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Eripsa posted:Can the values of digital culture be applied to economics? Should they? Until "digital culture" is defined by some authority, that is throwing out a meaningless loving buzzword. What is digital culture? What are it's values. Please cite your references.
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Feb 2, 2012 06:38
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Eripsa posted:So I want to ask what the thread thinks, completely independent of any idea I've proposed. Is it moronic to think that digital values (and not just digital products) will have consequences for how we structure our economy? Possibly, but that's such a vague statement that it could mean practically anything. The computer era has already affected our economy--people now rely on electronic payments, for example. But none of that means that we will come anywhere close to the kind of dystopia you're proposing, or that it will have any effect on the use of money as a medium of exchange as such.
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Feb 2, 2012 06:39
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Eripsa posted:A lot of people have called me crazy in this thread, but as far as I can tell, only one person has called the idea fundamentally broken. Wait, first you quoted yourself, and then you ignore the fact that every single poster in this thread has called your idea stupid. Which means it's broken. You've just been crowdsourced. Thread over.
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Feb 2, 2012 06:40
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rudatron posted:Except that we don't even think about the usage of iron ore in our day to day lives. And why should we? Why should I have to 'like' iron production constantly in order to keep the economy running? You're still presupposing that 'attention == demand' which isn't necessarily the case, and something you haven't actually made a cogent argument towards. Because my view isn't that attention == demand. My view is that attention is a measure of use. So in fact, whether they like it or not, whether they even know it or not, they are giving iron a lot of attention, and in my system that attention paid (in the form of using products built from that ore) empowers the people who put in the effort to harvest the iron to have some proportional level of influence within the system, especially as it regards the use and mining of ore. All I'm saying is to let the people do it themselves, in quantities and methods that they themselves endorse and are willing to put up with with a free conscience, instead of doing it for the private interests of capitalists who simply claim to own the mines and seek to reap the profit with no social check on that power. I mean, this isn't an unexpected result. The closer one is to the means of production, and the more people know and are involved and personally invested in that production, the more sustainable the overall system will be. Being blind to the means of production is one of the clear sources of the inhumanity of the modern age (ethicists call this the "problem of distance"), and it would make a lot of sense that in a sustainable culture, people have direct awareness of those means and are directly involved in that discussion. If you think that a sustainable population is not desirable because you'd rather remain ignorant of the means of production, then I'm sorry. If forced education seems too 1984 to you, write an essay and give it to your English teacher.
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Feb 2, 2012 06:51
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If this thread is going to discuss any economies not based on attention marbles, I may as well ask this here: What're people's thoughts on distributionism in general? I only know the basics- everyone owns shares in the means of production and receives dividends- and it seems like it has some upsides (the modern corporation is a little oligarchy to itself most of the time) and downsides (some industries may benefit from not having a democratic process resolve every market decision.)
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Feb 2, 2012 06:59
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Eripsa posted:Because my view isn't that attention == demand. My view is that attention is a measure of use. So in fact, whether they like it or not, whether they even know it or not, they are giving iron a lot of attention, and in my system that attention paid (in the form of using products built from that ore) empowers the people who put in the effort to harvest the iron to have some proportional level of influence within the system, especially as it regards the use and mining of ore. All I'm saying is to let the people do it themselves, in quantities and methods that they themselves endorse and are willing to put up with with a free conscience, instead of doing it for the private interests of capitalists who simply claim to own the mines and seek to reap the profit with no social check on that power. I have a question, while you're here. How do you break down the percentage of attention paid to any particular end product? Let's say you have a chart somewhere with the total breakdown of raw materials, invested energy, and remediation cost for the product. You also have values for the labour and capital invested in primary production, manufacturing, marketing, and recycling. Does the attention break down along the exact same lines? Or is a conscious thing, where you have to think "Man I really love my ipod, without those brave volunteers mining gallium it wouldn't exist!" Or is it purely reactive, like "Man I wish I had an ipod, maybe if I can get enough people interested in receiving ipods we can gather enough attention to open a new gallium mine and find volunteers!"
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Feb 2, 2012 07:00
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Eripsa posted:attention paid empowers the people who put in the effort to harvest the iron to have some proportional level of influence within the system, especially as it regards the use and mining of ore. All I'm saying is to let the people do it themselves, in quantities and methods that they themselves endorse and are willing to put up with with a free conscience instead of doing it for the private interests of capitalists who simply claim to own the mines and seek to reap the profit with no social check on that power. [/quote] Unless someone is enslaved in some form, they are working in a mine not for capitalist pigs, but for themselves. So they get a paycheck, and can eat and buy a Camaro. Eripsa posted:I mean, this isn't an unexpected result. The closer one is to the means of production, and the more people know and are involved and personally invested in that production, the more sustainable the overall system will be. Eripsa posted:Being blind to the means of production is one of the clear sources of the inhumanity of the modern age (ethicists call this the "problem of distance"), and it would make a lot of sense that in a sustainable culture, people have direct awareness of those means and are directly involved in that discussion. Eripsa posted:If you think that a sustainable population is not desirable because you'd rather remain ignorant of the means of production, then I'm sorry. If forced education seems too 1984 to you, write an essay and give it to your English teacher.
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Feb 2, 2012 07:04
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Maxwell Lord posted:What're people's thoughts on distributionism in general? I only know the basics- everyone owns shares in the means of production and receives dividends- and it seems like it has some upsides (the modern corporation is a little oligarchy to itself most of the time) and downsides (some industries may benefit from not having a democratic process resolve every market decision.) I would be interested in learning more about this, but that might require a new thread (Alternate Economies: No Eripsas allowed). But, of the hip, my main outstanding criticism of any similar ideology is that there are certain things which work better the more they are centralized, at least due to economy of scale. It hits on my main gripe with "buy local"--it's vastly more efficient in terms of man-hours and resources to produce, say, a particular digital camera in a couple of semi-automated factories then it is to produce them in someone's house.
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Feb 2, 2012 07:11
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Slanderer posted:Unless someone is enslaved in some form, they are working in a mine not for capitalist pigs, but for themselves. So they get a paycheck, and can eat and buy a Camaro. To be fair, I know at least one country (in South America, but I'm drawing a blank- Peru maybe?) that, for gold mining, uses the payment system of "one day a month, you keep whatever you find, and it has to last you until the next scramble."
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Feb 2, 2012 07:13
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Narbo posted:Or is it purely reactive, like "Man I wish I had an ipod, maybe if I can get enough people interested in receiving ipods we can gather enough attention to open a new gallium mine and find volunteers!" Better yet: people could capture those attention experience points even more efficiently by enslaving their children in the gallium mines! I mean, they might be someone yelling SHAME! SHAME! at them for a while before heading back to the nearest drum circle, but with those many maybes, they could do... actually, it still seems like they do, and mean, nothing tangible. Well, they can still have more kids, I guess.
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Feb 2, 2012 07:14
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Slanderer posted:Wait, first you quoted yourself, and then you ignore the fact that every single poster in this thread has called your idea stupid. Which means it's broken. I saw a lot of people call my idea stupid, and a lot of people call me stupid, but the idea of applying digital values to the economy is neither my idea, nor is it particularly stupid. You want sources of digital values? I guess I don't count as a source, although I have been studying the philosophy of technology and internet culture as a student and instructor for almost a decade now, and I take myself to be an expert. But ok, you want academic sources. Michael Wesch is probably the most directly relevant, and was a pioneer in digital ethnography, which is a whole loving discipline that exists now to study digital culture. He's already been mentioned in this thread, I think. Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture is important in this discussion, and Tom Boellstorff is probably also relevant. Clay Shirky and Lawrence Lessig are in some ways the front lines in articulating and popularizing the digital culture and its values, and are basically required reading for the digital age. If you think that the digital values are "meaningless" or have been poorly articulated, then you haven't read Here Comes Everybody. Those are mostly people working in media studies and cultural anthropology. If you want something a little more theoretical, you might want Haraway's groundclearing essay A Cyborg Manifesto, and Bruno Latour's actor network theory. If you want something more science-y, try Andy Clark's extended mind theory, which is basically just Dennett's theory of the mind applied to tools, and by the way Dennett says consciousness is just "fame in the brain", which is basically what I'm doing with the Attention Economy. If you are looking for something more basic and foundational, you might want to go to Durkheim himself. If you are interested in sources on the computer science stuff in the story I can provide that too 
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Feb 2, 2012 07:16
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Slanderer posted:I would be interested in learning more about this, but that might require a new thread (Alternate Economies: No Eripsas allowed). This thread is going to the goldmine after it's run its course, so if you want to talk about nonmarble economies probably best to do it in another thread that will stick around longer.
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Feb 2, 2012 07:16
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Eripsa posted:I saw a lot of people call my idea stupid, and a lot of people call me stupid, but the idea of applying digital values to the economy is neither my idea, nor is it particularly stupid. And yet you still didn't give a definition. Is this like when you ask a libertarian about some retarded claim they made, and they only respond with "NO YOU GOTTA READ THIS BOOK BY VON MISES THEN YOU'LL GET IT" If any post you've ever made in D&D is any indication, you do a discredit to the teaching profession. Because no one has learned jack loving poo poo.
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Feb 2, 2012 07:18
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Slanderer posted:And yet you still didn't give a definition. Is this like when you ask a libertarian about some retarded claim they made, and they only respond with "NO YOU GOTTA READ THIS BOOK BY VON MISES THEN YOU'LL GET IT" I have given definitions and examples and key terms and ideas in the digital values uncountably many times in this thread, and I have repeated those definitions so goddamn much that I am getting sick of the phrases too. That you haven't see these definitions or understood their meaning is completely clear, but it is no fault of my own.
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Feb 2, 2012 07:21
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Eripsa posted:I have given definitions and examples and key terms and ideas in the digital values uncountably many times in this thread, and I have repeated those definitions so goddamn much that I am getting sick of the phrases too. That you haven't see these definitions or understood their meaning is completely clear, but it is no fault of my own. Actually, because I'm even slightly competent, I checked. You used the term "Digital Values" 11 times in this thread. Nowhere was it defined. Your mental instability is showing.
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Feb 2, 2012 07:24
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Eripsa, the problem I have is that you're assuming that sustainability must come at the cost of privacy via your system. My preferred method would be to strongly monitor the resources at the input. In essence, I don't believe that natural resources should be owned privately but in aggregate for the reasons you outlined. I also don't think that I have a "right" to consume without limit. However, within reason, I would like the luxury of consuming how I choose, without having to make my consumption public. If that is simply impossible, then so be it, but my argument is that you have not made a case that it is. There is a huge gap between "everyone is raping the planet," and "everything is collectively owned and shared," with a lot of potentials in between. To answer your hypotheticals -- no I don't believe that first world consumption patterns are sustainable, and I am willing and able to lower my quality of living to match that. But you make the assumption that the drop in quality of life under your system is slight. It very well might (and I'd argue its likely) be massive. If you wish me to take a massive hit in quality of life, then you have to make a drat good case that its necessary and that other, better systems cannot be used. Moreover, I don't buy the appeals to populism. To me, it matters not if my actions are being controlled by a cabal of elite or a collective - it impacts my life in the same way. And I have no more chance to change the decisions of a democratic body than my elected representatives. People who promote this style of collectivism, as it seems you do, always seem surprised that we don't see this as an unmitigated good. I like my individuality. Being that I'm an introvert, it seems like hell to toss aside my privacy and submit to the collective in such a way. If its absolutely necessary for the human race, then well so be it, but we're also a very very long way from proving that it is necessary. And really, that's not even touching on the feasibility of your system which you've still failed to prove. Your pithy comment that you don't buy that people cant share isn't really based about any sort of reasoned analysis, but around how you feel. That's a terrible metric. We can see how crowd-sourced systems work -- they often do so relatively poorly. We have a decent understanding of human psychology. If you take a really hard and honest look at the systems you hold up as examples, you'll find that they are not particularly promising for solving difficult problems. Maxwell Lord posted:What're people's thoughts on distributionism in general? I only know the basics- everyone owns shares in the means of production and receives dividends- and it seems like it has some upsides (the modern corporation is a little oligarchy to itself most of the time) and downsides (some industries may benefit from not having a democratic process resolve every market decision.) Ah, I've had this idea tossing around in my head lately. It's nice to know that there's a name for it. Require that public companies give a certain percentage of their equity (a controlling share at least) to the workers, and also require that they pay a certain percent of the profit in dividends. Hopefully, such a system should cause profits to go back to the workers. The fact that they're paid on dividends may prevent the "growth at all costs," issue. Still, I think its not a really strong solution to the sustainability problem. And the big problem that I can see is that, yes, democratic decisions are often not good for making market decisions, for reasons outlined in this thread. They require expertise. But hopefully, the workers could elect someone to make these sorts of decisions on their behalf and fire them if they fail to make good decisions. Also, I haven't read a lot of Marx, so could someone chime in whether such a distributionist system is compatible with his ideas?
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Feb 2, 2012 07:27
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Slanderer posted:Actually, because I'm even slightly competent, I checked. You used the term "Digital Values" 11 times in this thread. Nowhere was it defined. Sigh. For people who have trouble following a conversation: AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF DIGITAL VALUES 1. Participation: Everyone is encouraged to contribute. 2. Inclusivity: By everyone, we mean everyone. 3. Open Access: Everyone's contributions are shared with everyone. 4. Collaboration: Everyone is free to use everyone else's contributions. 5. Self-Organization: Everyone has a say in how those contributions get organized. There are other values at work in my system of course, and they are generally humanitarian values of one stripe or other. But these are at least a partial list of the specifically digital values that I've discussed in this thread. These are the words that were precisely called out as being overused, and were the frequent focus of examples and issues that I've discussed in many posts. I suppose having an enumerated list is helpful, and you could have asked for one instead of questioning my sanity because you couldn't put it together yourself from your obviously thorough ctrl+fing through my posts. edit: I have explicitly discussed restrictions on these values in this thread. For instance, I think that some centralization is good, because experts should have more of a say than passers-by. So we shouldn't entirely decentralize. Nevertheless, the move to decentralization at all represents a "digital value". edit 2: now that I think about it, decentralization is probably in tension with self-organization. I'll need to think about this more.
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Feb 2, 2012 07:51
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ryde posted:We can see how crowd-sourced systems work -- they often do so relatively poorly. You said this earlier, and I didn't call you on it. Where the hell did this come from? Every one of the internet communities you mention are thriving, flourishing communities that have sustained an active population of regular contributors for years and in some cases over a decade. That's an amazing success, given that before these genuine digital communities existed it was an open question if anyone would even bother to use the internet. Does Something Awful regularly produce work that will live in the minds of generations to come? Of course not. But that's not a reasonable metric of success. I think sustainability is a perfectly fine measure of success, and by that measure the internet is doing just fine. And by the way, since sustainability is also the measure of success of my system, I think this counts in my favor. quote:We have a decent understanding of human psychology. If you take a really hard and honest look at the systems you hold up as examples, you'll find that they are not particularly promising for solving difficult problems. I also have no idea where this came from. I've cited actual psychology that is incredibly optimistic about our ability to share and cooperate, and to be motivated by the goodness of the work we do over the material value of the reward we are given. Unless your pessimism is anything other than anecdotal, this is also unwarranted.
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Feb 2, 2012 08:01
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Eripsa posted:In other words, the extraction of X tons of ore does not represent the fact that X tons of ore is needed, or that anyone wants it. Instead, it only represents the recognition that this ore's value when mined exceeds the cost of mining, and so someone can make a profit off its extraction. If it were not profitable, it would not be extracted. Supply and demand would ignore that someone may really need ore and be unable to pay for it, but the problem isn't the fact that the ore has value. There is a cost to digging something out from a kilometre below ground and shipping it to the other side of the world. That will always cost something outside of Star Trek. The problem is that a person who needs something can't pay for it, not that it is worth something. Eripsa posted:If the cost of the ore is not related to its usefulness, then it is possible that the amount of ore we should be extracting to solve the coordination problem is different from the amount of ore we are as a matter of fact extracting. Eripsa posted:Perhaps, if profits were not an issue, we may be able to devote more research into improving the safety of the miners at work, and more development of the automation technologies that will keep them out of harm's way in the future. Maybe we could devote research into ways of harvesting and reusing the ore we have already mined, and research into material alternatives to iron ore. These things usually won't turn a profit, and are ignored or sometimes actively avoided for the sake of profits, but it will keep humans from toil in the mines. Eripsa posted:Maybe when all those inefficiencies are ironed out, we'll have a task that is manageable enough that a small group of passionate and experienced people can approach it with the support of their technology and for the benefit of the crowd. Mining is only one example. The real question is this: T-1000 posted:I'm sure there are other craptastic jobs that nobody will do out of a sense of duty or necessity, and many of them require years of training. Why would anyone do this? Why not be a kitesurfing instructor or a sculptor or any other job where you go home to your family every day, and live in a place with decent restaurants? Eripsa posted:Sigh. For people who have trouble following a conversation:
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Feb 2, 2012 08:07
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Are you guys talking about something like the Mondragon Corporation?
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Feb 2, 2012 08:08
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T-1000 posted:Some of these have been problematic in implementation, at least in my local Occupy. It was largely paranoid nutjobs, wannabe rappers, and people dressed as tents. Occupy is running into some of the problems that people are arguing would happen to your system. I have more to say on your other points, but I need to say this: Occupy was a protest to express a problem, but it did not come prepared with a solution, and it isn't ready for one yet even if we had it. I'm toying with Attention Economy because I don't think the solution space is big enough to get people to really seriously start thinking about solutions at all, and science fiction is a good way of blowing open the possible solutions. But I have very strong opinions on the process of direct democracy that Occupy was using, and in particular about how to scale it to large systems. I think the problem at Occupy was that the process they were using didn't scale well, and they didn't have systematic methods for dealing with dissenters, and so productivity broke down. I think it is a failure of their process, and thinking about how a solution might work has led to a lot of my confidence in the Attention Economy, but discussing the process is probably best left for a different thread. But I think that look, most of the people at occupy didn't understand it was an anarchist movement, and wouldn't have been able to articulate the digital values very well, and basically had no idea what they were doing. They just knew it was important, and it was. And now let's get serious about solutions. With marbles.
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Feb 2, 2012 08:15
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Eripsa posted:and wouldn't have been able to articulate the digital values very well How could they? You just arbitrarily made them up on the spot
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Feb 2, 2012 08:35
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Eripsa posted:And now let's get serious about solutions. 1. "Digital values." 2. ? 3. Utopia. The more I read this thread the more I feel this is more like a religion than anything to do with logic or reason.
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Feb 2, 2012 08:41
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quote:Because my view isn't that attention == demand. My view is that attention is a measure of use. It's a completely useless metric economically. And it still doesn't answer the question of 'will the marbles the iron ore miners get be enough to overcome the shitiness of the job?'. I mean, gently caress, If you're going to say that 'influence' is the incentive to do lovely jobs, how can that possibly be true when there are so many, many jobs that require incentives to get done? How is the 'influence' from each going to compare out? It our current system, it's a pretty simple relation between money -> stuff, and people like stuff! Yeah, people should get enough to eat no matter what, but using stuff to encourage productivity seems like a pretty good strategy. On the other hand, your 'influence' isn't actually something that seems like anyone would give a poo poo about it. So I'll ask it straight up: What so special about having a lot of 'marble' influence, and why should I give a poo poo about it? quote:If you think that a sustainable population is not desirable because you'd rather remain ignorant of the means of production, then I'm sorry. Even if I was completely altruistic, and started scanning throw the list of required products to make sure they get the required number of marbles, that's not something that's going to be able to done in my lifetime. This is in contrast to our current system, and in fact many other alternative economies, where average joes don't have to care about the exact chain that leads to a pressure cooker, because it's boring. And that's a good thing, because I'd rather focus on my job, or when I'm not working, focus on whatever leisure activity I'm doing, rather than spend all day looking at trucks so ma knows we need more trucks to carry the food so we don't starve.
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Feb 2, 2012 08:45
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One thing I don't fully understand, is how this system is a replacement for money and not just a replacement distribution system. Obviously there would be massive issues with funding and organisation, but let me wave them away with buzz words and this could be funded by higher taxes and policed by the police (not perfect, but give me the court system over twitter). This whole 'attention based economy' is peripheral when the entire system is almost entirely automated. The areas that are not automated have either been ignored, or involves strangers moderating my life through twitter.
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Feb 2, 2012 09:49
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One more thing: Eripsa, if you haven't, I suggest you read Superfreakonomics. You will probably take issue with a lot of it, but there's a chapter on money and psychology you'd find interesting. They mention a few of the altruism studies you've brought up and a few others with different results. One issue is that studying someone in a test changes their behaviour; people can try to act extra good in front of the people running the test. There are a few tests where people don't know they're being studied and the results are a bit different. Especially entertaining is a study where a researcher introduced the concept of currency to a group of monkeys. The monkeys picked it up very quickly and invented prostitution.
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Feb 2, 2012 10:02
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rudatron posted:No, it's not. attention doesn't measure anything than what you are looking at/thinking about. Things that you don't currently see, that could still be in use, aren't going to get your attention. Are you looking at your refrigerator right now? If not, then how is 'ma' going to be able to continually feed it power? I'm not looking at the fridge, but I'm using it, and that use gets counted in the Attention Economy. Attention doesn't mean "What is consciously present in a persons mind". Attention means "I am employing this tool or resource for some purpose". The whole point of my system is so that the underlying trade of the resources actually gets tracked by the system, and can be accounted for and maintained in a public way. And that means accounting for all the use, and trying to optimize it. I am saying that the proper way to do this is to conceptualize it as "attention", and then track the flow of attention across the network. I "attend to" my TV when I watch it, and my car when I drive it, and the fridge as long as it remains on and cooling my food. That fridge is the end result of a long chain of distribution, where each part and person along the way contributed to its construction. The flow of attention would track those pieces down the line, resulting in the laborers who created them receiving attention themselves derivatively as a result of their productive contributions to society. Basing this on attention means that the more useful your product or service, the more popular and influential you are in the system. I have no guarantee that people will only use good things, I only have the digital value that the people should decide what they want to use. This system is preferrable to the system of money because money doesn't actually track the actual contributions of the people and resources, and is invariant with respect to sustainability. The dollar amount I pay for products at the store do not represent the cost in actual human and environmental terms, it represents the cost that maximizes the personal profits of a wealthy few, who exploit those workers by keeping them in bondage in order to earn those extra percentages. I'm claiming that an attention economy, by reflecting the real value of resources as measured by their use, will help us make better decisions about how to manage our production and distribution to ensure a sustainable community. quote:It's a completely useless metric economically. Actual use is the only important metric economically. The idea of "supply" and "demand" do not track anything about an actual economy made of actual resources, because "supply" and "demand" are again invariant with respect to sustainability and solving the coordination problem. I'll say this one more time: money doesn't actually measure anything. It is completely fictitious. Shekels are the equivalent of fairy dust we've collected that we all think is special and that we've trained ourselves to obey completely when wagged in our faced. Our current economic theories have as much relation to the sustainable and humanitarian treatment of our natural resources and labor as astrology has to your future spouse. But for some strange reason everyone here is completely willing to trust the money system, which is demonstrably unsustainable, and comes at huge social costs, and they are willing to defend it against an open, democratic system where everything is free, and they would reject that system because we want to make sure you aren't being abusive to the community resources. And somehow from this conversation, people have concluded that I am insane. quote:Yeah, people should get enough to eat no matter what, but using stuff to encourage productivity seems like a pretty good strategy. Yes, slavery seems like a good strategy. It works! I think we have an obligation to do better than loving wage slavery. Jesus loving christ. quote:On the other hand, your 'influence' isn't actually something that seems like anyone would give a poo poo about it. I haven't explained very well how this goes yet, I understand that. I'm getting there. quote:Holy poo poo dude, do you realize how complex modern production methods are? How many little products and little things in the system that are absolutely vital, yet completely ignored? I don't think anything in my system undermines specialization. I need so write the next chapter. I have three more to go, and I think the idea will be much more clear when I am done.
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Feb 2, 2012 10:16
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T-1000 posted:One more thing: Eripsa, if you haven't, I suggest you read Superfreakonomics. You will probably take issue with a lot of it, but there's a chapter on money and psychology you'd find interesting. They mention a few of the altruism studies you've brought up and a few others with different results. One issue is that studying someone in a test changes their behaviour; people can try to act extra good in front of the people running the test. There are a few tests where people don't know they're being studied and the results are a bit different. The studies on altruism have been repeated over and over again, in all sorts of contexts. The soma cube experiments have also been confirmed repeatedly. I also know the monkey studies you mention. As I've mentioned before, money is a Good Trick. Once you understand the trick, you can literally bend other people to your will if you do it right. If you are really good at it, you can bend entire countries and change the course of history. It is very powerful. But I still maintain that it is a method of private coersion, and that it is inhumane, and that we have basic obligations to get rid of it in favor of a system that is sustainable and solves the coordination problem. People in this thread literally believe that money is so inevitable that people would be unable to take care of ourselves and provide for our basic needs without it. People think that we are so selfish and petty and stupid that we need to be shackled to a job to have any value to society, and that if we don't perform for our paychecks then tough poo poo, we starve. And people think this system is so loving good that even mentioning the possibility that it was optional, and that there was a better way to do it, is itself grounds for suspicion of mental instability. I don't know, man, but y'all look like monkey whores to me.
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Feb 2, 2012 10:29
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Eripsa posted:I'm not looking at the fridge, but I'm using it, and that use gets counted in the Attention Economy. Attention doesn't mean "What is consciously present in a persons mind". Attention means "I am employing this tool or resource for some purpose". My desk is "in use" 100% of the time, in that it is constantly holding up whatever is on it. The computer that is on the desk, however, is "in use" only maybe 15% of the time. Nonetheless, I think I can say I value the computer far more than the desk it is on. Similarly, my refrigerator is "in use" 100% of the time, in that it is constantly cooling my food, while my computer is "in use" maybe 15% of the time, but if I had to choose between the two it would be a tough choice, since I drive by a grocery store every day. My bed is "in use" maybe 30% of the time, while my car is "in use" maybe 3% of the time. Nonetheless, the car is necessary to get to work, while I can always sleep on the couch. But these are just the values I place on these items--someone else may be able to get most of their e-mail and internet use on their phone, and do a lot of gourmet cooking, and thus value the refrigerator much more than the computer, since, although they use the computer, they have a viable computer substitute. Similarly, another person may live in an area with an awesome public transportation system, and thus not really need the car they drive, but may suffer from a bad back that makes sleeping on anything but a proper mattress rather painful.
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Feb 2, 2012 10:33
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Eripsa posted:I'll say this one more time: money doesn't actually measure anything. It is completely fictitious. Shekels are the equivalent of fairy dust we've collected that we all think is special and that we've trained ourselves to obey completely when wagged in our faced.
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Feb 2, 2012 10:38
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Sir John Falstaff posted:My desk is "in use" 100% of the time, in that it is constantly holding up whatever is on it. The computer that is on the desk, however, is "in use" only maybe 30% of the time. Nonetheless, I think I can say I value the computer far more than the desk it is on. Similarly, my refrigerator is "in use" 100% of the time, in that it is constantly cooling my food, while my computer is "in use" maybe 30% of the time, but if I had to choose between the two it would be a tough choice, since I drive by a grocery store every day. My bed is "in use" maybe 30% of the time, while my car is "in use" maybe 3% of the time. Nonetheless, the car is necessary to get to work, while I can always sleep on the couch. Excellent! These are the sort of questions I hoped we'd get to. I don't quite know how this would go, and I hope others have good ideas. But the idea is that we need some formula for redistributing the attention marbles you are producing. Remember, you are producing them at some constant rate, say X marbles per minute. So every minute, those X marbles need to get distributed among the things you are "using", and we need some way of weighting all those things so that it tracks its relative importance. As I said earlier, this tracking can be improved in various ways, allowing the economic system to better reflect the use of resources that it monitors. So I think we can just make estimates right now in an effort to figure out what a formula like this could possibly look like. So I think X is going to get split in the following ways X1: The things I am currently looking at X2: The things on my body or attached directly to my body (like earbuds and an ipod) X3: The things that are currently near my body; my immediate physical surroundings (the bed I am sitting on, the car I am driving in). X4: The things in my residence (my dresser, my unwatched TV, all the utilities being fed into my house). There may be other distinctions to make in this list, but it gives the general idea. So this list is weighted towards the front of the list, because the things at the front of the list will likely be double-counted at other points on the list. So the book I am reading is ALSO an object near me AND an object in my residence. So the time I spend reading the book is effectively giving it three times as much attention as when it sits idle on the shelf. I think that's roughly how that should be. Now because I am only producing a small amount of attention, and I am using a lot of things, that use gets divided up in lots of ways. So the portion of those marbles that goes to the dude that made the washer in the faucet in my kitchen sink is going to get a very small portion of my marbles. But that dude probably made hundreds of thousands of washers, and so though I don't attend to him much myself, he can aggregate those small fractions to achieve a comparable compensation. I think this kind of scheme will allow us to account for differences in relative importance. You have a computer, maybe, but you don't use it often, but it is important that you have it. My computer, on the other hand, basically never leaves my side, and I spend relatively more of my attention on it than other things. This different in use and value gets reflected in the attention it receives. At least this is the basic idea. I need to say more about influence to make the system fit together right, but this is the basic layout of the attention side.
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Feb 2, 2012 11:18
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Eripsa posted:Excellent! These are the sort of questions I hoped we'd get to. I don't quite know how this would go, and I hope others have good ideas. But the idea is that we need some formula for redistributing the attention marbles you are producing. Your system will still wind up assigning essentially arbitrary values, though. My jacket may be something closely attached to my body, but if I live in Miami I don't really need it. The electricity constantly flowing into my home, however, powers my refrigerator, without which all my food spoils. Even if you could assign anything more than arbitrary values to these things, though, you'd still have the problem of assigning a value to the various contributions to each thing. My computer, for example, may be 30% iron (probably way off, but bear with me). However, that 30% may be mostly the result of the case, which could just as easily be made out of plastic, and the computer might be only 5% iron without the case. So, the iron miner's contribution may be whatever portion of that 30% that is not the portion attributable to the refiner of the iron or the shipper of the iron or the janitor at the mining facility, or it may be only the arbitrary portion of the 5% that would be the contribution otherwise. And then there are the massive, massive problems involved in tracking and calculating all of this. I'm not sure how you could measure what portion of my time I spend looking out my window, for example, to tell what value to assign to my window (and, of course, the window also serves to let in light, without which my plants would die and my electrical use would be higher, and I would probably be psychologically affected in some way). And then how do you value the portion of the iron that makes up the computer that is attributable to the janitor at the mining facility, or to the engineer that designed the support system for the tunnels, or to the heavy equipment operator that dug the tunnels, or to the explosives expert that blasted some of the rock away, or to the miner that hauled the coal out of the mine, or to the refiner that transformed the raw iron into a form usable in producing products?
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Feb 2, 2012 11:52
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Sir John Falstaff posted:Your system will still wind up assigning essentially arbitrary values, though. My jacket may be something closely attached to my body, but if I live in Miami I don't really need it. The electricity constantly flowing into my home, however, powers my refrigerator, without which all my food spoils. This is very similar to my question, maybe you could answer them together: quote:I have a question, while you're here. How do you break down the percentage of attention paid to any particular end product? Let's say you have a chart somewhere with the total breakdown of raw materials, invested energy, and remediation cost for the product. You also have values for the labour and capital invested in primary production, manufacturing, marketing, and recycling. Does the attention break down along the exact same lines? Or is a conscious thing, where you have to think "Man I really love my ipod, without those brave volunteers mining gallium it wouldn't exist!" One trick is to reduce everything to a common standard, say joules, that represents values of energies of formation of the materials (though that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how hard it is to make that material available), and do your accounting based on that. The problem with that solution is that labour and capital are valued differently in every nation, in every region, and any value you assign is going to be market based or arbitrary. Edit: My answer to this question is that in your conception of an economy, supply chains do not span across regions, much less nations, and that the capacity for mass production wouldn't exist. Of course then you have to wonder where all the billions of computer chips and brain scanners and internet infrastructure will come from...
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Feb 2, 2012 13:52
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Eripsa, you've repeatedly held Wikipedia up as an example of crowdsourcing effectively. Does it occur to you that Wikipedia has a leadership (government)which makes decisions? This includes adding and removing admins (top down decisions, denying access to certain users), deleting unwanted articles (denying access, silencing voices), and generally policing (law enforcement) the site? It seems that your best example is actually a poor example for what you are suggesting. Wikipedia survives based on having a governing body and locking unwanted influences out of the system. People get banned from Wikipedia. In your society they would be unable to influence society and would be constantly put under duress that they could not fix. I'm not seeing a difference between that and capitalistic disinfranchisement.
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Feb 2, 2012 15:12
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Eripsa posted:You said this earlier, and I didn't call you on it. Where the hell did this come from? Every one of the internet communities you mention are thriving, flourishing communities that have sustained an active population of regular contributors for years and in some cases over a decade. That's an amazing success, given that before these genuine digital communities existed it was an open question if anyone would even bother to use the internet. That's an incredibly superficial metric of success, and I have called you on that before. Do the sites given accurately summarize and analyze the articles they post? Do they often post articles with a high quality and low noise? Do the highly-rated commenters read and properly understand the articles? Does bad analysis get properly downvoted or left behind? The answer is no for all these sites. In all them, summary and analysis is terrible -- misleading headlines, biased sources, and commenters who likewise promote their own bias instead of a nuanced understanding. Group-think and knee-jerk reactions are upvoted. In many of these sites, noise greatly overwhelms signal in terms of quality. Posters contributing bias instead of reasoned analysis are more highly regarded than posters taking a rational look at the issues presented. Yes, in regards to growing the sites and drawing people in, they are successes, but in regards to promoting greater understanding of issues and quality discussion, they are failures. This is what I meant by you giving superficial platitudes with regards to the internet's success. You have not properly analyzed any of the things you use as examples. Eripsa posted:I also have no idea where this came from. I've cited actual psychology that is incredibly optimistic about our ability to share and cooperate, and to be motivated by the goodness of the work we do over the material value of the reward we are given. Unless your pessimism is anything other than anecdotal, this is also unwarranted. Scientific research also shows that people are more interested in having more than their neighbors than they are having an equal number of things in common with neighbors. Also, people are easily gamed and irrational. And they tend to organize hierarchy and like conformity. They do have capacity for sharing, but they also have capacity for greed, and for being manipulated. Humans are a mixed bag, but you can't just reach in and only take the candy you like. If you don't address basic human nature at all, and just hope the good parts shine through, then your system won't work. It's just that simple. I mean, how do you reconcile the Milgram experiments with human benevolence? Assuming we recognize experts or authorities on subjects, then that becomes a problem. And we also have the bystander effect too. Eripsa posted:Yes, slavery seems like a good strategy. It works! I think we have an obligation to do better than loving wage slavery. Jesus loving christ. I'm really not sure how people can equate working for a living to slavery. Remember that in the absence of society and any sort of effort, the default state is for you to be dying. Entropy is a bitch. Continued life is the result of effort on someone's part towards that goal. Wages are just an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction of the idea that one has to put effort in to stay alive, and that people should contribute effort towards that goal.
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Feb 2, 2012 16:53
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rudatron posted:No, it's not. attention doesn't measure anything than what you are looking at/thinking about. Things that you don't currently see, that could still be in use, aren't going to get your attention. Are you looking at your refrigerator right now? If not, then how is 'ma' going to be able to continually feed it power? It doesn't solve the problem of how to bring about improvements that people do not understand or know that they need. Would you be able to get attention for a car in a world of people that own horses? After you've built the car, the advantages become obvious. But history is replete with people building things that people did not know would become valuable at the time of their invention. See transistors, for example. The Duke of Ben posted:Eripsa, you've repeatedly held Wikipedia up as an example of crowdsourcing effectively. Does it occur to you that Wikipedia has a leadership (government)which makes decisions? This includes adding and removing admins (top down decisions, denying access to certain users), deleting unwanted articles (denying access, silencing voices), and generally policing (law enforcement) the site? Wikipedia added these things because crowd-sourcing failed for moderation of their community.
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Feb 2, 2012 16:57
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Sir John Falstaff posted:Your system will still wind up assigning essentially arbitrary values, though. My jacket may be something closely attached to my body, but if I live in Miami I don't really need it. The electricity constantly flowing into my home, however, powers my refrigerator, without which all my food spoils. The difference between "what I am using" and "what I need" is part of the optimization problem. My idea is to first track all the use, and then to optimize it with the crowd. So right now, you might have the jacket in Florida. When Twitter gets through with it, though, they might decide that jacket is better set to a kid in Maine. But we can't make that decision about optimization until we know where that jacket is, and just how infrequently you use it. quote:Even if you could assign anything more than arbitrary values to these things, though, you'd still have the problem of assigning a value to the various contributions to each thing. My computer, for example, may be 30% iron (probably way off, but bear with me). However, that 30% may be mostly the result of the case, which could just as easily be made out of plastic, and the computer might be only 5% iron without the case. So, the iron miner's contribution may be whatever portion of that 30% that is not the portion attributable to the refiner of the iron or the shipper of the iron or the janitor at the mining facility, or it may be only the arbitrary portion of the 5% that would be the contribution otherwise. I don't think the values are arbitrary, they are just designed to measure use, and to be an accurate reflection of the actual resources used. So if there actually is 30% steel in my computer, then that's what gets registered by the AE. If some nerd recognizes that we can reduce steel consumption by 25% by changing the computer cases we need, then that goes through the production cycle to inform the next round of computers made, which will result in different distribution patterns. This will be difficult to figure out, but I don't think it has to be arbitrary, and I don't think it is impossible to figure out. quote:And then there are the massive, massive problems involved in tracking and calculating all of this. I'm not sure how you could measure what portion of my time I spend looking out my window, for example, to tell what value to assign to my window (and, of course, the window also serves to let in light, without which my plants would die and my electrical use would be higher, and I would probably be psychologically affected in some way). Using the metric assigned earlier, the window would receive attention in virtue of being in your residence, plus the attention you pay it when you are (geospatially, as tracked by GPS) near it. So part of the tracking story here is accomplished by Ma, who just knows a lot about objects and use patterns and can make pretty good guesses about how much of what supply is left around. Part of the tracking is solved by having everyone affix little RFIDs on all the items they consider important, which makes them easier to track. If I gave you 200 RFID antennas to track the items you think are most important and useful, which items do you track? And part of the tracking is done by GPS and generally tracking your behavior. If it is just GPS then we can't tell if you are looking out the window or just standing near it, but as I said as tracking technologies get better we can make these measures more accurate. quote:And then how do you value the portion of the iron that makes up the computer that is attributable to the janitor at the mining facility, or to the engineer that designed the support system for the tunnels, or to the heavy equipment operator that dug the tunnels, or to the explosives expert that blasted some of the rock away, or to the miner that hauled the coal out of the mine, or to the refiner that transformed the raw iron into a form usable in producing products? I agree that this is a difficult problem, but a) I think you have to solve this problem to get sustainability (that is, these are the measures money SHOULD BE TRACKING but DOESN'T), so these are exactly the right problems to have for my system, and b) I don't think these problems are unsolvable, they are just difficult to resolve, so I think we can do it.
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Feb 2, 2012 17:19
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Narbo posted:One trick is to reduce everything to a common standard, say joules, that represents values of energies of formation of the materials (though that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how hard it is to make that material available), and do your accounting based on that. The problem with that solution is that labour and capital are valued differently in every nation, in every region, and any value you assign is going to be market based or arbitrary. Standardizing use measurements will be important, although I don't think you need to peg them to some outside measure (like joules), instead of some standardized human activity (like attention paid). Either way, though, open standards generally will be important, and these need to transcend current political and economic boundaries. So yeah, Attention Economy is an all-or-nothing solution. Everyone everywhere has to be on board or it won't work. Susuatinability is a global problem and the Digital Revolution is a global solution, not just a local problem with local solutions. Any solution that requires cooperation with distinct nation-states simply won't work. Since states largely work simply to protect their own economic interests, I have no hesitation to suggest we strip the whole thing down and start from scratch. THAT is probably far more unrealistic than anything else I've said in this thread, but like the rest of it I think this is required for solving the sustainability problem. It makes me very pessimistic about the possibility that the problem gets solved, but I don't think that makes it any less correct.
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Feb 2, 2012 17:26
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Eripsa posted:
So hey Eripsa, how do we motivate people to do all the incredibly unpleasant jobs in society currently without some form of compensation? *dodge dodge dodge* It so clearly is outside your level of concern or even interest that maybe most people don't even like doing what they have to do to make a living (except as a damning indictment of capitalism maybe) that man, I just have to wonder how soft your entire life has been, if even working for a living doing something unpleasant is totally outside your sphere. This isn't some minor niggling detail. It is the entire core of any economic system. And yet, you barely even seem to care about this - one of the primary issues to any economic system. In not having a real answer to this fundamental question, you show you aren't really proposing a system of alternate economics at all. You're just wanking.
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Feb 2, 2012 17:41
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Oh no, he's answered it. People will just do that stuff because they realize it's necessary and are amazingly far-sighted when it comes to staving off complete catastrophe and apparently we're not talking about humans at all! That is, magic.
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Feb 2, 2012 17:44
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