Forums Barber posted:

get down off that cross, Eripsa. People have offered concrete criticisms left and right, and you've pretended they are ad homs. Go back to Hacker News if you want people to skim your proposals and fellate you based on their syllable count, we are going to read them and try to see if you have an actual argument. You have gotten more intellectual attention and rigor in this thread then you did throughout your education, because guess what, if you sign a loan for a couple hundred thousand bucks, there is a strong motivation to just pass you through the system.

Little Blackfly posted:

Your example of the medals and pips is frankly bizarre. Military structures are actually very simple, if highly artificial, structures of social hierarchy. The pinning of medals onto the breast of a soldier is much more a self-affirmation exercise for the individual soldier, and by extension the military as a whole, than it is any sort of assignation of social value within the military hierarchy. At most, it could provide a fuzzy justification for a later promotion, though these would be arbitrary and subject to the whims of the promoter, and so not at all like the sort of explicit social valuation system you describe. And even then, the military, which i'll admit is perhaps the closest modern day example to a system like Strangecoin describes, one that tries to explicitly quantify social worth and reputation, is still subject to all sorts of horrible consequences, including inurring those at the top from the consequences of their actions (say, raping a subordinate) once they have enough social power to protect themselves. Why should the Strangecoin network not be subject to these pitfalls?

RealityApologist posted:

I don't give a poo poo about anything in this post.

RealityApologist posted:

That's fair enough. I've given a proposal designed explicitly to help me learn how to do it, in a framework that general and works according to principles I find agreeable. I'd like to be able to study how this structure I've proposed works, but I don't know how to do that on my own and don't have the resources to attempt it in a reasonable timeframe without the help of others. Which is why I come here to talk about it.

The opinion of the thread is that:
- this framework is impossible
- I have an inflated ego and a messiah complex for wanting to play with such an idea in an informal setting like this in my free time.

The first point is fair enough, although talking about why its true also helps me learn and isn't uninteresting.

quote:

I think the second one is false. I think an internet comedy forum is a perfectly fine place to entertain such a proposal, especially since its members are both familiar with the idea and capable of insightful analysis from a perspective I find generally agreeable. I don't think there's anything messianic about the Strangecoin proposal, or even all that radical; its just a twist on the general altcurrency meme that is being replicated like mad at the moment.

quote:

The implication of the thread's second opinion above is that only a messiah (that world changing genius) could successfully propose the sort of theory that I've proposed and have a shot of it working, and since I'm obviously not such a person then there's no hope for my proposal. The idea is that you don't have to weigh the merits of the proposal itself (which you couldn't do anyway), but instead you only need to weigh the merits of the person offering the proposal, and the thread consensus about that person, and that's enough to address whatever proposals may come. Be sure to add a confirmation bias, so that any mistakes incidental to the proposal are considered themselves refutations of the proposal.

It's quite the efficient method for sorting the genuine messiah from his imposters.

BernieLomax posted:

Having been at the butt end of the same type of jokes (and called out in this very thread on basis of at thread I posted 8 years ago, when I was under strong medication because of schizophrenia), and even recognizing many of the same names... One of the persons who did the role of Obdicut was this guy, and nobody ever criticized him. His intention was sociopathic in nature, and given that some of the high-volume shitheads in this thread behave in the exact way I can only assume they are having similar interests. They are only in it for some kind of dick pleasure.

Adar posted:

Strangecoin is more complex than money, but it gains that complexity by reflecting features of the community structure of the network, and that's a particular kind of complexity to which we're particularly disposed to thinking about. That is why everyone who matters spends their time navelgazing about who follows them on Twitter.

grate deceiver posted:

drat, son. For 300 eggs per pail, that has to be some bomb-rear end milk she got there.

LGD posted:

No, only a genius would have a hope of developing such a system into something that might be workable and implemented. You demonstrably haven't developed anything of the sort, and in fact seem to have difficulty with basic fundamentals like "what do I hope to accomplish?" Given this, it seems sensible to suggest that if you do want to accomplish some sort of Great Work you might want to start on a smaller scale. Right now you're attempting to develop psychohistory without a basic grasp of psychology or history- and not only that, you don't even have a goal that developing psychohistory will accomplish.

RealityApologist posted:

I agree with all of this. I wrote the strangecoin proposal so we have a more concrete model to work with instead of just idle speculation. I also spent time talking about what kind of things I wanted Strangecoin to do so we knew what the goals were and could prune the possible models to fit those goals.

I'm trying to do this better. I'm trying to improve the project. I think it's happening, with help from you and others who can must some constructive comments in between the jabs. That's all I'm hoping for.

With regard to your last point, I don't think complexity simpliciter is a barrier towards something being intuitive. Sometimes complexity represents a barrier to understanding, but we also find lots of things very intuitive that are very complex, because our brains have evolved to be very sensitive to those complex conditions. Distinguishing human cases is one of those things that is incredibly complex and subtle and yet perfectly intuitive and natural for us to do. Our brains are solving equations in high dimensional geometry like its butter, because the problem fits the tool.

I think that reading and forming meaningful, actionable judgments about community structure is another one of those things our brains are just wired to do. It has to be presented in the right way for those connections to be exploitable, but once it is such a system could both be far more complex and yet simultaneously more intuitive. So, for instance, consider the huge array of pips and whistles can might adorn the breast of some decorated general, and all the myriad of signals distinguishing those badges from one of their arbitrary subordinates. These things are hugely complicated things, but they feed right into the human desire for a clear and stable social structure and to settle potential conflicts of authority and power through rank and hierarchy, and so the whole system (as complex as it is) becomes not only an efficient form of coordination but also of motivation and submission.

The fact that the pips are complicated and varied isn't an argument against it's success; it's part of the reason why the system works. You need a symbol system complicated enough to express all those subtleties of rank and affiliation that actually exist in a real social structure.

Obdicut posted:

Edit: Psychohistory holy poo poo.

BernieLomax posted:

I feel the metaphore would be slightly closer if slightly modified: I think he's rather is making an attempt at developing psychohistory knowing full and well that he is going to fail. And the model could, after testing, become a sort of metric on how to measure other, possibly better, models. I could be off-base here, but that's what I think he's saying? At least he isn't saying that he has found any underlying pattern of human behaviour and economy nor found a perfect economic model.

Personally I don't find the model interesting enough, but he has repeatedly said it isn't a perfect solution.

LGD posted:

Sorry, I should have been clearer- I didn't mean to imply that Strangecoin would be anywhere near as useful as a working theory of Psychohistory, nor that RealityApologist is attempting to do anything so noble. I just feel that the difficulty level of both projects is fairly similar.

Little Blackfly posted:

RA, what makes you assume that human brains are good at choosing beneficial community structures

quote:

Your example of the medals and pips is frankly bizarre.

Napoleon posted:

Give me enough medals and I’ll win you any war.

Obdicut posted:

There can't be a working theory of psychohistory, it's pseudoscience.

RealityApologist posted:

Who What Now posted:

It was eight years ago. Let it go, dude. It is super unhealthy and hosed up to hold a grudge and have links immediately on hand to talk about people from the thread for that long.

Obdicut posted:

Psychohistory holy poo poo.
Psychohistory is the pseudoscientific study of the psychological motivations of historical events.

RealityApologist posted:

I never made this assumption, and I pointed to exactly the literature you refer to (like the Stanford Prison experiment) in order to make it clear that this isn't my suggestion. People can form all sorts of terrible awful communities with horrible intentions and consequences.

My claim is only that human brains are good at reasoning about community structures, not that the results of their reasoning will always yield beneficial results. My argument would be akin to saying that humans are good at reasoning in base 10 numerical systems: not that we can't reason in other ways, but they might be more difficult for us because of the ways our brains work, and not that we'll always only do math in base 10 with good intentions instead of evil ones. Only that the base in which the numbers are expressed resonate with shortcuts and dispositions our minds tend to take.

I'm surprised that no one has still raised the obvious problem, which are mental health issues like autism that are characterized in part by people being having difficulty reasoning about social situations. It's at least a lot more pertinent of an issue than saying "durr I have add does that mean I'm poor".


The example actually comes from Kleinberg's treatment of badges on stackoverflow.

quote:

Incentivizing users to increase their activity naturally brings up
the question of how this affects the quality of their actions. For ex
ample, we find on Stack Overflow that users’ votes on questions are
significantly more positive before they receive the Electorate badge
than after it. Developing principled ways of incorporating action
quality into models of user behavior in the presence of badges is an
exciting direction for future work.

Slanderer posted:

How do you so perfectly miss the point? This has nothing to do with people understanding complex poo poo intuitively. This is about complex behavior emerging some simple ones. Our entire economy is layers of emergent behaviors stacked on top of each other, and most of those behaviors are *not* predictable from first principles. Your dumb economy involves adding a lot more complexity to each individual transactions. It intuitively follows that the result would be even more complex and unpredictable when expanded to a scale of billions. Countless economists work to understand and predict our current system, but you claim that you can do better than all of them--reinvent the system AND predict exactly how it will function!

BernieLomax posted:

Yet I was mentioned in this thread, and again ridiculed. And why don't I find it surprising that you, who has been a high-volume jerk in this thread, tries to wave away how the poo poo I experienced lead to years of intermittent abuse as a "grudge" ... I might not be an expert on the stuff Eripsa is talking about, but I am certainly a veteran at understanding the insufferable discussion club nerd abuse he is getting here. It's Stanford Prison experiment level poo poo, except nobody is going to tell you it's just an experiment.

BernieLomax posted:

Yet I was mentioned in this thread, and again ridiculed. And why don't I find it surprising that you, who has been a high-volume jerk in this thread, tries to wave away how the poo poo I experienced lead to years of intermittent abuse as a "grudge" ... I might not be an expert on the stuff Eripsa is talking about, but I am certainly a veteran at understanding the insufferable discussion club nerd abuse he is getting here. It's Stanford Prison experiment level poo poo, except nobody is going to tell you it's just an experiment.

RealityApologist posted:

"Level of complexity" is not a fundamental barrier to understanding. Adding more complexity does not necessarily make something less understandable. Adding emergent layers upon emergent layers might actually make something more understandable if it fits into patterns I'm already disposed to detect.

The biology of a cell is immensely complex and delicate and far beyond my comprehension or understanding; our best biologists only yet have a glimpse of its enormous complexity. But the behavior of a human being is something more tractable, at least for some purposes given what I know about human beings. I can predict, for instance, what my family will likely be doing for the holidays or whatever. I can make these predictions and have a good sense of the behavior of that human organism, even though it is entirely composed of cells displaying patterns of patterns of emergent activity, and I am completely oblivious to many of those patterns at many different scales.

All that matters about my ability to predict human behavior is that I have a pattern for doing so at the scales necessary given the interests I have. If my concern is about what my family is doing for the holidays, then my predictive frameworks are quite sufficient for describing the system, despite my ignorance at other scales.

Best Friends posted:

If you don't like people being less than friendly to people these are a poor choice of forums to read.

RealityApologist posted:

"Level of complexity" is not a fundamental barrier to understanding. Adding more complexity does not necessarily make something less understandable.

RealityApologist posted:

This is actually spot on. It's not that twitter followers matter at all in any practical or existential sense, but its that social rank and hierarchy matter to us a hell of a lot from a subpersonal model-of-the-self-and-social-environment sense, and twitter followers provide an indicator about that value that is meaningful to us and suggests an immediate course of action in response.

quote:

The thing is that money isn't like that. I mean, there's things I should and can do with my money that a financial adviser would suggest, but that kind of financial planning is well outside the purview of most people with their paychecks and bills. The money and the bills do supply information about one's status in the network and can be used for those purposes, but especially for people of limited financial means money doesn't provide nearly the kind of flexibility, feedback, and engagement to adequately represent their dynamic position within their social worlds.

quote:

At most it describes their position in someone else's world, to whom they are subject and obliged. Which is to say that money doesn't describe our economic system, it describes their economic system: the system of the capitalists and embedded interests who have a huge stake in keeping the economic system largely as it is. It's a network designed for their communities of interest, not the rest of the communities we actually care about.

quote:

Money famously underrepresents the care structures in industrial social systems. Strangecoin quantifies our networks of care directly. I'm not operationalizing care; I'm not trying to establish the nature and extent of the concept. Instead, I'm trying to describe a vehicle through which care can be expressed naturally in the way we coordinate our behaviors.

quote:

Anyway. I'm not saying twitter followers exemmplify the care structure or anything so absurd. It's just that the number of twitter followers is something easy to engage with and receive feedback and positive reinforcement on and which may have some impact on one's social identity and psychological well-being, and it serves some of those care functions because the rest of our economy is so poo poo at doing it that we actively seek out these alternatives.

quote:

Twitter stardom doesn't mean anything more than substantive than that in either politics or the economy. But in an attention economy future, wealth and prosperity is measured my community structure and centrality in the network, which individuals can engage directly with immediate feedback something like the way we engage with twitter now.

quote:

Twitter and Facebook are teaching us (both individually and collectively through the development of culture and convention) to engage with explicit networks of digital communities, and to anticipate how they behave and in various circumstances and under various pressures. We're never had to do this before, but now we're all having to learn because we all know we're going to be doing this more in the future. It will take generations before these kinds of network-engaging actions are commonplace enough to trust the human population to engage with our global economy in these terms. But I don't think there's much doubt that we're headed in that direction, so there's no reason not to start talking about it now.

RealityApologist posted:

"Level of complexity" is not a fundamental barrier to understanding. Adding more complexity does not necessarily make something less understandable. Adding emergent layers upon emergent layers might actually make something more understandable if it fits into patterns I'm already disposed to detect.

The biology of a cell is immensely complex and delicate and far beyond my comprehension or understanding; our best biologists only yet have a glimpse of its enormous complexity. But the behavior of a human being is something more tractable, at least for some purposes given what I know about human beings. I can predict, for instance, what my family will likely be doing for the holidays or whatever. I can make these predictions and have a good sense of the behavior of that human organism, even though it is entirely composed of cells displaying patterns of patterns of emergent activity, and I am completely oblivious to many of those patterns at many different scales.

All that matters about my ability to predict human behavior is that I have a pattern for doing so at the scales necessary given the interests I have. If my concern is about what my family is doing for the holidays, then my predictive frameworks are quite sufficient for describing the system, despite my ignorance at other scales.

Little Blackfly posted:

You have provided no evidence for the validity of the emergent patterns you predict you will see, and we have provided plenty of evidence that such patterns in fact do not occur. Lower level compelxity has nothing to do with it, the models you propose are too simplistic at the level of analysis.

RealityApologist posted:

The biology of a cell is immensely complex and delicate and far beyond my comprehension or understanding; our best biologists only yet have a glimpse of its enormous complexity. But the behavior of a human being is something more tractable, at least for some purposes given what I know about human beings. I can predict, for instance, what my family will likely be doing for the holidays or whatever. I can make these predictions and have a good sense of the behavior of that human organism, even though it is entirely composed of cells displaying patterns of patterns of emergent activity, and I am completely oblivious to many of those patterns at many different scales.

RealityApologist posted:

All that matters about my ability to predict human behavior is that I have a pattern for doing so at the scales necessary given the interests I have. If my concern is about what my family is doing for the holidays, then my predictive frameworks are quite sufficient for describing the system, despite my ignorance at other scales.

RealityApologist posted:

I can predict, for instance, what my family will likely be doing for the holidays or whatever. I can make these predictions and have a good sense of the behavior of that human organism

RealityApologist posted:

The biology of a cell is immensely complex and delicate and far beyond my comprehension or understanding; our best biologists only yet have a glimpse of its enormous complexity. But the behavior of a human being is something more tractable, at least for some purposes given what I know about human beings. I can predict, for instance, what my family will likely be doing for the holidays or whatever. I can make these predictions and have a good sense of the behavior of that human organism, even though it is entirely composed of cells displaying patterns of patterns of emergent activity, and I am completely oblivious to many of those patterns at many different scales.

All that matters about my ability to predict human behavior is that I have a pattern for doing so at the scales necessary given the interests I have. If my concern is about what my family is doing for the holidays, then my predictive frameworks are quite sufficient for describing the system, despite my ignorance at other scales.

RealityApologist posted:

The biology of a cell is immensely complex and delicate and far beyond my comprehension or understanding; our best biologists only yet have a glimpse of its enormous complexity. But the behavior of a human being is something more tractable, at least for some purposes given what I know about human beings. I can predict, for instance, what my family will likely be doing for the holidays or whatever. I can make these predictions and have a good sense of the behavior of that human organism, even though it is entirely composed of cells displaying patterns of patterns of emergent activity, and I am completely oblivious to many of those patterns at many different scales.

Forums Barber posted:

I'm wondering if that analysis of family behavior comes down to "the emailed me where they would be, therefore I have a strong prediction as to where they will be".

JawnV6 posted:

It also indicates a very, very stable family situation. When I was younger I thought all my holidays would be with my family in Georgia. Then my parents got divorced and I got engaged. Her parents are also divorced, so holiday planning involves splitting the 2 big ones among those 4 parties and trying to keep air travel and other budgets down. I can't imagine predicting my own holiday plans in the 5+ year range, much less my entire family's.