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SedanChair posted:But you have a terrible sense of predicting human behavior, at the garbage meta level or in a practical sense. You don't see why a 13-year-old should have their own financial identity. I would like you to please imagine having that conversation with a 13-year-old, that you are going to be making all their purchases with them from now on. Not to mention his incredible confusion that goons on the Something Awful forums don't respond to half-baked techno-futurist masturbation with praise and acclaim. I'm pretty sure that's actually a direct consequence of human social behavior and community formation! e: I also can't predict my family's Thanksgiving plans because who my parents decide to invite depends on information I don't possess because it doesn't exist yet, like whether other family members are willing to travel, what family friends will be alone or whether my mother finds an Egyptian family stranded on the side of the road again. The list is nearly infinite! Malmesbury Monster fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 01:20
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RealityApologist posted:There's a sense of "economics" that deals with the nature of human social transactions in the most general possible sense, of which this article and Strangecoin and traditional economics all belong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_computational_economics Look can you please finally stop saying your idea is novel when there is a wikipedia page giving a couple dozen references of people exploring your ideas in greater detail then anything in this thread? So even if you don't care to read economic textbooks, why not read some physics and computer science textbooks instead? You have said that your knowledge in those areas are rusty, so why not brush up on that stuff before delving deep into the subject? edit: And hey look at that, it has Econophysics in the "see also" section... Doctor Spaceman posted:I'm remembering the Thanksgiving discussion in a previous Eripsa thread. We don't talk about Thanksgiving in the strangecoin economy. Tokamak fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 01:26
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I'm remembering the Thanksgiving discussion in a previous Eripsa thread. How did that one go? (Besides spectacularly awful)
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Apr 8, 2014 01:34
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Who What Now posted:How did that one go? (Besides spectacularly awful) I remember something about your Uncle algorithmically determining exactly what you want to eat, which is somehow the most efficient way to do it.
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Apr 8, 2014 01:37
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Who What Now posted:How did that one go? (Besides spectacularly awful) About as you'd expect ie: spectacularly awful. But don't take my word for it, see for yourself.
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Apr 8, 2014 01:41
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Captain_Maclaine posted:About as you'd expect ie: spectacularly awful. But don't take my word for it, see for yourself. This is kind of sad because it gives the impression that Eprisa has never actually had a meal with his family. He describes it like a sterile, clinical affair and a sitcom chariacture at the same time. I didn't even know that was possible. 
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Apr 8, 2014 01:50
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Who What Now posted:This is kind of sad because it gives the impression that Eprisa has never actually had a meal with his family. He describes it like a sterile, clinical affair and a sitcom chariacture at the same time. I didn't even know that was possible. When all you have is
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Apr 8, 2014 01:56
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Little Blackfly posted:Our social reasoning is based on simplification and stereotype, which is why it is so prone to misattribution of social worth. If it wasn't, con artists would never succeed and racism wouldn't' be a thing. This fundamental claim you are making is unsupported. The claim is whether actual human social reasoning reflects the structure of the Strangecoin network. You're right that I haven't supported the claim yet, at least in this thread. Your comments are critical but constructive, so I'm going to take the opportunity to make clear what closely related claims I have been supporting before I support this particular claim, because this is the first time this criticism has been made explicit. First, the altcurrency paper that we've been talking about concluded with a comment about how the community structure in a network is actually predictive of social activity, and therefore important to consider in understanding and managing it's behavior. So most of my discussion has been in defense of the claim that community structure does predict social activity. In case the support for this claim is still in question, here's another resource of support. Second, I've argued (mostly during the nepotism discussion) that our historical attempts at reifying a community structure (through the caste system in India, modern economic classes, race, etc) are actually just poor-but-implementable ways of uncovering the community structure. That someone is black doesn't say anything about their relative economic value to a system, so a system grounded on race and skin color to determine economic position is just doomed to failure. The argument is that we're currently relying on mostly inherited/traditional markers of community organization (like race and class), and these poor markers will be usurped by more detailed and useful data about the network and its structure. This is also the reason why I think these issues don't become worse in Strangecoinworld. It's not like future populations will find better ways or organizing around race or class, any more than future vehicles will find ways to attach more and more horses to a carriage. You guys are attacking my proposal for an automobile by arguing that the amount of poo poo produced by the horses that would be required to pull the thing would drown the street. You fail to understand that the poo poo horses produce aren't a problem on future roads, which isn't to say there aren't problems but just that they aren't the same problem. Third, I've argued that the complexity of the social situation is not itself evidence of our inability to comprehend the situation. Slanderer's main, bolded objection, which Jawn erroneously repeats, is that complexity is itself a barrier to our potential comprehension of a system. The more complex it is, the less intuitive it is, and the harder computationally it is to navigate it's waters. Again, this is false. Although complexity can make things more difficult to understand, it doesn't necessarily make things more difficult to understand. We might have an intuitive grasp on some very complex systems because we've got the right tools for dealing with it and we know the relevant patterns for describing its behavior. Again, facial recognition is the example I've used. It's a hard problem computationally, but brains do it very easily because we have dedicated parts of our brain devoted to the problem. What presents the problem is not the complexity itself, but its match or mismatch with our tools. So the mere fact that Strangecoin is more complex is not itself a defeater that it can be useful profitably by human beings, if our community structures are actually reflected in the Strangecoin network. So finally: the claim itself. Why think this is the case that the structure of human communities are reflected in the strangecoin network? Well, first of all, what are the structures of human communities? My starting point for this discussion is the literature around the "sense of community" discussed by social psychologists. The idea is that one's own identity is a product of their perception of their place in the community, understood in terms of four factors: membership, influence, integration, and a shared connection. If this is, at first pass, the way humans are disposed to thinking about community structure, then the claim that Strangecoin reflects this structure means that each of these relationships can be expressed in terms of strangecoin interaction. And I think it's fairly clear, given the description of the transactions, that Strangecoin is precisely meant to cover this range of interaction. It doesn't cover only this set of transactions. In fact, it's much more general than that, and covers many more organizational structures besides. GulMadred noted earlier about how this creates the potential for radically unfamiliar forms of organization that we might not be familiar with. But that's compatible with the claim that it also reflects the community structures we are familiar with, and therefore that we might intuitively think in its terms. quote:That paper you provide also says exactly what I said, that badges are an incentivization exercise, not that they provide a robust guide of social worth or reputation, which is what you suggest they would do. In fact, the paper concludes by alluding to the possibility of perverse incentives. Badges are meant as an incentive structure for good community behavior, but of course it has implications for social status and hierarchy just as medals and awards do-- and not just within military culture but also in the eyes of civilians as well. On webforums like StackOverflow, badges do accord some degree of authority and respect that carries some social weight in at least some of their interactions. The point is not to give badges in order to establish and study the social hierarchy, the point is to give badges to incentivize the users. The users are motivated because they are interested in social hierarchy and the badge is some measure of that social status; reflection on that status and its value for each individual is what motivates people to pursue the badges themselves. That's the same thing going on with strangecoin. I'm not proposing the network as an accurate model of the social hierarchy, I'm providing it as an incentive structure for managing social relations, and using people's own social motivations to drive their behavior in response to these signals. quote:How has this been accounted for in Strangecoin, why should this not represent a fundamental problem with your implementation of the system you describe? This is accounted for in my original spec, especially in the account limits. The existence of account limits motivates users to act certain ways depending on where they are with respect to these limits. For instance, a user reaching the account cap has an incentive to increase their expenses (support or endorse people) in order to avoid the penalties incurred at the cap (the removal of the modifiers).
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Apr 8, 2014 01:56
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Malmesbury Monster posted:Not to mention his incredible confusion that goons on the Something Awful forums don't respond to half-baked techno-futurist masturbation with praise and acclaim. I'm pretty sure that's actually a direct consequence of human social behavior and community formation! I'm not saying family behavior is always perfectly predictable, but even when it is chaotic we're still normally equipped (as adults) to reason about the various dynamics that contributed to its chaotic state (she has a job or he is in the military etc). Even the failure to produce a stable state at least produces situations about which we can reason coherently. We understand the patterns to some degree because being a social creature means we have to reason at this level all the time. That's not the case for the patterns of cell biology; it takes years of study to understand those patterns and reason in terms of cell dynamics. We can do it, but it doesn't come naturally to the kinds of everyday problems we face as social creatures. We can reason more effectively about people because we understand the pattern, even if we don't understand the complex components from which this pattern emerges. The point is that humans are more complex than cells but also more easy to intuitively reason about than cells.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:03
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Real talk I was going to post a horse and buggy versus automobile analogy but I thought "oh that's too heavy-handed even as a parody."  Eripsa you were the fop in a Viennese cafe going "surely all this industrialization shall lead to a new kind of horse; a wonder-horse." Then you hear about Otto and go "oh my god #exactly. This is going in my next Steam Powered Philosophy pamphlet."
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Apr 8, 2014 02:04
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Tokamak posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_computational_economics Not only have I denied repeatedly that the idea is novel, but the past 10 pages have been a detailed discussion of exactly this literature. I mean seriously.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:05
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RealityApologist posted:First, the altcurrency paper that we've been talking about concluded with a comment about how the community structure in a network is actually predictive of social activity, and therefore important to consider in understanding and managing it's behavior. So most of my discussion has been in defense of the claim that community structure does predict social activity. In case the support for this claim is still in question, here's another resource of support. Community structure is mildly predictive of social activity, but no tint he highly deterministic way you seem to think it is. Already the fact that you can only point to studies constructed on digital communities and social media leads to an obvious problem of selection bias, since most of the planet remains unconnected to these networks. This alone is a huge blind spot in your reasoning, and one that you should seriously look into. Would these predictions hold across the entriety of a human society wide social network? I don't beleive there is any reason to believe this would be true. RealityApologist posted:Second, I've argued (mostly during the nepotism discussion) that our historical attempts at reifying a community structure (through the caste system in India, modern economic classes, race, etc) are actually just poor-but-implementable ways of uncovering the community structure. That someone is black doesn't say anything about their relative economic value to a system, so a system grounded on race and skin color to determine economic position is just doomed to failure. The argument is that we're currently relying on mostly inherited/traditional markers of community organization (like race and class), and these poor markers will be usurped by more detailed and useful data about the network and its structure. This is also the reason why I think these issues don't become worse in Strangecoinworld. It's not like future populations will find better ways or organizing around race or class, any more than future vehicles will find ways to attach more and more horses to a carriage. You guys are attacking my proposal for an automobile by arguing that the amount of poo poo produced by the horses that would be required to pull the thing would drown the street. You fail to understand that the poo poo horses produce aren't a problem on future roads, which isn't to say there aren't problems but just that they aren't the same problem. Here, I think your problem is believing that things like racism evolved as an attempt at some sort of objective measure of social worth. But they didn't, there was never any rational attempt made to quantify social worth by skin colour or familial origin. These patterns emerged as a natural result of a human bias towards xenophobia and preference for the ingroup. You believe that strangecoin would favour the creation of a far more just social order, but this seems to rely on the fundamental rationality of the actors in your system, by endorsing people based on some objective level of merit in the system based on their own actions. This is not how humans behave in any network observed, even social media ones. Why would Strangecoin prevent something like the ostracization of someone who looked or acted differently than the majority? How would things like peer pressure and social discipline be counteracted? What happens if a charismatic leader manages to receive many endorsements on the basis of his rhetoric, only to turn around and use it to marginalize another group? What part of this community structure you suggest would do away with human prejudice, because I don't see it.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:10
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RealityApologist posted:Not only have I denied repeatedly that the idea is novel, but the past 10 pages have been a detailed discussion of exactly this literature. RealityApologist posted:I've asked in this thread if anyone knows of anywhere that these ideas have been more systematically worked through and developed; the only responses that came back were econ 101 textbooks. I know I should learn econ, but I also know that's only part of the story I'm telling here. As far as I can tell, this story isn't told anywhere but science fiction, and hasn't been described with the kind of detail required to seriously model its behavior and take specifically about its benefits and detriments. So now that you've admitted that the idea isn't novel and other literature explores it, I'll look forward to this thread being locked immediately.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:12
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RealityApologist posted:I'm not saying family behavior is always perfectly predictable, but even when it is chaotic we're still normally equipped (as adults) to reason about the various dynamics that contributed to its chaotic state (she has a job or he is in the military etc). Even the failure to produce a stable state at least produces situations about which we can reason coherently. We understand the patterns to some degree because being a social creature means we have to reason at this level all the time. I don't think anyone would dispute the idea that humans as a whole understand human behavior better than cell biology. The point of contention is whether you do. I think you've spent so long thinking about this that you've lost sight of how humans actually behave in favor of a hazy theory of how you think we should. This is probably why, after pages upon pages of discussion, you've still proved entirely incapable of describing what an instance of human behavior might look like in Strangeworld without resorting to letters and symbols. RealityApologist posted:Not only have I denied repeatedly that the idea is novel, but the past 10 pages have been a detailed discussion of exactly this literature. So have you or have you not studied economics, then?
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Apr 8, 2014 02:17
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CheesyDog posted:Suppose someone wants to open a gay bar in a religious area in the Strangecoin economy. Is there any mechanism for overcoming the possibility for community inhibition of their transactions other than hoping they get enough countersupport? Then the wider community would catch wind of the story (via Tumblr reblogs or whatever). Lots of [liberal | SJW | LGBTQetc | ACLU] people would endorse/support the gay bar owners (to help keep them afloat, or perhaps just to spite the haters). The boycotters would be targeted by a public shaming campaign and counter-boycotts. The overall outcome would probably depend on the balance of social forces - are there enough reactionaries to sustain the bigotry (e.g. Chik-Fil-A) or will they bow to liberal hand-wringing (e.g. Brendan Eich's brief stint as a CEO)? Strangecoin isn't even especially useful/interesting in this scenario, because it plays out mostly via Internet "battleground of ideas" and conventional spending/boycott actions, rather than the interplay of exotic transactions and emergent market behaviour. Strangecoin would just make it easier for people to "take sides" and allow for quick tests of compliance, so that the scenario can escalate rapidly: "Ok Glass. Please lookup the economic entity known as 'The Open Manhole' and compile a list of all entities within two links." "Done." "Ok Glass. Please cross-reference the results with my own economic network." "Done." "Ok Glass. Any entity belonging to both lists should be reclassified as persona non grata. Sever any existing endorsement, support, or coupling relationship. And leave a poorly-spelled homophobic message on their Facebook wall before defriending them." "Done. Network analysis indicates, at the 92% confidence threshold, that your eldest son is gay. Blink twice to disown him." Ideally, Strangecoin would create so many interlinks and interdependencies that the bigoted behaviour would never arise (something akin to the pre-WWI network-of-defensive-alliances arrangement which ensured that a war was inconceivable) - everyone grudgingly tolerates everyone else, while trading mainly within their own affinity group. Of course, as with the WWI example, there's no guarantee that the system will operate according to plan. It might even be optimal for a bigot to "out" himself and accept widespread ostracism from polite society, so long as he can thereby attain a lofty position as an opinion leader or influence broker within the bigot community. Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:27
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Little Blackfly posted:E: also BernieLomax you have also demonstrated that you have no idea what you're talking about and have explicitly stated that you only are defending Strangecoin because you enjoy novelty and counter-culture, which is about as far from a useful contribution to the discussion as you could get. But you're also being directly dishonest, I said I find most value in this concept because it is novel. And I said I dig counter-culture. I didn't "explicitly state I defend strangecoin because I enjoy novelty and counter-culture". You might excuse that as nitpicking, but those two statements aren't even remotely comparable. I don't defend Strangecoin at all. I think Eripsa can defend his concepts perfectly fine on himself, even avoiding being unfair. I'm attacking the inexcusable bully-like debate technique of some posters in this thread. It's like being a smug atheist was trendy all over again. quote:When I provided you the citation you asked for, it was because I figured you were unsure where to look it up, but it later became apparent that you had not sufficiently payed attention to the conversation to understand what was being discussed. I wasn't going to call you on it edit: RealityApologist posted:Not only have I denied repeatedly that the idea is novel, but the past 10 pages have been a detailed discussion of exactly this literature. But surely there is a lot of economic literature at the bottom there. Have you read any of that? edit: Just to clarify, I think you're one of the neater posters here, but I found that responding to you were the best option than the rest  edit 2: Who What Now on the other hand ... BernieLomax fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 02:35
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GulMadred posted:Nah. Inhibition (as per the original spec) requires the consent of the target. The religious folk could refuse to link to the gay bar and boycott them in the traditional sense (refrain from purchasing their services). If they were sufficiently motivated, they might also attempt to shun/blockade the gay bar's [owners | staff | patrons | suppliers] - detaching them from the local network and refusing to sell them anything. There would presumably also be non-economic effects (e.g. forbidding their children from playing with the children of the shunned). If really motivated then they might try to recursively shun anyone who refused to play along with the shunning campaign (c.f. Catch-22). It's doubtful that they could actually starve the gay dudes to death (post-scarcity world is a precondition for the Strangeconomy) but they could presumably make life difficult and unpleasant for their targets. This still requires a majority to hold progressive opinions as a precondition for the system to work. Assuming you could implement strangecoin in a world with the social values of the 40s, gay people would receive virtually no support and could easily become relegated to their own little economic ghetto, rather than the bigots. RA has implied that the nature of Strangecoin is such that it would shape community behaviour away from this, but it actually requires a world without systemic bigotry. If an absolute majority wanted to ostracize gay people, they still could, and they could put social pressure through the threat of ostracism on anyone who didn't follow along with their ideas. The only way you would assume that Strangecoin would move away form this if if you believe in a narrative of history as the eternal forward march of progress, which wouldn't surprise me of RA but is also totally naive of the actual effort and cost social progress required of minority groups. E; Little Blackfly posted:In the context of the discussion? The one that started by talking about a SCOTUS decision, and made it pretty clear the they were talking about the Supreme Court? This one, BernieLomax. I'm not joking, your inability to follow the discussion from the beginning, a post that referenced the supreme court decision directly, makes me doubt that it is worthwhile to listen to you. The nature of a forums discussion makes it easy for people to read some line out of context, and then try to contribute to a discussion without actually having any understanding of what is being discussed. Based on my personal observations, I've found that such behaviour is a good indicator that the poster in question has nothing of value to contribute to a discussion. Your tendency to, like RA, quote some wikipedia page about a study out of context as some sort of support to your point (in this case by claiming that I am conforming to the broader majority in devaluing your posting )is also usually a sign that the person can't really defend their own arguments. Let me put your mind at ease though: I had no knowledge of you prior to this thread. My judgement of you comes from your posting int his thread, which has shown terrible reasoning and an appeal to novelty as a defence of incoherent ideas, and an inability to follow a discussion for a page and a half. These two points have led me to conclude that you don't have any substantive arguments to make. However, I am always cognizant of the fact that my observations may be inaccurate, so if you actually do end up providing some sort of substantive reason why all the myriad criticisms that have been levelled both at RA and Strangecoin are wrong, I will be happy to reevaluate my opinion of you. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 02:37
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BernieLomax posted:Videos on this experiment are unbearable to watch, much like how I feel when reading this thread. Then stop reading the thread, you doofus.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:40
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Malmesbury Monster posted:I don't think anyone would dispute the idea that humans as a whole understand human behavior better than cell biology. The point of contention is whether you do. I think you've spent so long thinking about this that you've lost sight of how humans actually behave in favor of a hazy theory of how you think we should. This is probably why, after pages upon pages of discussion, you've still proved entirely incapable of describing what an instance of human behavior might look like in Strangeworld without resorting to letters and symbols. I would dispute that. Humans understand cell biology fairly well until you get down to a couple of levels below that. When given a previously unknown terrestrial cell, a scientist will eventually be able to decode its genome, clone it, explain almost exactly how it interacts with body chemistry, tailor a virus to kill it and a bunch of other stuff. It's not perfect but there's a good level of understanding there. Good luck explaining how humans behave on an organizational level, never mind as individuals, to an alien lifeform seeing it for the first time. There are any number of behaviors that range between merely irrational to wildly counterproductive. That's without getting into brain chemistry, about which we know very little, and various psychological/physiological disorder combinations about which we know virtually nothing. This makes sense because we have only begun to get the computational tools to try to model any of this and the models are horrendous. I know you've said "as a whole" but actually humans "as a whole" know virtually nothing about *either* of those things; we're just slightly more arrogant about understanding ourselves, that's all. Into this vast abyss of unknowns comes Eripsa and proclaims the answer to our problem is by basing our societal structure on Twitter. Unfortunately for him, Twitter has trolls too. Adar fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 02:53
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GulMadred posted:Ideally, Strangecoin would create so many interlinks and interdependencies that the bigoted behaviour would never arise (something akin to the pre-WWI network-of-defensive-alliances arrangement which ensured that a war was inconceivable) - everyone grudgingly tolerates everyone else, while trading mainly within their own affinity group. Of course, as with the WWI example, there's no guarantee that the system will operate according to plan. It might even be optimal for a bigot to "out" himself and accept widespread ostracism from polite society, so long as he can thereby attain a lofty position as an opinion leader or influence broker within the bigot community. Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. It is absolutely, 100% optimal for everyone to opt out of Strangecoin the minute it is "implemented", and again I use the term loosely. This is because RA has roundly ignored the many, many times I've pointed out that if the path goes make money from bad things -> ostracism -> the world has shady rich people, no amount of word salad will stop other people from acting as their middlemen and eventually (very soon) you get to the point where the richest are *all* criminals and simply buy their own social networks. I don't mean to pick on this particular example because it's one of several dozen things RA has roundly ignored, it's simply the fastest way to get to the massive skull pile underlying all of his ideas. I mean, you have a setup where Item A costs person B Sx and person C Sx * 300% but somehow it's not efficient for person D to buy it and use the barter system to give person C what he wants because economics is not the brilliant philosopher's strong suit. Also, person C is a twelve year old and person D is a stranger offering her free stuff. This is okay because people have different ideas on parenting, which is also a thing the brilliant philosopher knows a lot about.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:07
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Adar posted:I would dispute that. Humans understand cell biology fairly well until you get down to a couple of levels below that. When given a previously unknown terrestrial cell, a scientist will eventually be able to decode its genome, clone it, explain almost exactly how it interacts with body chemistry, tailor a virus to kill it and a bunch of other stuff. It's not perfect but there's a good level of understanding there. Yeah, I definitely could have worded that better, and I agree with you. I should have said the average person is better at understanding and responding to human behavior on an individual level than they are at understanding cell biology. Our ability to understand and predict human behavior on a large/global scale is hilariously poor and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:15
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GulMadred posted:Nah. Inhibition (as per the original spec) requires the consent of the target. community. Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. Inhibition, endorsement, it will all ultimately boil down to a rep system pretty quickly and the various metrics are just different ways of expressing it. If we're going to work under the assumption that this model somehow isn't stillborn, then I predict that the various reputation metrics will quickly coalesce into an aggregate "Trust" score. The reputation metrics may be initially distinct, but the metrics that go into a credit score are even more distinct and despite consumer debt being near $12-trillion my bank is certainly happy to look at the one number and make decisions. I suspect Strangecoin would reduce down to a similar metric.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:30
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Adar posted:I know you've said "as a whole" but actually humans "as a whole" know virtually nothing about *either* of those things; we're just slightly more arrogant about understanding ourselves, that's all. The claim is not that we understand humans better in the sense that we can predict with greater accuracy what they will or won't do. My claim is that we can reason about human beings better, in the sense that our conceptual and folk-psychological resources for understanding how people behave are a more robust framework for drawing out inferences and consequences than our folk theories about biology. So if I told you that mom and dad are getting a divorce, you'll immediately draw out lots of implications of the separation for various interactions at the next family gathering. You won't be able to predict everything that can happen, but you can reason about those happenings: what effect it will have on the kids, or the awkwardness of Christmas dinner, or on your grandma's weak heart. You can reason about why Mom's new lover Bill probably won't be welcome, and what rumors they'll spread at church, or whatever. You can generate a picture of how this change will impact the family dynamics, using just the concepts readily available in our folk theories. If I told you instead that I'm introducing the cell to a 5% KCl solution, perhaps chemical biologists will have a good grasp on what will happen in the cell, but our folk concepts aren't particularly equipped to reason about these dynamics. What effects will it have on cellular mitosis? This isn't at all the kind of thing we're conceptually equipped to reason about without a technical training in biology, even if the phenomenon itself is dramatically simpler than the behaviors of the communities mentioned in the previous paragraph. Which, again, is to say that complexity isn't itself an impediment to understanding. There are extraordinarily complex patterns in nature to which we are nevertheless extremely sensitive. An even better example is the fact that we can detect genetic compatibility through scent alone. This is an unbelievably complex signal being sorted out of the noise, and it would be surprising that we're capable of such a feat except for how utterly central the ability is for our reproductive success. We're capable of the feat not because the signal is simple (some simple stereotype or generalization on a kind), but because the equipment we're using has evolved to do this one job really really well. Same with facial recognition and, I'm claiming, with community structure. edit: I hope it's clear how this is a subtly but substantively different claim than the one you're rejecting Adar. The distinction is not trivial and required development to be made explicit, which I think has occurred over the last few posts. This doesn't constitute backtracking or sliding around on the issues, and doesn't mean either of us are engaged in hostile interpretation. It's just a careful issue to sort out. RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 03:43
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I agree, you can absolutely predict the stereotypical effects of a divorce based on "folk theories".
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Apr 8, 2014 03:50
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RealityApologist posted:The claim is not that we understand humans better in the sense that we can predict with greater accuracy what they will or won't do. Ok. Lets say we grant all of this (which we absolutely shouldn't). Do you think that this is an argument in favor of your proposal? Because the general consensus seems to be that it is completely unworkable bullshit for a whole host of reasons, many having to do with impressions and learned experience about the way actual people inter-relate. Shouldn't that strike you as strong evidence that you should consider major, radical, revisions to your proposal (whatever it actually is) rather than mere tinkering around the edges?
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Apr 8, 2014 03:51
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CheesyDog posted:Inhibition, endorsement, it will all ultimately boil down to a rep system pretty quickly and the various metrics are just different ways of expressing it. If we're going to work under the assumption that this model somehow isn't stillborn, then I predict that the various reputation metrics will quickly coalesce into an aggregate "Trust" score. The reputation metrics may be initially distinct, but the metrics that go into a credit score are even more distinct and despite consumer debt being near $12-trillion my bank is certainly happy to look at the one number and make decisions. I suspect Strangecoin would reduce down to a similar metric. I've gone back and forth on this idea. It might be true that the relevant community structure can be given by a single parameter "trust", but I'm not convinced this is the case. There's lots of ways to measure community structure in a graph, and it seems too simplistic to think it could reasonably reduce to a single value. The tempting network value for evaluating the "trustworthiness" of a node would be centrality in my networks, but there's multiple ways of measuring centrality, each of which gives info that might be useful in certain community contexts. So I'm not sure this can be reduced to a single dimension of value. That said, I admit that the transactions themselves have redundancies; I imagine they could all be accomplished by stacking the coupling relation in clever ways. But my goal here isn't to give the logical minimal set of transactions, but only a general set that is useful for reasoning about the network. Specifically, I think it's clear from the transaction types I mention how they reflect the various dimensions of one's "sense of community", and that would be less clear on a pared down model.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:54
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CheesyDog posted:I agree, you can absolutely predict the stereotypical effects of a divorce based on "folk theories". In the first goddamn sentence of my post I say you can't predict the effects better.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:56
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RealityApologist posted:Which, again, is to say that complexity isn't itself an impediment to understanding. There are extraordinarily complex patterns in nature to which we are nevertheless extremely sensitive. An even better example is the fact that we can detect genetic compatibility through scent alone. This is an unbelievably complex signal being sorted out of the noise, and it would be surprising that we're capable of such a feat except for how utterly central the ability is for our reproductive success. We're capable of the feat not because the signal is simple (some simple stereotype or generalization on a kind), but because the equipment we're using has evolved to do this one job really really well. Same with facial recognition and, I'm claiming, with community structure. This is the most awful faulty reasoning I have ever seen. The study shows that there appeared to be a preference for MHC differences based on sent. Do you know what a major histocompatibility complex is? It's the cell structures that can affect things like organ donation compatibility, and it's present in all vertebrates. No ones knows for sure why it evolved, but it may have been as a way of ensuring that cancers weren't transmissible (which can happen in inbred strains or species with extremely low genetic diversity). In fact, the detection process is quite simple in its discrimination: It literally follows along a division of self or nonself for antigen response. It is in fact extremely simple, and has nothing to do with genetic compatibility for reproduction, which isn't even a real thing within a species like humans. Learn the actual facts about what you read before you reference this poo poo out of context.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:59
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RealityApologist posted:In the first goddamn sentence of my post I say you can't predict the effects better. I don't understand your distinction between "predicting" and "reasoning about" probable outcomes.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:02
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Little Blackfly posted:This still requires a majority to hold progressive opinions as a precondition for the system to work... The only way you would assume that Strangecoin would move away form this if if you believe in a narrative of history as the eternal forward march of progress, which wouldn't surprise me of RA but is also totally naive of the actual effort and cost social progress required of minority groups. No, it just requires in situations where people having an alternative between an organization system that is effective at coordinating action, and one that is a crude cudgel for coordinating action, they'll tend to prefer the more effective one. My view is not that someone sat down and said "hmm, how to divide labor? oh I know, darkie go here and whities go there" and then BAM oppression. Instead, it's a case of trying to hack an fix to a problem of growing complexity: "Its becoming difficult to distinguish between the oppressed and the oppressors. Let's try to just oppress the dark ones to keep it simple." Generalization and stereotype are involved, certainly, but it's not the only logic at play. In-group/out-group mentality (that "sense of community" I've been talking about) is far more relevant to the dynamics here. Strangecoin gives a new way to define in-group/outgroups that patch around the old race and class hacks.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:04
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RealityApologist posted:No, it just requires in situations where people having an alternative between an organization system that is effective at coordinating action, and one that is a crude cudgel for coordinating action, they'll tend to prefer the more effective one. Racism is very effective for the majority. It allows them to accrue many, many benefits. Why would people give up their prejudices and move to an alternative system without tangible incentive? E: Also, what prevents a pogrom or something similar? Do people just not interact outside of the strangecoin network? If not, what prevents someone from telling everyone to never endorse or always inhibit Jews? Political Whores fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 04:06
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Little Blackfly posted:This is the most awful faulty reasoning I have ever seen. The study shows that there appeared to be a preference for MHC differences based on sent. Do you know what a major histocompatibility complex is? It's the cell structures that can affect things like organ donation compatibility, and it's present in all vertebrates. No ones knows for sure why it evolved, but it may have been as a way of ensuring that cancers weren't transmissible (which can happen in inbred strains or species with extremely low genetic diversity). In fact, the detection process is quite simple in its discrimination: It literally follows along a division of self or nonself for antigen response. It is in fact extremely simple, and has nothing to do with genetic compatibility for reproduction, which isn't even a real thing within a species like humans. Learn the actual facts about what you read before you reference this poo poo out of context. The study I cited was an example of detecting an extremely complex signal about genetic compatibility. The process of detection might be simple, but the signal it communicates is not: it's telling you a lot of important things about the creature you're detecting. These features are relevant to reproduction and a host of other sociological issues, and we are very sensitive to this signal. My point was that the complexity of the signal is not the barrier to intuitive comprehension or sensitive discrimination. My argument was that we can detect a complex signal if we have the right pattern detector. I didn't commit a mistake of interpretation, although you seem to think I have. I've not said anything incorrect about the study or what it purports to represent. And you've also not addressed anything about the argument I'm making, or why I'm using the example to establish the point I've made. Somehow you think I've given an example of faulty reasoning, but you've not at all established how the reasoning is at fault. You are just taking in exasperated tones, as if that's sufficient for refutation.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:14
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RealityApologist posted:The study I cited was an example of detecting an extremely complex signal about genetic compatibility. The process of detection might be simple, but the signal it communicates is not: it's telling you a lot of important things about the creature you're detecting. These features are relevant to reproduction and a host of other sociological issues, and we are very sensitive to this signal. My point was that the complexity of the signal is not the barrier to intuitive comprehension or sensitive discrimination. My argument was that we can detect a complex signal if we have the right pattern detector. Because the signal it is giving is not some sort of nuanced complex reading of information, it is literally related to a few factors that are quite easy to understand. I am saying that the information transfer you posit this study as showing is not there, what our olfactory sensors detect about another person is a very simple. It communicates nothing like what you claim it does. You have taken a study, pulled few words out of it like "genetic compatibility", and used it as the basis for a reasoning that is totally at odds with what is actually talked about in the paper. Do you have even basic reading comprehension?
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Apr 8, 2014 04:17
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Little Blackfly posted:Racism is very effective for the majority. It allows them to accrue many, many benefits. Why would people give up their prejudices and move to an alternative system without tangible incentive? Racism has some benefits for the majority, but even in deeply racist societies the stereotypes relationships break down in strange and interesting ways all the tim. My claim is not that racism isn't effective for social control; of course it is. My claim is only that there are more effective and more useful methods available, and ones that operate under different values and assumptions. One thing to speak in its favor is that Strangecoin is extremely hostile to the notion of "private property". This connects back to the discussion of corporations earlier in the thread: Strangecoin gives an effective way of piercing the corporate veil by quantifying explicitly an individual's contributions to collective action. So in some sense, there is no private property in strangecoin world: everything is collectively owned. That gives at least some incentive to not unilaterally inhibit the jews; it hurts TUA and so it hurts us too. That doesn't protect the Jews against the inhumanity of man, of course, but that's a distinct kind of incentive that other kinds of socioeconomic networks. See: the digital values.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:24
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The study was "do you think this shirt or the other shirt smell better". i can't even conceive how one could argue that this means we are able to make intuitive judgements about complex systems that are somehow correct. What would be correct in the shirt-sniffing situation? The researchers theorize three or four possibilities, rule a few out (mostly), and think that it's possibly others. Nowhere do they say "wow people can pick out a suitable mate by smell, that's amazing", possibly because the idea of a suitable mate is transparently more complex than that.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:25
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RealityApologist posted:The study I cited was an example of detecting an extremely complex signal about genetic compatibility. The process of detection might be simple, but the signal it communicates is not: it's telling you a lot of important things about the creature you're detecting. These features are relevant to reproduction and a host of other sociological issues, and we are very sensitive to this signal. My point was that the complexity of the signal is not the barrier to intuitive comprehension or sensitive discrimination. My argument was that we can detect a complex signal if we have the right pattern detector. This is meaningless bullshit dude. Your words convey zero usable content.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:25
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RealityApologist posted:One thing to speak in its favor is that Strangecoin is extremely hostile to the notion of "private property". This connects back to the discussion of corporations earlier in the thread: Strangecoin gives an effective way of piercing the corporate veil by quantifying explicitly an individual's contributions to collective action. So in some sense, there is no private property in strangecoin world: everything is collectively owned. That gives at least some incentive to not unilaterally inhibit the jews; it hurts TUA and so it hurts us too. That doesn't protect the Jews against the inhumanity of man, of course, but that's a distinct kind of incentive that other kinds of socioeconomic networks. See: the digital values. Strangecoin doesn't do any of this poo poo you disingenuous loser. It is a set of dumb transactions. Maybe you want it to do these things, because that is what you believe the ideal system should be.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:27
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RealityApologist posted:One thing to speak in its favor is that Strangecoin is extremely hostile to the notion of "private property". This connects back to the discussion of corporations earlier in the thread: Strangecoin gives an effective way of piercing the corporate veil by quantifying explicitly an individual's contributions to collective action. So in some sense, there is no private property in strangecoin world: everything is collectively owned. That gives at least some incentive to not unilaterally inhibit the jews; it hurts TUA and so it hurts us too. That doesn't protect the Jews against the inhumanity of man, of course, but that's a distinct kind of incentive that other kinds of socioeconomic networks. See: the digital values. I think literally everything in this is either something that has been previously mentioned never despite having huge implications (abolition of private property) or has already been dealt with to the degree anything in strangecoinland can actually be addressed- i.e. TUA is completely superfluous to the system you specified and even if it exists as an accounting identity provides no constraints on or incentives for participants in the system. You are literally making up bullshit as you go along. And again, if you think we can discuss this because humans are inherently good at evaluating social systems, why does the fact that most actual humans are telling you your ideas are bad not seem to make an impression on you?
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Apr 8, 2014 04:30
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Here's a question for you RealityApologist- is strangecoin more "extremely hostile" to the notion of private property, or the notion of strangecoin itself? Because private property serves all kinds of useful social functions, not the least of which is that people like knowing they have ownership of small prized personal possessions. Strangecoin appears to serve no social function not better handled by existing ways of doing things beyond possibly allowing borderline autists to make pretty graphs, and is totally poo poo at serving as a medium of exchange. If strangecoin were implemented instantly from on high (even in a post-scarcity society), do you think people would have more incentive to go along with its constant demands to track and quantify every interpersonal relationship so that they could buy (but not really buy) things depending on how closely they could cozy up to the biggest attention whores imaginable, or do you think they would be given a very strong incentive to switch over immediately to bartering goods and services so that they could acquire things that they value? Because strangecoins have and vary in "value" (to the degree they have value at all) in arcane and unpredictable ways. But my Ninja Turtles slammer has relatively consistent and anticipable value to me, and so do Jimmy's best pogs. LGD fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 04:48
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Forums Barber posted:The study was "do you think this shirt or the other shirt smell better". i can't even conceive how one could argue that this means we are able to make intuitive judgements about complex systems that are somehow correct. What would be correct in the shirt-sniffing situation? The researchers theorize three or four possibilities, rule a few out (mostly), and think that it's possibly others. Nowhere do they say "wow people can pick out a suitable mate by smell, that's amazing", possibly because the idea of a suitable mate is transparently more complex than that. RA's misinterpretation goes deeper than that. The signals being posited here are not novel of all that surprising. They have nothing to do with some generic level of genetic compatibility. It's basically two things, sexual fitness and MHC differentials. This last part is the part that he seems to be pulling "genetic compatibility information" thesis from, but that's not what MHCs are at all, as I explained above. The only signal they send is one that basically amounts to "like me" or "not like me", with preference shown for the latter. Why that should be is the matter for debate, but the information transmitted is extremely simple. I don't see how you could read that paper and use it the way he did, without unironically invoking Dunning-Kruger. He is unaware of his own incompetence in the field of biology, in this case, and so does not even have the ability to evaluate his own lack of comprehension.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:51
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