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ryde posted: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? Why are those the necessary measures of success? You want the casual conversation of people to be held to professional standards, because you think they should be doing something specific-- apparently, you want them to be objective and accurate and to give insightful analysis. But that's not what any of them go to that community for, and it is not a standard they hold themselves to, clearly, because they flourish with activity despite their inaccuracies and lack of professionalism. Its almost as if, shock, people don't care as much about the professionalism you seem to care so much about. Now, if you are arguing that Digital Communities would stop caring about objectivity and analysis entirely, I see no reason to suspect that intelligence and objectivity suddenly go away because money disappears. I agree that perhaps youtube comments aren't the greatest source of objective analysis, but that's not why people use it, and having those youtube comments around don't make it any more difficult for other blogs to facilitate actual illuminating discussion. This is part of the dynamic of networks- you get a lot of poo poo content published for free, but because the publishing is Open Access that poo poo content doesn't actually crowd out the good content, and if you give people the capacity to self-organize, they can help make the good content salient over the bad. Apparently you want a system that forces good content, and suppresses bad content, because you value professionalism over free speech. That's fine. But my system doesn't force anything, and lets everyone talk about whatever they want to, where the only criteria here of success is the natural selection that makes some communities and populations thrive, and others wilt and die. All the sites you mention, professional or not, are thriving, buzzing loci of activity: they are Darwinian success stories, not capitalist success stories. quote: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. Yes, humans are irrational, but they are also endlessly curious and seek things like "meaning" and "purpose" and "expertise", and they tend to share, and they tend to do things that benefit their families and communities. Humans aren't lazy or greedy unless you give them a reason to be lazy and greedy, like undervalue their labor or starve them of resources. You think that people need to be controlled in order to be productive according to what products you value. I think people will naturally be productive according to their own values, and allowing them the freedom to pursue their interests will result in stable, self-organized, self-supporting communities that hold themselves to the standards necessary to sustain their existence. I am not telling those communities what values to have or how to be productive, but I am letting those communities decide that on their own, because I think the people should be deciding their values even if I disagree with them. I do not think they need to be controlled, or handed a program that tells them what they need to do, I think they are perfectly capable of handling that themselves. quote: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. Do you know anything about the Milgram experiments? The subjects in that experiment were willing to do things they didn't think were right because they were led to think that the scientific research was valuable for the community, and they were willing to put their own values aside for what they considered to be a greater purpose. And they continued to put those values aside even after they thought the person they were shocking might be dead. BUT as soon as you ordered them to do it, or as soon as the subjects had reason to believe that the authority giving the command was illegitimate, then they refused to follow those orders. The Milgram experiments show that quite conclusively that a) you can't order someone to do something, and b) people will do incredible and difficult things if they think it is for the greater good. I don't know why that isn't a huge vindication of my view. quote: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. I am guessing you've never been unemployed for a significant amount of time, or that you don't sit on huge medical bills that basically take your paycheck before you've touched it. I'm guessing you've never found yourself at the end of the month wondering how you will feed yourself for a week until you get paid, knowing that you still have to drag yourself to work for this whole week despite your growling stomach. I'm sure life is great for the middle class of America, but that poo poo is unbelievable luxury for the majority of the world, and I'm sorry you won't get to keep your comfortable middle class life after the revolution. I almost feel bad for you, really I do.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 16:48 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 07:14 |
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Eripsa posted: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. Take a complex consumer product, let's say an ipod. How do you arrive at a single pie chart that shows the relative content of energy, materials, labour, and capital in that product in terms of attention?
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 16:49 |
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I wonder if we can find some shipping invoices for a major port, or maybe the production schedule of a large factory, so that Eripsa can see how complicated this stuff really is. We don't just need expert opinions to color our views, but millions and millions of ground level experts doing the literal work at every stage of that process. I actually have no doubt that some people would be willing to do some of the hard work. I am baffled at the thought that these people would be numerous enough or competent enough to actually complete the functions they are taking on. I also have no doubt that there will be a number of functions which are inconveniently overlooked while crowdsourcing, and whoops, there goes the production line. P.S. There are about 14,000 seperate parts in an average modern car. Let's see if we can get volunteers to work on each of those production lines so we can get some cars rolling out!
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 16:53 |
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Eripsa posted:
Clearly, working for free a/o being shamed by redditors who have access to every detail of my life is preferable.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 16:53 |
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ryde posted: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. You are basically given free time to research and develop whatever you want, with no requirements on your production, and where your basic necessities are provided freely. I'm sure in such circumstances someone will build a car. When you are free to tinker and develop, you'll get all sorts of innovations I'm sure. You know there was once a world of horses, right, and that in that world someone invented a car, and had to shop that car around the country to expose people to it and attract attention and build hype so that when the car reached the market it was already widely known and popular. I don't see why that is impossible on my framework. It is interesting you mention the car, by the way, because it is a perfect case where competing technology (the electric car) would have both improved sustainability and resource use, but was shelved for over a decade because of how it undermined profit margins. It is a good case for how capital stymies R&D, not for the success of money in spurring innovation.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 16:54 |
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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. That's not what he was talking about at all you disingenuous piece of poo poo. There are jobs out there that need to be done, that are invisible and miserable, and require incentive if they're ever going to be completed. Being the most popular girl at prom is not incentive for digging poo poo out of the earth a mile underground. The miners don't care about a bunch of people saying "Oh man you're so great." Being provided the means to obtain a rad new car is better incentive. Non-commodity money is a fantastic medium to exchange for goods and services and has been for just about all of recorded human history. And re: sustainability of the internet, it's actually not sustainable in its current form at all. The methods we use to access, use, build, and form the internet waste a ton of energy and are massively unsustainable, and there's only a couple billion people using it. Seven billion+ people all using computers and smartphones and poo poo in its current form will annihilate the planet in record time. We need your step 2 in this grand plan of yours. All you give us is the beginning and the end, with nothing more substantial than a handwave for the transitory period. And before you start with the disingenuous bullshit again, no I am not advocating the status quo. The status quo sucks. Your proposed solution of burning everything to the ground and starting over with the 4chan model is so much worse that I can't even fathom how you don't see it. People are dumb as poo poo. Outside of our respective expertise we're all a bunch of bumbling morons. I don't trust the crowd with medical, nutritional, or infrastructural decisions. I don't trust the crowd to choose the best person to make these decisions either. It's going to give more power to whatever guy can play best to a crowd rather than the person who may be more legitimately capable of the job. This happens all the time already, do you really think it's going to get better if we remove all structural resistance to it? And hey, you know, why not? I can think of a certain person in recent history who was really really popular and charismatic and caused untold amounts of pain and suffering because of it 
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 16:54 |
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Eripsa posted:I'm sure life is great for the middle class of America, but that poo poo is unbelievable luxury for the majority of the world, and I'm sorry you won't get to keep your comfortable middle class life after the revolution. I almost feel bad for you, really I do. And I'm done. See you guys later.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:02 |
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Eripsa posted:It is interesting you mention the car, by the way, because it is a perfect case where competing technology (the electric car) would have both improved sustainability and resource use, but was shelved for over a decade because of how it undermined profit margins. It is a good case for how capital stymies R&D, not for the success of money in spurring innovation. No, it's a perfect case of how the market is distorted by inadequate pricing of externalities. If the proper price of GHG emissions and other pollutions was cooked into the price of gas, electric cars would suddenly look a lot more attractive compared to conventional ones. This is a problem we already know how to solve.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:03 |
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Money is exploitative. Basically, slavery. To solve this problem, we should structure society to ensure that some people are forced to work in mines for free.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:09 |
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Best Friends posted:So hey Eripsa, how do we motivate people to do all the incredibly unpleasant jobs in society currently without some form of compensation? I am not dodging the problem, you just don't like my solution. There's a difference between the two claims. The first implies that I'm not being cooperative or sincerely engaging in the discussion. The second implies that you just don't think I'm right. You can say that I'm not right without implying that I'm not responding to the issue. I agree that the primary focus of capital is "how do we get the people to do the work." And I agree that the solution is "give them money for work, and deprive them of money if they don't, and make money necessary for participating in society at all". And what you get out of this is 1) profit, and 2) wage slavery, and 3) exclusion for anyone who doesn't play along. I think these are all bad results EVEN IF they get people to do the poo poo jobs. You take this to be a damning result for my theory, which implies you think that "if we want those dirty jobs done, then capitalism (and the unsustainable wage slavery it involves) is an acceptable solution." To me this sounds indistinguishable from the claim "If we want all that cotton picked, then we need slaves". I categorically disagree, and think that no end warrants these means. I take this to be one of the primary evils of capitalism, and I'm pointing it out because it is supposed to make the opposing position hard to swallow. The fact that capital makes people do things DOES NOT JUSTIFY ITS USE. But this is SA, and everyone here is basically  ya slavery works yo, so that argument isn't convincing on its own. But I've also said other things:Maybe it is OK that most of the people who don't like their jobs just stop doing them. I don't think fast food flourishes my my system, for instance, do all the burger flippers would be free to say "I'm outta here" and that would mean completely shutting down that industry, and that's fine. It wasn't necessary. So yeah, a lot of people leave their jobs and do something else. I don't think that's a bad thing, in fact I think that's ultimately the more efficient thing do to. People are more productive when they do work they like, and should be free to find work they like without putting their very lives at risk. This also means that rates of consumption and use will also change, just as a result of changed patterns of activity. Maybe people don't commute so much when they don't need to drive. Maybe that's a good thing. We know our currently levels of use and consumption are not sustainable, so maybe it is a good thing that people cut back and slow down and don't rush for the work. And maybe after all those inefficiencies are ironed out (since no one got the joke the first time), and you still have something socially necessary that needs to be harvested, but maybe then you have a manageable problem of that can be solved by the few people still left who passionately want to see it accomplished, given its clear necessity. If there was a "We are about to run out of Iron Ore and need 5 volunteers!" campaign on Twitter, and everyone was educated about the importance of that resource for the global economy, I'm sure you'd get 5 volunteers.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:09 |
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Eripsa posted:This also means that rates of consumption and use will also change, just as a result of changed patterns of activity. Maybe people don't commute so much when they don't need to drive. Maybe that's a good thing. We know our currently levels of use and consumption are not sustainable, so maybe it is a good thing that people cut back and slow down and don't rush for the work. Your solution actually is to replace compensation with unpaid "volunteers." Because money is slavery! But what if - and I know this is unlikely, but what if - not enough people want to do customer service phone support / design medical tracking software / work the midnight shift in the ER / pick up garbage / work on a cargo ship / assemble ipods / build houses / farm / etc / etc / etc (ad infinity) What then? I kind of love that in between being mad at people for not taking your seriously enough, you actually have no idea that labor is unpleasant.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:14 |
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Eripsa posted:But this is SA, and everyone here is basically Stop this. Nobody is saying this.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:14 |
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Narbo posted:Take a complex consumer product, let's say an ipod. How do you arrive at a single pie chart that shows the relative content of energy, materials, labour, and capital in that product in terms of attention? You are just showing how the current capitalist system does not respect the use of resources at all and will never solve the coordination, because that problem looks impossible given our current methods of production and distribution. So the fact that this is a problem is a problem for capitalism. I'm not giving you specific formulas for trying to form that pie chart, although I've suggested the kind of thinking required to build it. All I've argued is that there is some pie chart that accurately reflects the resources used and attention paid to build that product, and that having that pie chart publicly available(and similar charts for all the other products) is a necessary requirement for solving the coordination problem. If building such a pie chart is impossible, then I'm willing to accept that the coordination problem is unsolvable. But I don't think it is impossible. We would just need to think hard about how to do it. I'm not telling you what that solution will look like, I'm just telling you that it will be the solution. The only other thing I can say is that solving this problem requires having all that information being publicly accessible, and having it be scrutinized by the crowds, including the experts who will know what to do with that information, and the people who are affected by it. If this information stays private with the companies, or fragmented across warring nations, the system also can't be sustainable, or at least will be difficult to optimize.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:15 |
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Eripsa posted:But I don't think it is impossible. We would just need to think hard about how to do it. I'm not telling you what that solution will look like, I'm just telling you that it will be the solution. Well hopefully we can get an answer sometime after the revolution and shortly before reddit crowdsources hiring Blackwater to make sure their xbox's get built on time.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:18 |
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Eripsa could you define precisely what you mean by "the coordination problem"? It just occurred to me that it might be handy to know exactly what you mean by that. Also what it means for capitalism to be "unable to solve it".
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:18 |
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Why don't people read me charitably enough  FYI y'all are a bunch of slaves an slavedrivers The only way to end this terrible thread is to stop giving Eripsa the attention he craves for his bad ideas. Does anyone honestly need three more chapters of this crap? He's just going to keep spouting hopelessly optimistic drivel and continue to dodge the questions about unfeasibility of his system in reality while he plays his woe is me, tragically misunderstood visionary song and dance.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:21 |
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Eripsa posted:The Coordination Problem is the problem of coordinating global human activity to produce and distribute resources in order to satisfy global human need.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:22 |
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Yiggy posted:Does anyone honestly need three more chapters of this crap? He's just going to keep spouting hopelessly optimistic drivel and continue to dodge the questions about unfeasibility of his system in reality while he plays his woe is me, tragically misunderstood visionary song and dance. Yes, I definitely do.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:24 |
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Chajusong posted:Ahh, ok. Eripsa there is literally no way in which your horrible system solves either of those better - or even comes remotely close - to how we do things now. Please note "capitalism is bad!" does not help rebut this claim. This is most glaring in the basic coordination problem but still glaring in the 'basic' coordination problem because your proposal doesn't solve it in the least: your basic argument is you believe it to be possible and need someone else to do the heavy lifting. Which, of course, is the fundamental flaw with your system: a lot of people want to be the brilliant top-level guy and tell everyone else to do the heavy lifting in the middle.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:26 |
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The Duke of Ben posted:I wonder if we can find some shipping invoices for a major port, or maybe the production schedule of a large factory, so that Eripsa can see how complicated this stuff really is. If the money completely disappears this second, all the knowhow and human labor hours and technical equipment for coordinating all this incredibly complicated activity will still be around. We won't suddenly forget how to do it or how to coordinate it all. Your post makes the process sound impossible, but we are clearly able to do it now, and money itself isn't what makes it happen. What makes it happen are people and their skills and cooperation and technology, and none of that disappears when we get rid of money. I am arguing that we can change the incentive structure in our society to allow products and services to be freely exchanged in order to provide for everyone. This will mean that some people will stop doing their jobs, sure. And some assembly lines will shut down as well, and some ports maybe too, because the need to trade and produce and consume at our current rates would fall dramatically, because people aren't being driven by the motive of profit and won't be on the same narrow deadlines and wont need to cut the same corners to ensure their bottom line. But once we figure out the rates of production and consumption that will actually sustain ourselves, I don't see any particular barriers to people getting it done. Maybe we don't need 17 million vehicles every year. Maybe we only need 5 million, and maybe we can engineer those 5 million cars to be more durable and efficient so that the year after we only need 2 million, and so on. There is no doubt that planned obsolescence and the capitalist market cycle drives production well beyond basic needs, and that this process produces excess waste. And that a lot of the people who are toiling away right now are making their living by producing this inefficient waste. So maybe it will be a good thing that most of them don't want to do those jobs, because maybe they shouldn't be doing them at all. I think that if you let people pursue their interests, guided by their own sense of what is valuable and what is good for the community, and you give them the information necessary to know how the community's needs break down and how the can contribute to the solutions, then people will self-organize to produce a stable and thriving system. That system might not be held so the professional standards of capitalism, and it might seem uncomfortable from the privileged perspective of late 20th-century suburban Americans who are used to their Big Macs and Hummers, but nevertheless I am convinced that this is how you produce a sustainable system.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:28 |
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Eripsa posted: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. That's not what I'm getting at here, though. Your system is supposedly designed to measure the value of contributions to society. Arguably, the iron's contribution to the computer is much less than the amount that is actually used in the computer, since it can be easily replaced. Therefore, the contribution to society of the use of iron as opposed to any other possible material is minimal. Eripsa posted: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. You are aware that this still doesn't answer the problem, right? The window may serve many different purposes. Even given windows may serve different purposes--one may be used more for looking out of and one more for light. And in any case you have to decide whether to value the window on its own, or as part of the house, or value each component of the window separately. I'm not sure how you'd decide how to value, say, the window pane over the sash, for example, all weighed on some arbitrary scale of how close I happen to be to it at different times. Not to mention, as Duke of Ben pointed out, how does this value components of products such as cars, that may have thousands of components, and beyond that each component may be made of many different materials, produced through the use of different kinds and sources of energy, etc.? Finally, you do see the prviacy implications in being tracked 100% of the time in everything you do, right? Eripsa posted: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. You are aware this is a complete non-answer, right? Like most things about your plan, this is handwaving away a pretty fundamental objection. You have to value each person's contribution to the final product, in this case the iron. You have no way of doing this in terms of "attention." So, what do you use?
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:30 |
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Best Friends posted:Money is exploitative. Basically, slavery. The interesting thing is that the basic compulsion method is actually exactly the same as in Capitalism. In Capitalism, you either work (for money) or die. In Attention Economy you either work (for no personal gain), or everyone dies. It's still the same basic motivator. The question is, who wants to be left holding the bag while everyone else gets to do art or play games or do whatever they want all day? "Oh man, Bob didn't show up to work for his 2 hour shift today, and nobody was willing to stay over. I guess we won't make enough computers to meet demand. Luckily I already got mine, so it's not a big deal to me. Perhaps one of the 1,000 people who won't get theirs can come 3,000 miles, learn how to do the work, and live here where they don't know anyone, and then they won't have to deal with that problem anymore. That is, unless they are incapable of dealing with the problem themselves, and they need to find a volunteer willing to do that for them. Perhaps we can get Reddit to upvote computer production enough times that somebody would be willing to donate more time. We won't ask anyone directly, or give anyone a reason to do it that offsets the costs, because that would be capitalism."
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:43 |
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The Duke of Ben posted:In Capitalism, you either work (for money) or die. In Attention Economy you either work (for no personal gain), or everyone dies. Just popping back in here that my pointing out that life doesn't come "for free" and requires effort, and that wages were an abstraction of that, was met with venom, open hostility and Erisa wishing me ill, while at the same time making broad assumptions about my background. Something to think over.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:45 |
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Sir John Falstaff posted:Finally, you do see the prviacy implications in being tracked 100% of the time in everything you do, right? He does. He doesn't care. FOR THE GREATER GOOD.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:50 |
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Serious question for Eripsa. Would I be allowed to "Go Galt" in this society, and go live on my own to grow my own food? Would the land I move to be appropriated from me without my approval? Would I have to give my food to the collective to be redistributed? On one hand it seems that it's something that some people would genuinely want to do, and tying them into the network would be costly and inefficient. I would say that these points indicate that I would be allowed. On the other hand, you've already said that the system only works if everyone is involved, so I'm not sure how society can allow it. Also, I fear it might start a freedom movement, where people who don't want to be monitored all the time try to make privacy communes. That's a whole side issue, though.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:52 |
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OatmealRaisin posted:He does. He doesn't care. FOR THE GREATER GOOD. Money is slavery, therefore we need to enable redditors to know everything about every person so that certain people can be shamed into working in coal mines for free. That is literally his proposal. Utopianism that doesn't even bother to promise a utopia.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 17:53 |
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OatmealRaisin posted:That's not what he was talking about at all you disingenuous piece of poo poo. No, it was an analogy. I did not say he was endorsing slavery, I said he was endorsing something that is analogous to slavery. I think it is a fairly accurate analogy. quote:There are jobs out there that need to be done, that are invisible and miserable, and require incentive if they're ever going to be completed. Being the most popular girl at prom is not incentive for digging poo poo out of the earth a mile underground. The miners don't care about a bunch of people saying "Oh man you're so great." Being provided the means to obtain a rad new car is better incentive. Non-commodity money is a fantastic medium to exchange for goods and services and has been for just about all of recorded human history. The incentive is influence. I have described influence as "popularity", but the reward here isn't just a pat on the back from Twitter. The influence I get is that my voice is weighted by the work I've done. If I'm the one pulling iron out of the ground, then I have at least some authority in saying how that iron gets used. In general, in my system, the compensation for production is some measure of socially-recognized credit for that production, such that you have some influence about what to do with that work. The miners might not care about what Twitter thinks about its iron. But the passionate miner who is self-motivated to do that work will care about what happens with the products of his work, and the ways he goes about his work, and so on. So for instance, say I am a robot manufacturer looking to make industrial robots. I know how important iron is to the construction of my bots, and I want my bots to help in the mining of iron. So how should I make those bots? Your suggestions at how to make those bots will end up being influential in my production, because your suggestions are weighted by the experience and labor you've put into the mining operation, and are therefore more informative to me about how to best use my resources. In other words, the work you put into your mining has given you influence (that is, authority) to direct the production and activity of the community in areas directly relevant to your work. That is, the Attention Economy it attempting to give you control of your labor. Again, we must remember that's not how it works now! The time you spend laboring in the mine, right now, only gets you a check for food and consumption, and that's it. If you work hard enough, and you are good enough at it, and your bosses take notice, and they are in a financial position to reward that work, then you might get a slightly bigger check next month. But for most of the people in most of the situations that's as far as "climbing the ladder" ever goes, regardless of how hard they work or how important their work is. This is what I mean by wage slavery: the value of the labor is fixed by the market, and so are the rewards, and the only option for an individual is to toil for money, because money is a requirement for participating in the society. The system is rigged on all sides, and the worker has no control. So I'm trying to provide a mechanism whereby you can unrig the system against the individual, but still coordinate the collective in ways to nevertheless still solve the coordination problem. I'm saying that you don't need to incentivize the labor by making food and social participation contingent on doing it. I'm saying that there are other ways of incentivizing labor that will still result in the issues getting resolved, but nevertheless frees the individual to pursue their own interests. And the way you incentivize it is just by making the data publicly known, and then trusting the people to care about the important things. If we need iron, and the system gives us accurate information about how much iron we need and how to get it, and people are free to volunteer their time to solve this issue, and given the fact that we know how to actually do the work to get it, then I don't see why we should expect that people won't do that work. I can be done, we know how to do it, and we are able to do it, and we see the need to do it. If we are an intelligent species at all, that will result in us doing it. But instead people are so convinced that humans are nasty, brutish, and undependable that they would rather THEMSELVES TOIL IN THE MARKET and TRUST THE CAPITALISTS than believe for a second that people will organize themselves to do what they need to. I'm sure these people think that without God's tablets, humans would never develop their own moral codes, and without Pharaoh's command, the Nile wouldn't rise. quote:And re: sustainability of the internet, it's actually not sustainable in its current form at all. The methods we use to access, use, build, and form the internet waste a ton of energy and are massively unsustainable, and there's only a couple billion people using it. Seven billion+ people all using computers and smartphones and poo poo in its current form will annihilate the planet in record time. We need your step 2 in this grand plan of yours. All you give us is the beginning and the end, with nothing more substantial than a handwave for the transitory period. I was clearly talking about the sustainability of the communtiy, and not the sustainability of the technology required to support that community. Your claim that everyone having computers would annihilate the planet is, I think, a version of the claim that we cannot solve the coordination problem. Is that what you think? It is fine if it is, I just want to be clear on where the disagreement lies. quote:And before you start with the disingenuous bullshit again, no I am not advocating the status quo. The status quo sucks. Your proposed solution of burning everything to the ground and starting over with the 4chan model is so much worse that I can't even fathom how you don't see it. "Better or worse" are going to be difficult things to evaluate. The claim I am trying to defend is NOT the claim that my system is "better" in some absolute and objective sense. I am just trying to claim that a) it solves the coordination problem, and b) it adheres to digital values. You might not like the view, and again that's fine, but saying it is "worse" isn't an argument against my claims. quote:People are dumb as poo poo. Outside of our respective expertise we're all a bunch of bumbling morons. I don't trust the crowd with medical, nutritional, or infrastructural decisions. I don't trust the crowd to choose the best person to make these decisions either. It's going to give more power to whatever guy can play best to a crowd rather than the person who may be more legitimately capable of the job. This happens all the time already, do you really think it's going to get better if we remove all structural resistance to it? You don't share the digital values. That's also fine. I think if all the information were available, so that we knew that the crowd-pleaser has spent a total of 12 hours in a hosiptal, whereas the introvert wizard surgeon has spent closer to 15,000 hours in a hospital, if that information were available to the people and broken down in clear ways (by Ma), that is if the people can genuinely be informed, then I would have to trust that the people will make the smart decision. I don't trust an ignorant masses. But I do trust the masses when they are armed with knowledge. I don't think the crowd will favor the crowd-pleaser over the shy expert, if they have the relevant information to make that distinction. The Attention Economy would arm them with that knowledge.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 18:02 |
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I'm afraid this may have already been posted, but it's such a great video that I want to make sure anyone thinking about alternative economies has considered the ideas it presents. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIsHKrP-66s
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 18:11 |
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Chajusong posted:No, it's a perfect case of how the market is distorted by inadequate pricing of externalities. If the proper price of GHG emissions and other pollutions was cooked into the price of gas, electric cars would suddenly look a lot more attractive compared to conventional ones. This is a problem we already know how to solve. Wait, tell me again what that solution is? Because the problem here is exactly inadequate pricing, you are right, but my claim is that capitalism is incapable of settling on adequate pricing, because if pricing was adequate we'd actually be solving the coordination problem. But ok, so what is the solution. Some state government sets some tax or gives some subsidy or otherwise tweaks the market to hopefully get it to reflect something closer to the "true cost". Carbon offsets and whatever. If we just get the dollars to balance just right then the money would actually reflect the resources. So I'll go right past the part about having to artificially tweak the market (surely evidence that the market itself is unsustainable) and jump to the part that money is powerful enough to corrupt the governments responsible for regulating their use. Even if there isn't direct bribery from Capital, the states are influenced enough by the mere presence of money that they look to compromise between environmental and humanitarian concerns on the one hand, and the private profits of capitalists (in order to "stabilize the economy") on the other. This is not a solution that results in solving the coordination problem. There is no conceivable tweak to the State Capitalist system that will bend it in the favor of the people and their sustained future. The solution you propose is on course and on schedule to completely upend human civilization as we know it, and we have no means whatsoever to bring that under control. You are proposing patches to an obsolete framework, when we clearly need an upgrade.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 18:13 |
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Eripsa posted:The incentive is influence. I have described influence as "popularity", but the reward here isn't just a pat on the back from Twitter. The influence I get is that my voice is weighted by the work I've done. If I'm the one pulling iron out of the ground, then I have at least some authority in saying how that iron gets used. In general, in my system, the compensation for production is some measure of socially-recognized credit for that production, such that you have some influence about what to do with that work. Is it influence or authority? It's a huge difference, so we can't just blow it off as semantics. Influence means that people will tend to listen more often. Authority means that the people must listen to some extent, as is codified by law. If you're talking only influence, then no, that is not really any consolation to the problem. If you're talking authority, then I agree that authority would make people much more likely to join the system. Authority speaks of government, though.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 18:14 |
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Dr. Quigley posted:I'm afraid this may have already been posted, but it's such a great video that I want to make sure anyone thinking about alternative economies has considered the ideas it presents. This is excellent. Thank you.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 18:19 |
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Serious question’s for Eripsa -How old are you? -Do you have a college level education? -How frequently do you use drugs?
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 18:25 |
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How is this anything more than a distribution system? Implementing this within our current system by raising taxes and providing everyone with free basic food/essentials will solve half of the flaws in your 'system'. In fact, I would say it is even more likely that every country will spontaneously disband their armies and spend the money saved on this scheme than for the entire worlds governments to relinquish power to a global computer system in order to switch to an attention based buzzword economy. This is all based on current information, but we need more information about the actual economy presented, not just the aims of the distribution network.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 18:45 |
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evilweasel posted:Which, of course, is the fundamental flaw with your system: a lot of people want to be the brilliant top-level guy and tell everyone else to do the heavy lifting in the middle. No. I am saying that the people who are willing to do those difficult and dirty jobs of their own free conscience and without threat or duress should be able to do them, and that if we don't have enough people to do it freely, then we shouldn't be able to force people to do it by threatening their access to basic needs for not playing along. Lack of money puts people in duress, and that enables us to construct a system whereby people are willing to do awful things to themselves and others in order to be able to participate in society. I think this is a fundamentally inhumane situation, and I think it needs to stop. I also sincerely believe that in 150 years we will look back on late 20th century capitalism with the same kind of moral outrage as we have when we look at the history of slavery. So I don't think this analogy is inappropriate. We obviously have it better than slaves. But we can do so much better ourselves, toward the ends of solving coordination. The very first argument I made in this thread is that money will never solve this problem. If that's where you want to get off the boat, that's fine, but let's just be clear about where the disagreement lies. If we can't get enough people to mine the iron of their own accord, that doesn't give us the right to force people to do it with money. If that means we have to do without iron ore, then we need to figure out some other solutions. I trust that people are resourceful enough that, especially with help of a neutral and relatively risk-free platform like the internet, that they can self-organize to address these basic issues. That means allowing a lot of people to spend a lot of time that appears to be wasted on completely stupid poo poo, but I don't think that means that all the knowhow and resources that we already all have won't be employed productively just because we get to determine collectively how to do it instead of some capitalist overlord. I believe that humans will take care of themselves. This is not because I am a wild eyed optimist about human nature. I believe that humanity will take care of itself in the same way that I believe a pack or wolves or colony of ants or school of fish will take care of itself, and that's not because I'm optimistic about fish nature. Taking care of ourselves is what we evolved to do. We are really good at it, and we've spent literally hundreds of thousands of years as a species doing it. And sometimes we do lovely things and sometimes we do amazing things, and the only selection criteria is how many of us there were doing it. The invention of civilization introduced some dramatic problems of coordination lots and lots of people, and money was an incredibly successful solution to that problem. It was a drat good trick for a few thousand years. But humanity seems to have figured this "civilization" thing out now, and we've got just about all of us networked together and trying to manage on a global scale. The problems of a global humanity of 7+ billion people introduces some dramatically different problems of coordination that must be solved with tools that we could have never imagined when money or the state were invented. The urgency of the problems we face as a global human population, the scale of those problems and the consequences for not solving them, are so dramatically high, and the resources we have for solving them are so frighteningly new, that "revolution" has been on the lips and fingertips of a generation, worldwide, for now nearly a year, and it shows no signs of stopping. We need a new way, and everyone knows it, and the air is ripe for a paradigm shift. Not just a change of the guard, or of the flag, but a revolution in human society. And clearly the values of digital culture will inform that paradigm shift. I take both these points as uncontroversial, which is why I find the obstinace in this thread to even entertain the thought to be more depressing than anything else. So the question just is, how do we do it. It is quite reasonable to think that such a world would be petty and violent and tyrannical, and would bring out the worst in humanity. And it is easy to conjure these dangers in order to feel comfortable in the chains we wear, and to convince ourselves that they are necessary and that we want them. But I think you can build a system built on those digital values that is vibrant and flourishing, that might not always meet "professional" standards for what would fly in a controlled market, but nevertheless is successful and productive and fulfilling for the individuals in it, who live free from duress for their basic needs and is therefore able to live the lives they want. I think that's not a bad goal. I think the internet gives us sufficient evidence to show that such a system could flourish. I think the virtues of the digital values speak for themselves, and allay fears of totalitarianism. I think they create new worries and new stress points, and we will need to develop new cultural norms for dealing with them, and I'm not telling you what those norms should look like. I'm just saying its possible. We know how to do this, thank you so much. We've got it from here.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 18:54 |
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Eripsa posted:...force people to do it by threatening their access to basic needs for not playing along. Do you not understand that your system does the exact same thing? If nobody wants to go farm, then we all starve to death. The end. How is that not "threatening...access to basic needs?" The only difference I can see is that you are perfectly fine with us all dying out if nobody wants to go farm anymore. Otherwise people are still forced to go farm, or they die. Sure, you've abstracted the death into a society-wide death instead of the death of individuals who choose not to play along. Theoretically, some people could get motivated to carry the slack for everyone else, and then it all works fine. But "motivation" here doesn't seem to me any different than "force" in our current system when the only alternative is death. That's why I asked you about "Going Galt" earlier. If someone is willing to do the work, they are going to want to be more heavily rewarded for it (compared to other people who get to do what they want with their time). Otherwise they have a really strong incentive to not share at all, and trade what they have worked for with other people who have worked. Food person trades with computer person who trades with electricity person, since they are all working together. Toothpaste Art guy and X-box Live guy don't have anything to trade that the producers want. If the producers decide not to share, then what?
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 19:07 |
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Eripsa posted:I believe that humans will take care of themselves. This is not because I am a wild eyed optimist about human nature. I believe that humanity will take care of itself in the same way that I believe a pack or wolves or colony of ants or school of fish will take care of itself, and that's not because I'm optimistic about fish nature. Taking care of ourselves is what we evolved to do. We are really good at it, and we've spent literally hundreds of thousands of years as a species doing it. And sometimes we do lovely things and sometimes we do amazing things, and the only selection criteria is how many of us there were doing it. What do you mean by 'the only selection criteria is how many of us there were doing it'? Edit: my eyes keep sliding off the bit in the center of what I quoted where you argue that 'we' evolved to take care of 'ourselves', in the middle of an argument about species-wide survival. That's really really not a strong position to be taking, but it's at best an evo/biotruth derail.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 19:09 |
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The Duke of Ben posted:Is it influence or authority? It's a huge difference, so we can't just blow it off as semantics. Influence means that people will tend to listen more often. Authority means that the people must listen to some extent, as is codified by law. I was using "authority" in the sense that an epistemicist would use it. I'm talking about the authority that an expert has when talking about their field of expertise. When the doctor gives advice, she has authority to do so that gives her words weight. Your uncle Charley is not a doctor, and so his advice does not have the same weight as the doctor's. The doctor's authority is not "codified in law" in the sense that you must listen to the doctor or you will go to jail. If you don't want to listen to your doctor and would rather listen to Charley, go right ahead. But the doctor's authority does confer a different kind of "must", which is that if you want to be healthy you must (or should) listen to medical authorities. If you want to be intelligent about your health, you should listen to your doctor. The normative force of the "should" comes from the doctor's authority to make that prescription. So I'm saying that it gives the person authority in the latter sense, in the sense that the intelligent thing to do would be to listen to them. So take the example of Art again. Some issue comes up that affects the market. Let's pretend the democracy works perfectly, because the point here is to demonstrate influence. So all 500 people who use and care about this market tune in to Twitter to weigh in on this important decision. Now there are 500 voices around, each with their own opinion about what to do about the market. How do I make a decision among this plurality of voices? Especially if I don't know anything about the market, how do I know who to listen to or which voices matter? Well, the idea is that you need to sort the voices somehow into importance. And my proposal here is that you weight them by influence. So since the issue is about the market, I might ask "who spends the most time at the market?" And when I ask that, Art's name comes up at the top of the list. He's clearly paid the most attention to the market and its happenings. That gives me some reason to think his opinion matters more, and should be weighted more heavily, than other opinions. Of course, its not the only thing that will affect my decision. For instance, it may be that this is really an issue with distribution to the market, and although Art has been paying attention to the market more, and the guy on the delivery truck has paid a lot less attention, the delivery truck guy knows more about the delivery side than Art, and so Art's influence here should matter less. There are lots of important issues to consider, and we've got to find some way of sorting through the information to find the relevant bits for making the decision. I'm saying that you just need all that data available, and I'm saying that the relevant data here is "attention paid". I'm also saying that the "sorting" process should be open access and distributed and decentralized to ensure it isn't manipulated or controlled by a centralized power. How to quantify all that is a hard problem that I'm not handwaving away but that I don't have solutions for. But the end result will just be something like a weight, or a ratio, that I can use to assist my judgement in how to proceed, and where I can be confident that the weighting reflects actual facts about the sustainability of the system- a confidence I don't have when using money.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 19:13 |
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Fire_Monkey posted:In fact, I would say it is even more likely that every country will spontaneously disband their armies and spend the money saved on this scheme than for the entire worlds governments to relinquish power to a global computer system in order to switch to an attention based buzzword economy. This is a reasonable claim. I'm not describing the Attention Economy because I think it is a live option. It is utopic theorycrafting in order to talk about the consequences of digital culture on the economy. You are probably right that we'll end up with some partial solution that won't be anywhere near as ideal, but we have to know what the ideals are in order to start compromising, and that takes a description of the uptoia. I'm being fairly upfront about the fact that this is science fiction, and I think there is some value in speculating about whether the Holodeck would work. I think you can treat that question as a legitimate question about technological and social realities even though the example came from a story. That means you get some annoying internet children who run in and flip you off and scream "there never really was a boy who cried wolf you all are LIARS" and runs off thinking he won, but the internet is filled with people like that and if you don't let it bother you, you can do some neat stuff.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 19:20 |
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Eripsa posted:Of course, its not the only thing that will affect my decision. For instance, it may be that this is really an issue with distribution to the market, and although Art has been paying attention to the market more, and the guy on the delivery truck has paid a lot less attention, the delivery truck guy knows more about the delivery side than Art, and so Art's influence here should matter less. There are lots of important issues to consider, and we've got to find some way of sorting through the information to find the relevant bits for making the decision. I'm saying that you just need all that data available, and I'm saying that the relevant data here is "attention paid". I'm also saying that the "sorting" process should be open access and distributed and decentralized to ensure it isn't manipulated or controlled by a centralized power. How to quantify all that is a hard problem that I'm not handwaving away but that I don't have solutions for.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 19:21 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 07:14 |
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Eripsa posted:Of course, its not the only thing that will affect my decision. Sorry, I'm honestly having trouble figuring out how this will work. You say "my decision" but I know you don't mean Eripsa's decision. But who decides? How do you know you have a consensus? Let's say that the discussion is about whether to put lemons out front or apples. At what point do we consider a decision to be made? Does Art just stick the apples out, and let people deal with that? What happens if one of the lemon people don't like that, and lemon people make up 51%+ of the consensus despite Art being in favor of apples? What happens when the lemon person puts the display up first? All I can see is a system where people get angry because there is no arbitration between apples and lemons. Sure, maybe they just don't care enough to fight over it, but it's not hard to imagine a million scenarios that people will really care about.
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| # ? Feb 2, 2012 19:21 |
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