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The Duke of Ben posted:I suppose I can see a society that distinctly abhors consumerism to the point that nobody would want more than they need. I think that technological advancement for individual consumption would drop significantly in such a society. It seems to me that things which allow individuals more access to information would be more scarce in this case than in our current system.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2012 21:44 |
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| # ? May 19, 2013 22:24 |
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evilweasel posted:Oh, you scrapped the stuff about the resturant, I should have saved it. Welp! In the interest of furthering the discussion, here's what it said before: Chapter 2: The Market The market at the corner of my street was a deli before the Conversion, and it had been gutted and repurposed shortly thereafter as a market. A “market” is a generic term for public spaces where one can go to collect food (both packaged and prepared) and other supplies. We used to call it the Weasel Market, but after the incident we stopped doing that real quick. Things in the city operated mostly the same as they had before the Conversion, at least at a general level. The spaces that were formerly groceries and restaurants still, for the most part, were involved with food production and distribution. Markets were mostly supplied by large food banks and warehouses positioned in a few key locations around the city; those banks in turn were supplied by large industrial parks and farms scattered around the city’s borders. I don’t know quite how they do it because I never got into the production angle, but I know that most of the resources being consumed in the city are produced and manufactured within the city itself. What little we have to import from the global resource distribution networks are always imported as raw, unmanufactured material, and are always assembled and processed locally. Its a lot more efficient this way; it also makes it easier to harvest the resources efficiently from the recycling process when we know in great detail how they goods are produced. This was one of the many infrastructural changes that happened as part of the Digital Conversion. Ma can show you real time data about production and consumption rates, if you want, and there are standardized ways to propose changes in production and methods. I know there is a whole collection of nerds who obsess over this data and are just dying to tell you their latest proposal to tweak the tube socks per capita algorithm or whatever, but I find the whole thing boring. The restaurants, also serviced by the food banks, went through a revolution that in some ways reflects the general change of culture in miniature. Immediately after the conversion there was a major crisis in the restaurant “business”, because, well, there wasn’t a business anymore. No one quite knew what to do with it. There was clearly high demand for professional food preparation and the social luxury of dining out, and for a long while people kept showing up at restaurants expecting to get food right on through the Conversion without skipping a beat. There were also surprisingly many chefs who still wanted to cook for crowds of people, pay or not. And there was a much smaller but far more demented group of people in the Human Services game who really sincerely enjoyed the organizing and coordinating of human social activities and were willing to run a restaurant floor. But it just wasn’t enough to keep the restaurant industry going. Most of the good chefs just gave up and quit the business, choosing instead to run ultra hip and super exclusive 1- or 2- table kitchens out of their own homes-- since it was private space and personal goods they were free to be as exclusive as they wanted to be. These little private restaurants got some attention in some circles, but most people had no idea they even existed. Most of the mid-tier chefs stuck around to lend their wisdom to the groups who started to organize around managing the existing restaurant space. A lot of people were paying attention to what was going to happen with all the restaurants, and that sustained attention attracted the people who were interested in doing something about it. Their idea was to just divide up the kitchens and schedule them among the chefs who wanted to use them, and at first there were more kitchens than real chefs. It was against Open Access to restrict non-chefs from using available public resources, though, so a lot of people who had no business boiling a pot of water suddenly found themselves standing behind a stove in a real restaurant filled with hungry people. Wait staff almost completely vanished, despite the potential attention that role would attract. A typical restaurant would consider itself lucky if it had a single person to manage all the tables for an evening, usually doing it as a favor to the “chef” (who was usually just some bozo with a cookbook) and the role of “table waiting” never really rose above “crowd management”. As a result, eating out became a mess. Nearly a year after the Conversion, restaurant protocol at what people considered a “good” restaurant had somehow come to the point where, after entering, one would walk directly to the back of the restaurant, knock on the swinging kitchen door, and wait until one of the chefs came out to negotiate your order. Then you’d wait around until the food was ready, hope there was a table waiting for you on the floor, and clear your own table when you were done. Cleaning up after oneself found an enormous and unexpected revival following the Conversion, but nevertheless it did cheapen the whole experience of dining out. There is something about the nice, crisp bookends of wait staff greetings and signing the check, with nothing else expected of you except to consume, that made a meal go down just right. Without the pretenses of money the whole thing felt too institutional and phony. The food wasn’t worth it anyway, and sort of like a nostalgic 50’s diner we gradually started to think that maybe restaurants were a relic of the past that we were just romanticizing. So, if you’ll believe it, people actually stopped going to restaurants for a while. There were some big cafeteria-style places that continued to operate mostly as large soup kitchens for people too lazy to cook for themselves, but for years the restaurant business looked like it had vanished. I’m still shocked in retrospect that we waited so long, but at the time people felt that we needed to be austere and spartan that restaurants were an unnecessary luxury we couldn’t afford. Never mind that the restaurant spaces were still sitting there, going underused or worse being used by people operating it without Coordination at all, which can be dangerous when we are talking about gas flames. Never mind that the moderate increases in food and resource consumption that went along with restaurants was hardly a burden on production and well within acceptable levels of use according to our models. If Ma were around then she’d probably recommend against closing the restaurants, given what we know now about the psychological importance of casual meals with friends, but at the time and with no one to tell us otherwise, people just cooked at home. Perhaps we were subconsciously punishing ourselves for the excesses of the 20th century. But then something amazing happened that no one expected. A small group of chefs and party planners got together, in secret, and coordinated the gathering of supplies from markets and food banks all over the city. Without anyone realizing it was happening, they had scheduled an absolutely massive series of dinner parties in some of the best restaurants in town,. It was completely unprecedented and an amazing success. Part of it was just the shock of the sheer amount of resources they had acquired for these dinner parties. The first few dinners were far more extravagant than anything most of us ever remembered from before the Conversion, and compared to the general button-lipped, self-imposed austerity of the previous few years it felt like we were all suddenly Capitalists again. But this was an Open Access event of a defining sort, and it could have never happened before the Conversion. The first time the held a dinner, they used 35 restaurants in Hell’s Kitchen, all of them open and fully operational and connected with tables scattered throughout the streets and sidewalks between them. The Coordinators had scheduled almost six straight days of 24 hour cooking as a collaborative project, and everyone was invited to enjoy and help out. Once the people showed up, and there were a lot of us, there was also singing, dancing, and music. It was a party. The really stunning trick was collecting the resources for the party. People still threw parties after the conversion, but most of them were private parties with supplies that people had collected and stored on their own, and because of the exclusivity that required it was considered distasteful and usually it wasn’t done unless specifically celebrating some event like a birthday or a wedding. And, sorry, birthdays and weddings are not parties. There were also occasionally large public festivals and fairs, which always attracted wide attention and were served with lots of resources but were completely, mind-numbingly dull. With any public party, though, you always saw them coming a mile away, because the resources sequestered to prepare for the parties would usually make a big blip on the usage patterns, and of course Twitter paid attention to things like that. So somehow these chefs and party planners must have coordinated enough people to collect supplies in quantities below personal use, until they had stockpiled enough for these major blowouts. If you just took amounts for personal use, the tracking system wouldn’t even notice you had taken it. can’t even imagine the scale of coordination that must have taken, and to keep it out of Twitter’ It helped that the little coalition of Twitterers that usually monitor these things were in on the gig, and with their help and a little deception no one actually put together what was going on until a little under 72 hours before the event, and really that was the perfect amount of time to generate the attention required to get people to show up. For five days, it was great food from chefs that hadn’t had the pleasure
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| # ? Jan 31, 2012 21:47 |
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paumbert posted:In the interest of furthering the discussion, here's what it said before: I cut out the bit about the restaurants because I had run into trouble conceptualizing an Open Access restaurant, and the structure became too bureaucratic and bulky. A friend told me it was starting to sound like a 14 year old fantasy world, where all the chefs and all the party planners in the land put together an extra special sweet 16 party. So I cut it out and got back to basics, and the restaurants turned into the open kitchen at the market. I don't mind it being reposted, but I don't want to be held accountable for the material here, since it didn't make it past my own editorial process.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2012 22:40 |
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The Duke of Ben posted:I don't think that most of us disagree with these four points, actually. The idea that "there is no reason to abandon money" seems to directly contradict that argument. The argument is not merely that we should coordinate efficiently, but that the use of money as the coordinating medium is incapable of solving the problem. If you are claiming that the people in this thread agree that money is incapable of solving the problem, I haven't seen much debate over the idea in this thread. The general sentiment is "well maybe it isn't but I don't see any better ideas around", which is why I am trying to give some shape to what I think is a better idea. But the argument I proposed doesn't say anything about my solution, it just says that we should seek SOME alternative to money. But evilweasel's quote suggests that any attempt at even proposing an alternative is against reason itself (hence, the repeated claim I am mentally ill). And that's what I'm objecting to.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2012 22:46 |
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evilweasel posted:Well, it's post scarcity but if you use too many lightbulbs or toothpaste you get hauled in front of The Assembly and are forced to answer for your horrific crimes. We can't have anyone using too much toothpaste. I don't want to get too much into the details outside the narrative, but I pretty clearly say that you have to be using 2 or 3 times the average toothpaste use for people to start caring about how much you are using. And even then there will be ways to justify that use that will pass the consensus of an assembly. If you are using 9 tubes of toothpaste a month, I think it isn't completely unreasonable that society should at least be curious as to why, since it could potentially be a waste of resources, and this system is designed to optimize the use of resources. The alternative is to think that a person can arbitrarily waste as much toothpaste as she wants, simply because she wants to, as long as she can pay for it, without any other form of accountability. This is one of the primary reasons that money is simply incapable of optimizing the use of resources. Again, your snickering at the toothpaste example suggests that you don't actually care about the optimal resource distribution.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2012 22:53 |
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Eripsa posted:I don't want to get too much into the details outside the narrative, but I pretty clearly say that you have to be using 2 or 3 times the average toothpaste use for people to start caring about how much you are using. And even then there will be ways to justify that use that will pass the consensus of an assembly. My snickering about the toothpaste is because it's hilarious. The very idea that I might be called to account for my use of excess toothpaste before a council of my peers or the TwitterPolice is absurd. It's a hilarious waste of resources, a hilariously intrusive and draconian "government" and a great example of just how little you've thought this through. I don't care that the assembly will accept that someone's son smashed a bunch of tubes of toothpaste, or that they accidentally broke all their lightbulbs: I care they're actually called to account and forced to undergo what amounts to a trial for using too many tubes of toothpaste. It's the sort of dystopian nightmare I would be embarassed include in a story mocking your idea because it would be too extreme and absurd.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2012 22:59 |
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evilweasel posted:My snickering about the toothpaste is because it's hilarious. The very idea that I might be called to account for my use of excess toothpaste before a council of my peers or the TwitterPolice is absurd. It's a hilarious waste of resources, a hilariously intrusive and draconian "government" and a great example of just how little you've thought this through. I don't care that the assembly will accept that someone's son smashed a bunch of tubes of toothpaste, or that they accidentally broke all their lightbulbs: I care they're actually called to account and forced to undergo what amounts to a trial for using too many tubes of toothpaste. It's the sort of dystopian nightmare I would be embarassed include in a story mocking your idea because it would be too extreme and absurd.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2012 23:19 |
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So you have got rid of human greed, and everyone has the products they need to live provided through a 1984 style government. Now, who has worked their rear end off to get the food to the table for the masses who do nothing? Are there any measures to deal with a very rapidly increasing population? Can you deal with forced labor in your next chapter please?
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 01:03 |
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Fire_Monkey posted:So you have got rid of human greed, and everyone has the products they need to live provided through a 1984 style government.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 01:12 |
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Strudel Man posted:It's far more a technological anarcho-communist government than a 1984-esque dictatorship. Though admittedly, I'm not sure how the twitter police figure into it...anyway, he's stated quite plainly that he doesn't believe the masses would fail to work. (Also, why a rapidly increasing population?) I see, I was reading it more as twitter being 'big brother'. I figured an expanding population, as most people I know would not work and with unlimited personal supplies and no worries about financing, there is not much to do except count toothpaste, sunbathe, and multiply.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 01:16 |
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The Duke of Ben posted:I think the idea is that a vigilante justice system would be the norm, and you would simply let your friends and neighbors know that you have been robbed, so you can get a mob together and So that time Reddit got mad at a girl because she said she was raped, and reddit totally thought she wasn't and posted a bunch of personal information about her - that is like, halfway there. In an optimal system, the mob of redditors would also get to physically hurt her. Everything just makes this sound more and more like a wonderful future.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 01:20 |
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Fire_Monkey posted:I see, I was reading it more as twitter being 'big brother'.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 01:21 |
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Strudel Man posted:Hey, now, Eripsa's ideas are absurd, but this is hardly required for them. There's a vast, vast gulf between 'post-scarcity' and 'nobody wants more than they need;' we can conceive of (if not actually achieve) a world in which people desire a reasonable level of consumer goods, one which can be met for all the world's people without overstressing our industrial capacities. Consumer electronics remain a believable part of this, if perhaps not quite as many iphone generations as we've had. Arguments against hyperconsumption aren't really self-defeating in the sense you seem to be implying. The problem I am trying to figure out is the next step in the process. How do we get people to not game the system to their own advantage? Even without money, the desire to have more things will lead people to work to do that, even at the cost of others. I think that leaves us with two options. One, we somehow create a society that is altruistic by nature, and nobody is willing to harm another for their own gain. Or two, we somehow create a society where people don't want more stuff.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 01:32 |
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Fire_Monkey posted:I see, I was reading it more as twitter being 'big brother'. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs does have productivity on there. I'm not sure people who wouldn't work ever at all are quite that numerous- we seem to have a need to keep ourselves busy.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 01:45 |
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Maxwell Lord posted:Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs does have productivity on there. I'm not sure people who wouldn't work ever at all are quite that numerous- we seem to have a need to keep ourselves busy. Sure, but the productive things I engage in when I have free time are rarely of much social use. They certainly aren't real work.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 01:50 |
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evilweasel posted:My snickering about the toothpaste is because it's hilarious. The very idea that I might be called to account for my use of excess toothpaste before a council of my peers or the TwitterPolice is absurd. It's a hilarious waste of resources, a hilariously intrusive and draconian "government" and a great example of just how little you've thought this through. I don't care that the assembly will accept that someone's son smashed a bunch of tubes of toothpaste, or that they accidentally broke all their lightbulbs: I care they're actually called to account and forced to undergo what amounts to a trial for using too many tubes of toothpaste. It's the sort of dystopian nightmare I would be embarassed include in a story mocking your idea because it would be too extreme and absurd. Tell me which of the following claims you disagree with: 1) Tracking the use of resources is essential for optimizing their use. 2) Abusive or excessively wasteful use of resources should be open for public scrutiny, and that the public should have some say in monitoring and restricting those abuses. Because that's what the toothpaste example is meant to demonstrate, and I'm not sure what part of that you disagree with. Now maybe we have toothpaste in such abundance, a post-toothpaste-scarcity society if you will, where even extreme abuses of toothpaste have no potential negative consequences. In such a world, Twitter probably wouldn't even blink at someone dumping crates of unused toothpaste into the ocean. In my world, though, resources are scarce, so the system is set up to optimize the use of resources, and that means tracking all the things and accounting for their use. And if you are using a resource in amounts that far exceed the average use, in amounts large enough to make Internet people actually pay attention to your excessive use, then maybe it isn't unreasonable to expect you to be held accountable to some public questioning. And maybe you are using the toothpaste to make giant toothpaste sculptures, and people consider that art important enough to tolerate your excessive toothpaste use, since toothpaste isn't particularly scarce and the art is popular, and that's the end of that. But maybe the public scrutiny reveals you to just be dumping crates of toothpaste into the ocean. Then maybe we should be able to stop you from doing that. The important point is not how I solve the problem. The important point is that the system is built to optimize the use of the resources, and you are scoffing at the very idea that we need to track the resources at all. So it is helpful to remember that the capitalist alternative is to let the person freely dump toothpaste into the ocean, as long as he can afford it. If he has enough shekels, he can also bypass the legal regulations and buy out the state governments that are meant to enforce the law, regardless of the public outcry, because in the capitalist alternative the only thing that determines what happens to the resources is how many shekels you have.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:00 |
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Eripsa posted:A friend told me it was starting to sound like a 14 year old fantasy world Yeah, I see his point.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:01 |
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T-1000 posted:In the purges in Russia, people would be forced to confess to stuff like destroying three trucks of eggs. Even Stalin didn't send people to the gulag over a few tubes of toothpaste. Look, there are serious and very important questions about the "tyranny of the majority" and personal privacy and the balance of sustainability and personal freedom. But I'm not going to have that discussion with someone who implies that I'm advocating Stalinism just because I'm advocating for optimizing the economy. Nothing I've said deserves this.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:04 |
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Eripsa posted:Look, there are serious and very important questions about the "tyranny of the majority" and personal privacy and the balance of sustainability and personal freedom. But I'm not going to have that discussion with someone who implies that I'm advocating Stalinism just because I'm advocating for optimizing the economy. Nothing I've said deserves this.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:23 |
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The Duke of Ben posted:How do we get people to not game the system to their own advantage? The idea is to set the system up so that there is very little room to "game". In my system, I gain no advantage over others from storing things in my house rather than just going to the store when I need it. In fact, it is more inconvenient for me to store it locally, since it means I get requests from people looking to share that resource. This example is going to get more heckles than sympathy, but here it goes. Take the game of Starcraft. There is a sense in which the game has rules for how it operates. The units do specific things, the buildings build at certain rates, whatever. But apart from playing the game, there is no way for a player to 'game' that system to leverage an artificial advantage. In other words, within the game it is impossible to "break the rules" and cheat. You can map hack and stuff by breaking the system itself, but assuming the system is operational then the only way to gain an advantage over the other player is to play fair and be the better player. Starcraft hasn't eliminated the desire of people to "game the system", it has just engineered a game where there simply are no artificial advantages to have, so every attempt to 'game' is completely legitimate within the system. So the restaurant hopeful is going to be using a lot of resources, more than normal people, because she is cooking all the time. And that might attract attention scrutiny. But that's a good thing, because gaining attention is the only way for her to be a successful cook. You can't fake that success in my system; you can't just buy your way into a restaurant without demonstrating that the people want you there. There's no way to 'fake' attention. In this sense, measuring attention is a genuine meritocracy. So people looking to maximize their personal advantage has more interest in working with the system than looking for ways to break it. And surely that's what we want: a system where the rules are both sustainable and that no one has much incentive to break. And clearly the incentive of money give people all kinds of reason to break the laws of our existing system. In the incentives and the rules of a system were harmonized, as I think they are in the Attention Economy, then selfishness and aspiration and basic human self-interested motivation will all be best expressed within the system, and indeed are part of the very fuel that makes such an economy work.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:23 |
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T-1000 posted:You aren't advocating Stalinism, just a level of monitoring everybody's use of everything that no totalitarian state or data-mining corporation has ever dreamed of. I think that total information awareness is ultimately necessary for solving the coordination problem. My fundamental claim here is really that money (both fiat and commodity money, or any other medium of exchange) will never ultimately solve the coordination problem, because the perceived value of the medium will never have any logical or causal relationship to the humanitarian value of the resources being exchanged. I'm saying that basically the problem is a lack of information, and my solution is to overload the system with info on the humanitarian value of the resources as tracked directly by their perceived value (the attention we pay). And that's only possible if you monitor everything. In the story, there are standardized ways to hide and obscure that information from public scrutiny for reasons of privacy and safety, but I do think that the public good necessarily makes that private space relatively small. I'll say more about that in the next chapter. It is also clear in my story that not everything gets tracked, but I do think it is a feature of this system that the system can be optimized by better methods of tracking, both of the resources and of their use, and that seems to be as it should be. I think there are legitimate arguments to be made that privacy trumps the public interest. The hard question is if interests in privacy trump the ethical obligation to solve the coordination problem, and my system will only work if we decide that it doesn't. But total information awareness doesn't mean totalitarian government, because my system doesn't have centralized authorities that can abuse that information. Again, there is the problem of witch hunts, and we can talk about that. But I'll wait for you to give a serious argument before going any farther.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:39 |
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It seems that you are stuck between two problems. If there is no outside gains to be made, then why would anyone want to open a restaurant? Why would someone want to work really hard at something useful? The chances that the most fun hobbies of a majority of people happens to be socially useful work is pretty hard to imagine. So, if there is no gain, you're going to need to show why people work at all, rather than just enjoy the surplus of others. On the other side, you have the problem I am trying to outline and explore. If there is any gain at all, then people are going to want it. Maybe they want more toothpaste than is normal so that they have cleaner teeth. Maybe they want a lot more food because they just like food. Yeah, we can have a system where a lot of people have their time taken up by investigating potential misuse, but for most small issues it's certainly not worth it, and most investigations would necessarily have to end when the person being investigated lies about what they are using it for. Anyone who happens to work near the means of production or transportation of those goods is going to have strong opportunities to steal and redistribute those items. A group of those people could potentially blackmail society (or trade with other groups of productive people) for personal enrichment. As an easy way to do this, someone in charge of providing food for a city could hide a shipment and open a black market bartering system to get other people's surpluses in exchange for food. Unless you are having autonomous machines (that monitor themselves for malicious code!) do all of this work, then there will be people who can game the system. The more people who do it, the more likely that it will be too hard to track. Keep in mind that organized crime exists now, when there are police forces dedicated to preventing them. If you take away the dedicated forces, I am baffled that you think organized crime will go away.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:40 |
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A serious argument against total information awareness? I must concede the point. I can't see any way that will be abused by any individual or organisation.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:47 |
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evilweasel posted:Sure, but the productive things I engage in when I have free time are rarely of much social use. They certainly aren't real work. For like the third time, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc Our most productive, creative, and socially valuable work is produced by people with the freedom to pursue it as a passion, where motivations revolve around personal development and making a meaningful contribution. The science has clearly shown over and over again that money is counterproductive to these motivations.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:48 |
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T-1000 posted:A serious argument against total information awareness? I must concede the point. I can't see any way that will be abused by any individual or organisation. Information is only an advantage, and hence can only be abused, in a limited information game. If all information is open, then any advantage gained by the information is gained by all parties equally. edit: Chess is a game of total information awareness, and that information cannot be abused by either player.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:53 |
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Eripsa posted:Our most productive, creative, and socially valuable work is produced by people with the freedom to pursue it as a passion, where motivations revolve around personal development and making a meaningful contribution. The science has clearly shown over and over again that money is counterproductive to these motivations. What? No, that's stupid. The most "productive" work is produced by people working 9-5 jobs. The people who repair roads, write firmware for devices that you never even think about, operate power stations, and so on. The most valuable work is not done out of passion, or for loving fun. It's work, and someone has to do it.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:54 |
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Eripsa posted:Tell me which of the following claims you disagree with: This one is pretty clearly wrong. There are ways to optimise ressource use without tracking the usage - the price signal is a pretty good way to do it. (Seriously, the problem you're trying to solve really seems like it would be solved a lot easier by keeping the fundamentals of a market economy but better distributing wealth and income.)
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 02:55 |
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Eripsa posted:For like the third time, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc The majority of jobs that are required for day to day life, including basic production of goods and farming doesn't require more than "rudimentary cognitive" expressions. Trust me, nobody would work in the factory where I work if they did not get paid, even if they already had their needs met. Sure, I'll grant you that more people would pick up science and art, but those things don't [directly] put food on the table. You'd still need somebody driving a tractor 10 hours a day all summer long to provide basic sustenance for everyone else enjoying their free time. Why does that guy work if he gets nothing more than anyone else who doesn't work at all? Why should he give up the free time he would rather spend making art? Eripsa posted:edit: Chess is a game of total information awareness, and that information cannot be abused by either player. And this is just wrong. Better players exploit their opponents lack of understanding of the board in order to win. Knowing your own thoughts about the board is more important than knowing the board itself, for anything less than master players. Unless you are advocating the Rational Actor model for economics, then I don't think that works for you at all.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:00 |
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The most interesting scenario to consider is one where the whole resource question is nullified and instead you consider a slow-growth resource base with a robust and open information economy. Basically, subsidize the hardware of society, maybe open-source the programming of the means of production, but mostly focus on the creation and free exchange of digital content. This free exchange would be facilitated by meeting basic needs, but would lack the limitations that other rationed systems impose, since informational complexity can grow with weaker pressure on systems complexity. This only works on the assumption that people could accept digital self-realization over physical self-realization, but with where we are now, I don't see it being too far off. The cultural evolution of a nation devoted to information processing and content creation would be blindingly swift. Lenin declared in 1920 that "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country." Today, I declare that "Communism is Democracy plus high-speed broadband and computers for the entire country"
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:04 |
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The Duke of Ben posted:And this is just wrong. Better players exploit their opponents lack of understanding of the board in order to win. Knowing your own thoughts about the board is more important than knowing the board itself, for anything less than master players. Unless you are advocating the Rational Actor model for economics, then I don't think that works for you at all. He's profoundly wrong, in fact. Chess, at any appreciable level, is a game of meta-information. The game is about which player has a better knowledge of Chess patterns and situations. It tests not how smart or clever you are as much as how much Chess you have played. I mean, this isn't true at like a beginner level, but at that point, just loving use Checkers for your example, since it's solvable.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:09 |
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Slanderer posted:What? No, that's stupid. The most "productive" work is produced by people working 9-5 jobs. The people who repair roads, write firmware for devices that you never even think about, operate power stations, and so on. The most valuable work is not done out of passion, or for loving fun. It's work, and someone has to do it. The video distinguishes between routine mechanical tasks and tasks that require any "cognitive function". So I'm going to make some claims, without justification. 1) Any mechanical task can eventually be automated. It is work that humans ultimately don't have to do. 2) Any task that requires cognitive function is a task that someone can be passionate about and do for fun. Now here's a third claim that the video I posted does justify, and I'll assume you've watched it to see what the argument for the claim looks like. But here it is: 3) Many people perform tasks today that require cognitive function not because they are fun, but because they get paid. Getting an external reward for a task that can be intrinsically motivating has a negative effect on one's motivation to do the task. In other words, for work that demands cognitive thought, getting paid to do the work makes you hate your job. Ok, so taking these claims together makes me conclude that it isn't unreasonable to think that a world of genuine open access, where people are encouraged to be productive but free to pursue their passions in the specific sense that the resources required to sustain my existence as a living creature does not depend on my productivity within the system, then you might have a system that is genuinely sustainable. It requires that the people will do the work necessary to sustain themselves; they won't get it for free. And I am confident that the species will do that work, because we've done it for hundreds of thousands of years. There is absolutely no reason to think that doing this work requires keeping the majority of us as wage slaves under the thumb of some land owning baron with a barrel of shekels who claims to own the products of our labor, and it certainly doesn't require threatening our very right to life for refusing to participate in that system. Freeing ourselves from the system of money will hopefully remind us that the work to sustain ourselves is ours to do, and that we are entitled to the full fruit of that work, so perhaps we can be passionate about the jobs that sustain our lives instead of treating them like chores for the benefit of our masters. I'll also say that the master-slave mentality is not unrelated to the bystander effect. Part of the problem with bystanders is thinking that "this is someone else's problem to deal with". Knowing who the masters are makes it easy to pass the responsibility on to others. This effect stops when the problem deals with friends and personal relations, because then the connection to ourselves is obvious. A world where people are free to pursue their passions would, hopefully, strengthen those personal relationships, in effect turning problems from "someone else's" to "ours".
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:26 |
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Slanderer posted:He's profoundly wrong, in fact. Chess, at any appreciable level, is a game of meta-information. The game is about which player has a better knowledge of Chess patterns and situations. It tests not how smart or clever you are as much as how much Chess you have played. "Better knowledge at chess" is not more information about a particular game of chess. There is no hidden information in a chess game; it is a paradigm example of a a game with both complete and perfect information. If I'm not smart enough to see all the possible chess moves then I won't be as good at chess, but the information required to deduce all those moves is perfectly available to me on the board, should I find some way of using it. So I'm not profoundly wrong, you just profoundly don't know what the word means.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:33 |
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If customer service was completely automatable, it would have been done by now. Many have tried. Most large firms incorporate dynamic help files and a complicated phone tree. But ultimately, many companies still needs people to be on the phone, willing to talk to angry people. That job sucks. It sucks so much that payment is necessary. Same for a lot of jobs that cannot be automated. Even a lot of simple-seeming tasks require a lot of thinking on the fly. Fishing. Logging. Hanging drywall. These things all totally suck, too. You need to pay people to do these. Any automation solution to these jobs is even by the standards of your utopia, not feasible. If we ever make a robot smart enough to build a house when the soil consistency is way different than planned and the architect hosed up one of the bedrooms, then we have built a robot as smart as us.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:33 |
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The Duke of Ben posted:Why does that guy work if he gets nothing more than anyone else who doesn't work at all? Why should he give up the free time he would rather spend making art? If he doesn't want to work in the factory, then don't. My idea is that enough people want the results of that work that they will ensure it is done. If people don't actually want it, then you won't be able to mobilize the resources to do it. The biconditional is virtually tautological in my system. I will have some discussion about how the factories work in my story, but give me time to write it.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:35 |
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Eripsa posted:Tell me which of the following claims you disagree with: This really gets at the core problem I see with this scenario and socialism (as it's advocated in these forums). The proposals take the hard problem and then remove them via handwave. Then we get lavish detail on some stuff that's really pretty minor. In many cases, we'll get pages of corporate bylaw-detail (and then assume that everyone votes for the benefit of society as a whole). In this case, you're assuming that the "what do we produce, when, and how" problem has been solved. And you're giving us lavish detail about distribution networks in a rationed system. Except, from what I can tell, the solution is worse than "just ration stuff, and where possible, give people more coupons than you expect them to reasonably need." Your proposed solution is public shaming. Except, you're assuming large communities and an attention economy. Suppose I build a toothpaste sculpture. Before anything happens to me, it seems like a few things will happen: 1. Someone needs to notice. 2. Someone needs to recognize that I broke a rule. 3. Someone needs to care. 4. Several someones need to spend effort complaining. Steps 1&2 are going to be pretty heavily attention-intensive, in and of themselves. #3 is going to start creating large inefficiencies. There's no reason to think that people are particularly good at guessing which activities are meaningfully wasteful. Step #4, in particular, is going to be really attention-intensive. Unless I know the people who are complaining (or there are a LOT of them), I don't have much reason to care. quote:The important point is not how I solve the problem. The important point is that the system is built to optimize the use of the resources, and you are scoffing at the very idea that we need to track the resources at all. So it is helpful to remember that the capitalist alternative is to let the person freely dump toothpaste into the ocean, as long as he can afford it. If he has enough shekels, he can also bypass the legal regulations and buy out the state governments that are meant to enforce the law, regardless of the public outcry, because in the capitalist alternative the only thing that determines what happens to the resources is how many shekels you have. In an attention economy, you're just replacing money with popularity.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:41 |
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You're literally saying "the invisible hand of the market will take care of it", after taking away the hand of the market. You're saying "the invisible will take care of it". It's insane!
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:41 |
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Eripsa posted:The video distinguishes between routine mechanical tasks and tasks that require any "cognitive function".
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:41 |
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Eripsa posted:The conceptual relation, hopefully, has already been made clear: that resources should be distributed in such a way to optimize their use, and that tracking attention is the right way to get accurate information about use. My claim is that tracking who has collected the most shekels is not going to solve the coordination problem, but that tracking attention paid will. Basically what you've argued is that an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent force would make sure that everybody was happy. You've given some structure to the 'omniscient' part by talking about this attention-monitoring thing. Fine. I don't need specific algorithms for anything, I need you to tell me how the omnipotence and benevolence of the system work with the attention stuff (the omniscience). You're absolutely right that it's best if resources are optimally distributed. And you're absolutely right that attention-tracking would be a way to ensure that resources are optimally distributed given a resource-distribution network (omnipotence) and given the good-will of resource-distributors. You've hinted that benevolence is solved with a great big computer that makes sure nothing goes wrong. How does it do it? "Algorithms" isn't really a satisfactory answer. Your entire system here presupposes a supreme body that distributes resources fairly in all situations. Your argument is "Assume this body, hey this attention stuff could tell them how to do it." You need to tell us how this body maintains its power and its moral perfection, otherwise it is about as interesting as Star Trek replicators.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:43 |
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T-1000 posted:You aren't talking automation, you're talking strong AI. I'll take ten please, and a yellow unicorn. Now we have strong AI, infinite energy, and unlimited resources! Who needs an economy now? gently caress "attention", I'll be virtual-snowboarding down Everest most of the day, with a bit of time reserved for activating the implements in the pleasure center of my brain. The robots will take care of mechanical affairs, such as feeding me, and removing my bodily wastes. A bright future.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:47 |
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| # ? May 19, 2013 22:24 |
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Achmed Jones posted:Basically what you've argued is that an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent force would make sure that everybody was happy. You've given some structure to the 'omniscient' part by talking about this attention-monitoring thing. Fine. There was a Star Trek Voyager episode on tonight about an alien healthcare system run by a computer called the Allocator that perfectly assigned resources in the system. Needless to say Captain Janeway and the Doctor sorted them right out! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Care_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)
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| # ? Feb 1, 2012 03:50 |
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