to you, or that someone who knows how to get those resources will find you. But the idea is fundamentally that the crowd handles all these issues in a distributed and decentralized way. In order to get those resources directed one way or another, you just have to ping the system and amplify that ping enough to get it to happen. Someone, somewhere, will be spending their days scanning twitter for people needing road repair and will be able to put them in contact with the people who have a bunch of road construction equipment looking for places it can be used. quote:2) How would this deal with things like apathy? The system doesn't really provide incentives to act. Who is directing the resources, whose managing the labor to distribute said resources. Is all of this supposed to be part of the infrastructure too? Automated, etc.? I take these questions to be two sides of the same basic coin: what happens if people pay attention to the wrong things, or don't pay attention enough, or otherwise aren't good attention payers? In the long run, if we aren't good attention payers, then we die. There isn't a system in the world that will protect us from ourselves. The attention economy isn't meant to protect us from ourselves, it is just meant to solve the coordination problem. This is an ant mill. When an ant is placed in a foreign environment without a trail to lead it home, it will wander aimlessly, which is probably the best method for stumbling onto the lost trail. When it encounters another ant from the same colony, it follows: maybe that ant knows the way back! When the entire colony is massively displaced and loses its trail it swarms around itself like a spiral galaxy, since all the ants revert to the best-guess default behavior of "following another ant", and none of them have any idea where to go. Unless disrupted, the ants will continue to spiral around themselves until they all die from exhaustion. These ants have no protection against their basic drives, and they have an intense drive to follow the trails of their fellow ants. This drive is usually a really really good thing, because the system they have set up ensures that "following other ants" will almost always help solve the Ant Coordination Problem. But when the whole colony is displaced, those basic impulses and drives spell doom for the whole colony. Ant colonies provide rock solid proof that an agricultural society composed of millions of semi-autonomous individuals can survive for millions of years, and the ant mill is still a well-organized system built on those same stigmergic principles. It just has no direction and isn't going anywhere. Coordinated, organized activity doesn't guarantee any kind of evolutionary success or sustainability. It is certainly possible that bringing an Attention Economy online will have this result. But I think it is incredibly unlikely, because I think we have too much interest in satisfying our basic needs to let the system spiral into exhaustion. I will admit that it is an optimistic view of humanity, but I don't think it is fatal to the credibility of the view. Lets start with the issue of the "jobs no one wants". How to we draw attention to the issues no one wants to attend to? I think people are perfectly willing to do the basic work required to feed and house and clothe themselves, and that they are willing to work as part of the system if that system is achieving those ends. So who will take out all the trash and dig the ditches and clean the toilets? Well, someone is doing all that stuff right now, and I see no good reason to think that someone won't continue to do it in the future. I know a lot of people right now do these jobs because they have to to feed and clothe themselves, and they would stop immediately and do something else if those needs were being provided for. That's okay, those people may be far more productive elsewhere. But that doesn't convince me that there wont be someone who will continue to do it even if their personal livelihood doesn't depend on it, because it needs to get done. By grandfather used to tell a story about living in rural Texas during the depression. Their "street" was a dirt cul-de-sac with about 6 houses holding ten or so immigrant families from Mexico. At the end of the road was the outhouse that the whole block shared. My grandpa explained that he never heard anyone discuss it, but the women on that street all worked out a cleaning schedule for that outhouse, sharing duties and distributing it among themselves not because anyone wanted to or was getting paid for it, but because the job needed to get done and they were willing to work together to do it. That said, if people are using that bathroom and you are doing the work to maintain it, then some of that bathrooms marbles will be directed towards you. So the system does credit the people who do the work. If I don't have the skills or talent to be popular but I still want to gain influence, there are plenty of things that need to get done. And I think that's the general lesson for all these cases. There are lots of workers who want to work but can't. I don't think people suddenly stop wanting to be productive simply because their livelihood doesn't depend on it. I'm not trying to inject some new incentive structure entirely; instead, I'm trying to unburden the system so that people are free to follow their own incentives, and then hoping that our incentives are targeted well enough on meeting basic needs for ourselves and our neighbors that the coordination problem gets solved. Now more directly to your cases, let's do the "paying attention to stupid poo poo". How do we make sure people don't pay attention to stupid poo poo? I don't think you can, frankly, and I don't think you should try. Let them pay attention to whatever they want. I don't think you end up with a planet of heroin addicts and couch potatoes. I think both diseases are forms of self-medication to alleviate the stressed of modern life and avoid the system; I think if we tear that system down and let people follow their pleasures as they will, they will be endlessly creative and productive and interesting. Again, this is the networked model, the Digital culture. People are an incredibly diverse bunch, and the overall strength of the network is improved by that diversity, so I'm loathe to reign it in. The old 20th century model was to try and abstract away from individual differences in order to have the individual fit into the assembly line system, and so the impression was that we need to standardize everyone. No wonder the masses turn to opiates under this kind of oppression. So let people pursue their passions. Some of it will look banal, but that's because people are banal. Some of it will look like /b/ because that's how some people are. But its a mistake to try to eliminate this diversity by trying to enforce a narrow range of acceptable interests. Diversity of interest, just like genetic diversity, is part of what makes humanity resilient. Finally, let's talk about apathy. There are real cases of complete lack of interest, and they usually are associated with depression and other forms of mental illness. These are serious cases, some of which are also the result of modernity-related stresses, but these kinds of issues can have all sorts of sources. Depression, and mental health in general, is a real and serious problem. But I don't think most people are apathetic in this sense. Most people have their passions and will invest tremendous energy and time into developing those interests, without anyone needed to come in from the outside to enforce that investment. But most of the time, people are forced to invest their time and energy into things they have absolutely no interest in whatsoever, and that creates the illusion of apathy. Again, my solution isn't about trying to figure out a way to get them interested in those things, but instead to reorganize the system so they don't have to be.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2012 00:09 |
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OatmealRaisin posted:Jesus man, the more I read the more I would rather be a prole in 1984 or a ground troop in Starship Troopers. Can you say why? If I'm meant to infer something obvious here I'm not seeing it.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2012 00:11 |
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Eripsa posted:You don't "create value" from attention. Attention is value in my system. No it's not. An economy does not dictate what is value. An economy reacts to what is value. This goes back to your anti-money bugbear: money isn't value in a capitalist system, money is merely a means of exchanging or storing value.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2012 01:17 |
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Eripsa posted:Lets start with the issue of the "jobs no one wants". How to we draw attention to the issues no one wants to attend to? I think people are perfectly willing to do the basic work required to feed and house and clothe themselves, and that they are willing to work as part of the system if that system is achieving those ends. So who will take out all the trash and dig the ditches and clean the toilets? Well, someone is doing all that stuff right now, and I see no good reason to think that someone won't continue to do it in the future. I know a lot of people right now do these jobs because they have to to feed and clothe themselves, and they would stop immediately and do something else if those needs were being provided for. That's okay, those people may be far more productive elsewhere. But that doesn't convince me that there wont be someone who will continue to do it even if their personal livelihood doesn't depend on it, because it needs to get done. Because honestly, it's difficult for me to see anyone holding such an opinion who's even read about human beings, much less dealt with them. edit: I may be missing something, because to be honest, I've had a really hard time getting much out of your descriptions of how the system is supposed to function. But I still don't feel that I have a good sense of how this actually qualifies as an economy. We can create all this infrastructure tracking what people pay attention to, but I can't see any reason why an individual would care how many attention-marbles they get; it doesn't seem like you actually have to worry about running out of attention if there's something you want to purchase(?), and the provision of vital services appears to operate on a system of wishes and dreams, so...how are the marbles actually necessary? Why do I want marbles?
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| # ? Jan 27, 2012 01:26 |
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| # ? May 19, 2013 13:43 |
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Eripsa posted:Good question. Measuring attention doesn't say anything about intention. When I protest outside the Fed, I am giving it attention despite my negative intentions. You might think about attention as the absolute value of value: it measures relative degree of value but not its valence. Oh, its a feature. Whew. I sort of thought it was a bug, but as long we're calling it a feature, problem solved! Also, there is this weird jump you're making that I don't fully understand. I think it ties in to your optimism in other people which you mention later in the post, and which I want to come back to, but I don't understand how we're getting from "increased attention" leads to "increased influence to cause others to act as you want" 1) Other paying attention to you. 2) ??? 3) Others caring about your problem and chipping in their time and energy. I just don't see the connection between the two. And I get that you're establishing that as some sort of a priori rule in your system, it just seems like a weak assumption to me. That people are going to Care. Don't get me wrong, I'd hope they would too, I just don't share your wide-eyed optimism. quote:Someone, somewhere, will be spending their days scanning twitter for people needing road repair and will be able to put them in contact with the people who have a bunch of road construction equipment looking for places it can be used. Any why is someone, somewhere, wasting there time doing this again? I know, I know, for more marbles. Skipping ahead a bit for a sec... quote:That said, if people are using that bathroom and you are doing the work to maintain it, then some of that bathrooms marbles will be directed towards you. So the system does credit the people who do the work. If I don't have the skills or talent to be popular but I still want to gain influence, there are plenty of things that need to get done. Now I get that you don't like to call these collected marbles a sort of currency or anything, because you don't like money. Its just attribution. But this attribution is quacking, and it has a bill and lays eggs, and I think we should just stick to calling it a duck. Ok back in normal order of your post. quote:I take these questions to be two sides of the same basic coin: what happens if people pay attention to the wrong things, or don't pay attention enough, or otherwise aren't good attention payers? I think its a fairly critical blow to your view, and that you're incredibly naive in trying to just soldier through it under the assumption that you've found The System and its Going to Work. quote:Lets start with the issue of the "jobs no one wants". How to we draw attention to the issues no one wants to attend to? I think people are perfectly willing to do the basic work required to feed and house and clothe themselves, and that they are willing to work as part of the system if that system is achieving those ends. So who will take out all the trash and dig the ditches and clean the toilets? Well, someone is doing all that stuff right now, and I see no good reason to think that someone won't continue to do it in the future. I know a lot of people right now do these jobs because they have to to feed and clothe themselves, and they would stop immediately and do something else if those needs were being provided for. That's okay, those people may be far more productive elsewhere. But that doesn't convince me that there wont be someone who will continue to do it even if their personal livelihood doesn't depend on it, because it needs to get done. So you think people will willy nilly engage in back breaking, body destroying labor like road and building construction just because it needs to get done? That people will engage in all of the unsavory jobs that no one wants out of sure Go Get Em Attitude. I won't deny that there are maybe some amount of people out there like that, but there are also freeloaders, who don't really care what needs to be done, and they create just as much mess as the Go Getters without contributing any of the work. I think you're ignorant of human nature if you think these sorts of problems won't create any resentment and won't lead to any sort of in-group out-group fracturing. And people are pretty good about not lifting a finger to help those in outgroups. They may pay attention to them all day, and still do nothing, like watching a train wreck. quote:By grandfather used to tell a story about living in rural Texas during the depression. Their "street" was a dirt cul-de-sac with about 6 houses holding ten or so immigrant families from Mexico. At the end of the road was the outhouse that the whole block shared. My grandpa explained that he never heard anyone discuss it, but the women on that street all worked out a cleaning schedule for that outhouse, sharing duties and distributing it among themselves not because anyone wanted to or was getting paid for it, but because the job needed to get done and they were willing to work together to do it. Thats a cute story, but I don't believe for a second that this example of a small community self-organizing to maintain a facility they all personally use is going to scale up to people taking care of messes created by other people who you have little to no interaction with, just because things need to get done. quote:And I think that's the general lesson for all these cases. There are lots of workers who want to work but can't. I don't think people suddenly stop wanting to be productive simply because their livelihood doesn't depend on it. I'm not trying to inject some new incentive structure entirely; instead, I'm trying to unburden the system so that people are free to follow their own incentives, and then hoping that our incentives are targeted well enough on meeting basic needs for ourselves and our neighbors that the coordination problem gets solved. Well thanks for admitting that your system is based on hope. I don't share it. Why do you assume that everyone wants to be productive, to begin with? quote:Now more directly to your cases, let's do the "paying attention to stupid poo poo". How do we make sure people don't pay attention to stupid poo poo? I don't think you can, frankly, and I don't think you should try. Let them pay attention to whatever they want. I don't think you end up with a planet of heroin addicts and couch potatoes. I think both diseases are forms of self-medication to alleviate the stressed of modern life and avoid the system; I think if we tear that system down and let people follow their pleasures as they will, they will be endlessly creative and productive and interesting. And in my shiny new utopia no one will ever become addicted to drugs, or be lazy, or maladaptive to the new attention economy. Ever. For it is the Way and the Light. quote:Finally, let's talk about apathy. There are real cases of complete lack of interest, and they usually are associated with depression and other forms of mental illness. These are serious cases, some of which are also the result of modernity-related stresses, but these kinds of issues can have all sorts of sources. Depression, and mental health in general, is a real and serious problem. This is just a sad case of confirmation bias. You're only seeing the faces of humanity that you want to see, that confirm your views and your ambitions towards an attention based economy. Surely most of the examples you see of apathy are just mental illness, or consequences of the current society. Once the world is made right, it'll all go away. It just has to. Right?
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| # ? Jan 27, 2012 01:33 |
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