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What's the mechanism that gets people to participate in this? But a lot of alternate 'economic' systems seem to focus on easy things and gloss over the hard-problems. It's good approach for a novel. But how is this solving hard problems like 'who directs the system?' or 'why don't people just ignore the attention-points?'
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| # ¿ Jan 27, 2012 05:32 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 13:21 |
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Eripsa posted:Tell me which of the following claims you disagree with: This really gets at the core problem I see with this scenario and socialism (as it's advocated in these forums). The proposals take the hard problem and then remove them via handwave. Then we get lavish detail on some stuff that's really pretty minor. In many cases, we'll get pages of corporate bylaw-detail (and then assume that everyone votes for the benefit of society as a whole). In this case, you're assuming that the "what do we produce, when, and how" problem has been solved. And you're giving us lavish detail about distribution networks in a rationed system. Except, from what I can tell, the solution is worse than "just ration stuff, and where possible, give people more coupons than you expect them to reasonably need." Your proposed solution is public shaming. Except, you're assuming large communities and an attention economy. Suppose I build a toothpaste sculpture. Before anything happens to me, it seems like a few things will happen: 1. Someone needs to notice. 2. Someone needs to recognize that I broke a rule. 3. Someone needs to care. 4. Several someones need to spend effort complaining. Steps 1&2 are going to be pretty heavily attention-intensive, in and of themselves. #3 is going to start creating large inefficiencies. There's no reason to think that people are particularly good at guessing which activities are meaningfully wasteful. Step #4, in particular, is going to be really attention-intensive. Unless I know the people who are complaining (or there are a LOT of them), I don't have much reason to care. quote:The important point is not how I solve the problem. The important point is that the system is built to optimize the use of the resources, and you are scoffing at the very idea that we need to track the resources at all. So it is helpful to remember that the capitalist alternative is to let the person freely dump toothpaste into the ocean, as long as he can afford it. If he has enough shekels, he can also bypass the legal regulations and buy out the state governments that are meant to enforce the law, regardless of the public outcry, because in the capitalist alternative the only thing that determines what happens to the resources is how many shekels you have. In an attention economy, you're just replacing money with popularity.
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| # ¿ Feb 1, 2012 03:41 |
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Eripsa posted:This is essentially right. I'm just not sure how this would fix corruption. In our world, we have a rich oligarchy that can get away with stuff. In yours, it would be megapastors who can do whatever. If anything, an attention-economy seems like it could make the problem worse. Anyone who has a public profile is probably getting deluged with praise as well as blame. So, those people would have a motivation to just segregate themselves into a social group that supports them. Eripsa posted:I don't think Attention Economy is THE solution, but I think it is at least characteristics of a larger class of solutions that share the same basic participatory framework, with values aligned towards sustainability and open access. And I do think that some solution within this class is substantively distinct from Capitalism, and will be preferable to Capitalism in the long run. The problem I see (as the opening parable suggests) is that no one can even really conceive of what such a solution looks like-- not because they are stupid, but because the whole paradigm of networked dynamics is so new that not even the experts really understand how it works. So I'm trying to spell the idea out just to give it some weight, so hopefully someone smarter than me can actually work on the details. The problem isn't really that I think they'd fail. Instead, it's that the hypotheticals grant such generous assumptions that almost any system would work. Typically (and in this case in particular) there's an assumption like, "we've found and empowered a benevolent philosopher king." But, at that point, everything else becomes details. You've added an attention mini-game. Other people add a 'unions-vote' mini-game. A libertarian could throw in a private-roads mini-game. Once we put enough resources in the hands of someone benevolent-enough and informed enough, they'd all work. So, I don't really see these hypotheticals as supporting any of the mini-games. Instead, they support, "It would be awesome if we could find and empower philosopher kings." And, that's true. But the assumption breaks the comparison.
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| # ¿ Feb 1, 2012 04:36 |
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Eripsa posted:The whole point of my system is to crowdsource those decisions, so you don't concentrate power into the hands of a few people. My system is an anarchist system, so there is no monopoly on authority for petty, malicious weasels like yourself. His point seems clear enough. The 'problems' that generate attention aren't the problems that hurt society. Imagine we played a game. I try to find crowd-sourced complaining about "Wizards of the coast are bad people for releasing Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition". You try to find crowd-sourced complaining about the use of open-air pits for hog waste. Then, we'll divide our respective finds by the number of deaths that each practice has caused. This should get us complaints:death. I bet Dungeons and Dragons will win.
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| # ¿ Feb 1, 2012 16:17 |
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Eripsa posted:I am suggesting that the people coopt those systems, and optimize them to solve the coordination problem. Those tools and technologies (not to mention the human know-how and training) ALREADY EXISTS, but right now they are put towards the service of MAXIMIZING PROFITS FOR THEIR OWNERS instead of FEEDING AND SHELTERING THE HUMAN POPULATION. I am saying we just need to take those existing resources and point them towards a sustainable future. This subtext shows up in lots of arguments in D&D. And it seems like you can't have it both ways. Either: Capitalists are selfish bastards who are in it for themselves or Capitalists have a huge pro-social drive with enough altruism to solve tragedy-of-the-commons problems. But, this argument tries to have it both ways; the capitalists so selfish. Also, they altruistically work together to lobby for evil-capitalist-policies, even though they could individually free-ride on the lobbying efforts of others. --- On an individual level, capitalists do try to maximize their profits by undercutting the profits of other capitalists. It's like people read Marx, see 'exploitation' and just stop thinking. His argument wasn't that they're evil. It wasn't even that the problem was that competition destroys resources. This is why it's a "spiral of capital accumulation" rather than "the capital class's tendency to get everything as personal consumption." (In your story, this would be the taco stands -- people would be served by 1. But since each guy wants to 'win' we see a duplication of all of the costs/efforts that come with setting up a taco stand. The taco-cooks aren't colluding. They're not even 'winning' individually. And that's kind of the sad part. No one is 'winning', resources are just getting locked into production equipment that no one needs) You've kind of touched on this in your story - instead of duplicating 'toothpaste factory' 20 times, we just have 3. But, you've merely noted that the solution exists. Then, you've abstracted away the problems that competition is intended to solve.
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| # ¿ Feb 1, 2012 16:45 |
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Eripsa posted:I don't think I disagree here. I'm not claiming that capitalists are evil. I'm just saying that capital tends to accumulate, and as it accumulates it tends to concentrate resources, and that this is counterproductive to solving the coordination problem. On this forum, it's bizarrely common to see 'end capitalism' as a solution to 'not enough altruism'. If the not-capitalism solution could give us enough resources to end scarcity, then we're lowering the cost of altruism enough that I can see why people might enact hugely generous safety nets. But, in that case, we could say, "Give everyone vouchers or a baseline income" and skip the whole RFID tracking thing, along with the part where random people go through my closet looking for lightbulbs. However, it seems massively unlikely that you'd actually get to this level of resources. What fraction of the US's production do you really think is tied up in zero-sum competition? (Keep in mind, any industry with a monopolies or colluding-oligopoly won't have this problem). Suppose we pick a number -- say 30%. That doesn't really get us to anything like the surplus you're describing. Wiki says that the average full-time man puts in something like 8.7 hours per workday now. So, if we burned that 30% on a reduction in hours-worked, we'd be down to 30 hour work weeks, but would hold everything else constant. Your scenarios seem to assume that there are far more free resources than this.
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| # ¿ Feb 1, 2012 17:43 |
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Eripsa posted:Nothing in my system prevents people from doing lovely things. Nothing in my system prevents people from being people. But I don't accept the implication from "people do lovely things" to "we need to control their behavior by incentivizing their labor with money". If we play with giving or not-giving incentives, I don't see a huge difference between "give Tom money" and "give Tom thing that Tom would have bought, if we'd given him money." If we play with punishments, there needs to be a punishment problem. You've suggested crowd-sourced shame. Some people have problems with that. And, you suggest that your system might work differently. But this is one of those weird comparisons. Problems with real-capitalist systems are treated as evidence. Problems with real-crowd sourcing are addressed with, "Well, I'm proposing a hypothetical." It's true that hypothetical-crowd-sourcing is better than real-capitalism. But hypothetical-monarchy is better than real-capitalism. And hypothetical christian-theocracy is better than real-capitalism. It's hard to come up with a system that's so terrible that even a best-case hypothetical can't outdo a real system. If we go with something other than moral pressure, then we're left with some flavor of physical force. At this point, the "HOW CAN YOU ALLOW PHYSICAL VIOLENCE" comparison sort of breaks.
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| # ¿ Feb 1, 2012 18:22 |
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Sir John Falstaff posted:Deep down, though, the technical details of the attention-gathering only matter if we accept the premise that attention is actually a valid metric. But, of course, it's not--a person may spend a miniscule amount of time each day taking their heart medication, but the importance of that heart medication is critical. So, the only way of accounting for this is to start adding weighting factors to different objects to reflect their importance, as Eripsa started to do here. But, of course, in practice the weighting factor for something like heart medication would have to be many, MANY times the value of any attention paid to it. So, in practice, the weighting factors would become at least as important as the attention metric, and would leave people making ridiculous apples-to-oranges value judgments like "is headache medication more important than a refrigerator?" or "is a grapefruit more important than a pencil?" Essentially, you would need a chart of every object in the world ranked by relative importance--and then the question becomes who does the ranking. This is really it. At this point, I'm not entirely clear if the assertion is, "Attention usefully approximates value" or "Attention is the same as value." If it's the first one, then these patches seem to break the usefulness of the system. We're trying to solve for 'value' and the weighting requires that we have an estimate of value. If it's the second one, then any weighting is going to make things worse -- attention is already optimal by assertion. In either case, I'm not sure that solving for value is even the interesting part. I'd be happy to accept a hypothetical that started with, "We'll do a big study to figure out how much stuff costs, and what stuff people want. Then my society will see that the right amounts are produced by _________."
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2012 19:07 |
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Uglycat posted:You fail to understand my point. Shocker of the month. Sure, it might. But how intelligent or well-organized are we expecting things to be? It's really common for people to treat the status-quo as if it were some easily-achievable baseline level of success. Then, alternative systems are treated as if they'd be (StuffNow + Benefits). It happens with libertarians; most of their arguments will be how removing regulation would fix some inconvenience. It happens with socialists; they seem to assume that production levels will stay fixed if we transition to some other economy. I'm not, at all, convinced that our standard of living is easily attainable. So, while I'm happy to concede that leaderless, non-hierarchical arrangements would do better than unorganized people, that's not really saying much. ---- Fake edit: Has anyone made an estimate of the efficiency gains they're expecting? There've been hints at Marx, but how many resources do people really think are tied up in zero-/negative-sum capital accumulation?
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 02:22 |
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Since we're breaking out numbers, here's why I have trouble taking most of D&D's "we need to overhaul everything" proposals seriously. The basic Marxist argument is that Capitalists tend to accumulate capital. As more capital is accumulated, the rate of profit falls. This creates more downward pressure on wages. Eventually, we hit a horrible spot where tons and tons of our output is directed towards capital equipment that doesn't actually add any value. Then, the argument is that a central planner can stop these inefficient cycles; instead of having UPS and USPS and FedEx (and 3 copies of a similar distribution network) we can reduce that to just 1 copy. The remaining resources can get used on other projects, or we can just all work less. The trouble is that I'm just not seeing the opportunity to extract any huge efficiency gains. Looking at the Economic Report of the President (Table B-1), the personal consumption component of the 2010 US GDP was 10,351.9 billion. Gross private domestic investment was only 1821.4 billion. A really optimistic assumption might be "our markets are so inefficient that a social planner could reduce investment by a full third without hurting productivity at all." That would only free up enough resources for a 6% increase in personal consumption. When that's paired with productivity-reducing suggestions like "work becomes mostly optional", it's not clear, at all, where this society is getting its post-scarcity levels of resources. And, that's in the best case. If the information problem actually is difficult for a central planner to get right, then the transition looks like it would get pretty bad pretty quickly.
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 03:09 |
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Eripsa posted:It is pretty important on my system that the planner is not centralized. I'm not advocating for a Marxist revolution. Eripsa posted:If anything, I would imagine radical decreases in consumption patterns on my system.
Which of these will provide your 'radical' decrease? I'd imagine that you're increasing healthcare and education costs by improving people's access to these things. If eating out were free, I'd expect food-costs to rise. *I'm using the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 03:33 |
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Eripsa posted:But I do think that since it is organized by a coherent set of values, and that it has certain baseline goals (the coordination problem), I think there is a clear discussion in my system to have about where production levels should be, and how to make that happen. This remains my least-favorite bit of pixie dust used in these arguments. My christian theocracy is also organized around a coherent set of values. Problems like 'what about rule breakers?' and 'how do you motivate people to do pro-social stuff?' are solved because these rules are intrinsic to the society I'm proposing. Thus, we should all be ruled by the Pope.
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 03:44 |
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Eripsa posted:Would you consider the development of Linux to be centralized? I'm just trying to figure out how you are using the word. I'm indifferent to how you label things. The Marxist argument would work in any system that avoided wasteful duplication of capital machinery. It's not concerned with "are these calculations distributed or centralized?". Instead, it's "is there enough coordination that we're not wasting tons of resources?" Eripsa posted:How much people spent on goods and services reflects how much the goods and services they used are valued in the market. You claimed that people would consume much less stuff. I want to know where you're expecting to find these reductions. I used dollar-denominations because they're a fast and convenient way to convey the real-amounts of stuff in question. But, if you want to think of the problem in real terms, that's fine. And iPods are an awful way to start approaching an answer. Audiovisual equipment is only around 2.5% of the average household's consumption.
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 04:10 |
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Eripsa posted:I think it will take significantly less work than everyone does right now to solve the basic coordination problem. Like, if we did nothing but solve the basic coordination problem, with all the tools and resources we have, we probably each would only need to work a few hours a week. Everything else would be free time to pursue whatever, with complete assurance that basic needs would be met, so the only risk of failure would be to reputation and ego. Why do you think this? Once again, which of the consumption categories are you hoping to reduce significantly? So far we have 'iPods'. But they represent a trivial amount of both labor and resources. So, even if we cut them out entirely, it wouldn't free up any time. The other major categories don't seem to have a lot of effort that could be freed up. For instance farming is already run by large, well-planned organizations that try to produce stuff with the smallest possible amounts of capital equipment, resources and time. The same is true of construction.
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 04:26 |
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Eripsa posted:Those well-run organizations generate profit and pool the capital from that system, instead of, say, using the productive capacity generated by their labor to build new farms and infrastructure. quote:The trouble is that I'm just not seeing the opportunity to extract any huge efficiency gains. Looking at the Economic Report of the President (Table B-1), the personal consumption component of the 2010 US GDP was 10,351.9 billion. Gross private domestic investment was only 1821.4 billion. And, I was careful to use mean consumption so the numbers already assume redistribution.
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 05:14 |
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Eripsa posted:So if Joe isn't productive he probably won't get an iPhone. What keeps Joe from just looking up where iPhones are and then taking one? Eripsa posted:So I don't know what a police system looks like when ruled by Twitter. What do you guys think? If police didn't have to answer to city hall, but instead there was a moderated forum somewhere with open discussion of policing and safety issues, what kinds of authority would you be willing to give to that forum, and what authority do you think it would need to effectively do its job?
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| # ¿ Feb 16, 2012 21:47 |
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Eripsa posted:I'm not saying "But I'm different!" I have never suggested that I'm immune to cognitive biases. I'm pointing to the very real change in consequences from the value shift that comes from looking at members as consumers and looking at them as participants, which is constitutive of the digital shift. Your mechanism isn't any underlying shift in psychology. It's just that there's a profit motive for saving (popular) people. We could do that now.
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| # ¿ Feb 18, 2012 23:40 |
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Eripsa posted:I have agreed with the point that human beings, considered individually, will make dumb decisions even when presented with all the information. Why do you think this? An easy example seems to be interracial marriage. 46% of people in Mississippi say it should be illegal. Nationally, the approval rate is 86%. There is a clear right answer. There doesn't seem to be an information problem. And there's still not a consensus.
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| # ¿ Feb 24, 2012 16:24 |
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Eripsa posted:Consensus does not mean 100% of the people agree 100% of the time. Consensus is not a matter of "majority vote". 50% + 1 does not make a consensus. I'm not seeing how Mississippi is more or less insular than another state or country. And, up until now, I haven't seen a "the region looking for consensus must be larger than ~3Million people" caveats to your proposal. The example is an objection to 'information will let people find the correct consensus.' There is full information. And the consensus is pretty clearly wrong.
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| # ¿ Feb 24, 2012 16:42 |
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Eripsa posted:Right, I'm certainly not talking about population thresholds or quorum or anything. I'm saying that 'right-thinking consensus comes when people have information' is wrong, at least on a reasonable time-scale. I don't think appealing to a more broad-minded community works as a response. It amounts to, "We can have right-thinking consensus so long as we expand our community enough to dilute the wrong-thinkers." That's true, but it's kind of unhelpful. You're claiming you have a way to win these arguments. But the method is: "Assume we've already won."
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| # ¿ Feb 24, 2012 17:10 |
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Eripsa posted:I mean, that's not entirely fair. I am arguing that a broad consensus of people is the only legitimate authority, so I don't think there is really a sense in which the whole of humanity can get it "wrong". Eripsa posted:But I might be wrong. So I've offered the challenge to anyone to offer an example of an inclusive, open, and diverse community that has witch-hunted against something we already knew was false or bad. I haven't seen a half-way plausible example yet. This seems tautological. Inclusive isn't "accepting of everyone". It's "accepting of the groups that we find agreeable." So, this seems to reduce to, "You cant find a community that
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| # ¿ Feb 24, 2012 17:28 |
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I think I've pinned down my problem with these solutions. They're solutions in the same way that, "The Chicago Bears can win their next game -- they just need to score more points than the other team," is a winning strategy. At some level, the claim is true. At the same time, it's not much more than "all we need to do to win is win." The interesting problem involves actions that are closer to my direct control ("What plays do we run"/"How do we structure voting systems"). I don't think we've seen much connection between the more immediate objective ('make decisions by consensus') and achievement of the end goal ('get people tolerant'). If anything, consensus seems to slow things down. I think that gay marriage and interracial marriage have had their approval ratings climb so quickly because we didn't wait for national consensus. Instead, the solution was imposed on people in a few regions. The result of this experiment influenced people in other regions.
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| # ¿ Feb 24, 2012 17:49 |
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I have a question about attention economies in a particular context. It seems like they might be a good way to handle revenue for digital content or TV. For instance, I could imagine a setup where Apple gives me access to a bunch of iPhone apps for a monthly fee. Then revenue would get distributed based on how often people use the things. The trouble I'm having is with the specific implementation. If we described 'attention' in terms of screen-time, then some utility apps could get ignored. If it were in terms of processor-time, then applications would bloat. If it were in running time, then apps might just get much harder to close. But, it we worked out the details, it seems like it could be a really reasonable approach to revenue-sharing.
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| # ¿ Mar 9, 2012 15:06 |
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Eripsa posted:So that's all very true. My solution here is to make the objects themselves account for their use, basically on a case by case basis. Because of their importance, epipens and heart medication might have their use tracked differently than, say, the copy of Angry Birds on my phone. I don't think there are any hard and fast rules for grouping and accounting for use; I think that a lot of the work within an attention economy, like in any other social system, is just maintaining the system itself. So I would expect that there would be a lot of open debate and discussion about how to set these use values for particular items or difficult cases. The bold line seems to be the really problematic part. To have the debate, we need a notion of the 'correct' distribution so we can say stuff like, "This metric will produce too little heart medicine." At that point, why bother with the 'measure attention' step? We could just skip to the end. And I'm not intending for my question to be general. I'm actually interested in how we could work out a system for revenue distribution to app developers. Everything I can come up with seems like it'll be subject to Goodhart's law.
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| # ¿ Mar 10, 2012 02:03 |
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Fire_Monkey posted:There is no realistic way I could find out about the habits of people I know personally, for example. This seems to be a really key point, and it seems like we could use it for a better definition of privacy. Instead of a binary, "can people find out about me?", privacy could be a continuum along "how much effort/resources would it take for people to find out about me?" In this sense, we still have some privacy, even though a super-dedicated organization could get massive amounts of information about us, if it wanted to spend enough time and cash.
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| # ¿ Mar 10, 2012 03:10 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 13:21 |
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Copley Depot posted:Wait, your criterion here isn't consistent. Your system compromises a huge amount of privacy, but you're asking for alternatives that don't compromise any privacy? What about a system that compromises a small degree of privacy but is still sustainable? To continue this, we still haven't really gotten past the 'how do we distribute stuff?' problem to the 'how does production work?'. Instead, we're relying on assumptions: 1. Enough of the right stuff is produced. 2. The majority of the population wants to distribute it fairly. But, those two assumptions are so strong that virtually any system would work. We could pick a monarch, go unregulated capitalism, or elevate everyone named 'Steve' to a dictatorial oligarch class.
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| # ¿ Mar 10, 2012 20:45 |
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